Cramer On Cramer: I Say My Show Works Basically Because I Pull Stock Picks Out Of My Ass

From the May 28, 2007 issue of New York Magazine, Jim Cramer on his show in comparison to his recent sparring partners:

Look at Mad Money in contrast to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, two programs that ought to be able to sue for libel after being included in the same sentence with Mad Money. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both very smart, they’re both entertaining, and they both appeal to the kids. But at the end of the day, even they are heavily produced. On Mad Money, we cannot be produced because we are pretty much at the whim of whoever decides to phone in and ask me a question. And even the parts of the show I control are a lot more off the cuff than you would expect or even believe.

[This next part is technically earlier in the article.]

Forget Real World or Survivor—all these reality-TV shows go only part of the way because they’re so heavily produced. I have an hour-and-a-half tape delay. I say whatever pops into my head, and we keep it in the show even if it makes me look like an unsophisticated moron, a way too sophisticated know-it-all, or the worst: when I come off as a Marxist-Leninist, even though I’m a Trotskyite at heart (an easy mistake to make given my close resemblance to Lenin). On some level, the show is dedicated to the proposition that 98 percent of my education, or at least the parts my parents paid for, was not irrelevant, or at least the Western-civ stuff, along with that Shakespeare course, because it lets me confuse the bard with C.R. Bard, the medical-supplies company.

Mercurial? Counter-intuitive? Unapologetically unreliable?

On an unrelated note, the Lenin portrait on his set was one of the things I liked about Jim Cramer years ago: