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A final eulogy for Dwayne from Swedesboro

Missanelli seemed comfortable slipping into Ebonics with a fake black caller

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to today's memorial service for "Dwayne from Swedesboro."

Dwayne died this week after a two-year call-in career at 97.5 The Fanatic, where his on-air musings were a "gift" to listeners fed up with political correctness and killjoys crying "racism!" any time someone says something funny about black people.

So frequent and detailed were Dwayne's rants, people felt they knew him as well as they knew The Fanatic's afternoon host, Mike Missanelli, Dwayne's go-to sparring partner.

As we learned over those two years, Dwayne was a single, black playa who loved the ladies, rode a Vespa and lived in a bucolic corner of South Jersey far from his native Olney.

Still, he told Missanelli, "Just because I upgraded my life don't mean I ain't still hood! "

How bracing to hear a black man unabashedly talk the way so many white people believe all black people talk! If there were an aural equivalent of shuckin' 'n'jivin', Dwayne nailed it, didn't he?

What a vindication to know those stereotypes were actually true, so whites could stop apologizing for noticing them already.

Dwayne spoke fluent Ebonics, dropping final consonant sounds and never conjugating the verb "to be." And that gave lily-white Missanelli permission to go hood, too, because Dwayne wasn't one of those testy brothers who'd make you feel bad about actin' all black'n'such.

So when Dwayne said, "I'm about to take the Vespa out and pick up some ladies!" it seemed perfectly natural for Missanelli to respond, "Aw, I can see that. I can see the Vespa pickin' up some big booty on the backseat!"

See how generously Dwayne helped Mike Miss channel Chris Rock? Dwayne was equally magnanimous when Missanelli ribbed him, like a bro from the corner, about the football games Dwayne planned to watch simultaneously on multiple TVs.

"Dwayne don't have enough TVs for that!" Missanelli said on air. "Dwayne's electric bill be too high for that! Dwayne not spending that much time lookin' at football. Dwayne got a social life. Dwayne out there lookin' for - y'know - Dwayne out there lookin' for coochie! Dwayne ain't watching football - Dwayne on the lookout!"

Dwayne disagreed that he'd be looking out for anything because, "The coochie come to Dwayne!"

That it do!

Like the time Dwayne "bagged" a "fine" South African girl on a trip to Manhattan, an act that "brought the continent together; I felt like Nelson Mandela!"

The line was quintessential Dwayne: In a handful of words, he reduced a woman to her essential parts while disrespecting the dignified hero of South Africa's anti-apartheid revolution. In the presence of such oration, Missanelli could only howl with delight.

Will any of us ever forget that the best Christmas present Dwayne received one year was a "you are not the father" paternity-test result? He celebrated the good news with liberal use of Mahogany Woods body wash.

"I lathered up with the Wood, and I laid the wood, you know what I'm sayin'?" said Dwayne. "Look, man, when you a Tinder savage like me you got women comin' out the woodwork!"

He said stereotypical black-man stuff like that so often, it was easy to believe he'd fan The Fanatic's airwaves forever.

But last week, sports site Crossing Broad murdered Dwayne by revealing he was not an authentic person but a minstrel-act figment of a white man's imagination.

Pat Egan, a Fanatic producer, created Dwayne all by himself. That led to three-day vacations - oops! I mean suspensions - for Egan, Fanatic program director Matt Nahigian and assistant program director Jason Myrtetus.

Missanelli was spared the rod because, he said, he didn't know Dwayne was a fraud. Can I just say that never has a man so eagerly acknowledged that his co-workers had been laughing behind his back for years?

"I didn't know that 'Dwayne from Swedesboro' was not a real person," Missanelli said on his show when the fraud went public. "I would not have authorized a racially charged caller like that," because a white producer creating a black character with some racial stereotypes might have pushed "racial bounds."

"If I had known it was a fake, I would have shut down this immediately because I was sensitive to the racial undertones involved," Missanelli said.

See, this is where Dwayne himself would've called BS: How could someone who is "sensitive to racial undertones" be so comfortable slipping into Ebonics with a black caller?

Dwayne was a caricature, sure, but that doesn't mean everyone who speaks in stereotypical, substandard English is one.

So here, dear mourners, is the takeaway of Dwayne's fake life and sudden death:

Philly's fans may be universally reviled by professional athletes and the media, but at least they're authentic. The last thing this city needs is race-baiting fan drama that arises from fraud.

So rest in peace, Dwayne, but do us a favor.

Stay dead.

215-854-2217 @RonniePhilly

Columns: ph.ly/Ronnie