The Naked Cowboy has become such a fixture of Times Square that he seems to exist out of time, as though he might have arrived from some cheesy alternate dimension complete with his patriotically-painted tighty whities and his perennially toned and tanned abs. But, in 2009, the writer Ian Frazier wrote a Talk of the Town piece about the Naked Cowboy’s actual origins, as told by his father, a loquacious genealogy enthusiast named Kenny R. Burck.
In the latest episode of “The New Yorker Presents,” now available to stream on Amazon, the show pays a visit to Burck at his pristinely manicured home in Greenhills, Ohio. Burck is more than happy to talk about his famous son, whose real name is Robert—although Jyllian Gunther, who produced the segment, said that Burck “almost exclusively refers to his son as the Naked Cowboy.”
As Burck openly recounts, the Cowboy was a troubled and ambitious youth, with body-image issues and a strong drive to be rich and famous. He cycled through stints as a body-builder, a male escort, an actor, a hand model, and a writer before discovering his calling. At first, Burck says that seeing his son transformed into the Naked Cowboy caused “concern.” “Is this morally what a person should do?” he wondered. But he eventually embraced his son’s celebrity (as did the rest of the family—Burck’s other son, Kenny, has a tattoo of the Cowboy on his arm), and his fatherly affection is on full display as he gives a tour of his home. “We asked him to collect some photos and Naked Cowboy paraphernalia to share with us, but we had no idea just how much he had,” Gunther recalled. “It was overwhelming. . . . He really does love that naked son of his.”
Episode 11 of “The New Yorker Presents” also includes a look inside a New Yorker ideas meeting; a short documentary about the police department in Albuquerque, where police have killed twenty-eight civilians since 2010; and a feature on the Iñupiat tribe, which has looked to video games as a way to preserve its culture and language. Episode 10, also available today, features a story about the Pulitzer-winning composer John Luther Adams and how moving from Alaska to New York is reflected in his music; a film by Eugene Jarecki, in which he learns about Cuba by becoming a criminal there; and cartoons by Farley Katz and Benjamin Schwartz.
