John Chester Kobylt and Kenneth Robertson Chiampou, known professionally as John and Ken, are American talk radio hosts of a four-hour weekday radio show, The John and Ken Show, on KFI AM 640 in Southern California.The John and Ken Show airs from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. PST on KFI AM 640 The program is the most listened to local talk radio program in the United States: they draw an estimated weekly audience of approximately 1.2 million listeners. According to Talkers Magazine estimates, they are the only local radio show with more than one million listeners.
John Kobylt was born to a working class Catholic family in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, Chester, was born in Poland and like many Europeans of his time was greatly affected by the German aggression. He was taken from his family and held in a Nazi labor camp for five years. He then joined the British Military and eventually immigrated to the U.S., where he married a Polish American woman, Helen. Chester and Helen had two sons John and Richard and lived a fairly typical working-class life in northern New Jersey. John entered the radio business as a sportswriter after dropping out of Seton Hall University.
Ken Chiampou, a native of Brentwood, New York, was a certified public accountant and had graduated from the University at Buffalo, working in corporate audits for a Big Eight firm. Both worked in the Elmira-Corning market in New York state in the late 1980s, Kobylt as a disc jockey at WENY and Chiampou at the station's cross-town rival WELM.
Kobylt and Chiampou first worked together in 1988 for a radio station in Atlantic City, New Jersey. According to Kobylt, the show was named "The Odd Couple" by a producer who was the "stupidest man on two legs." Kobylt became program director of WOND. One of their earliest pranks was while they hosted mornings at 103.7 WMGM. They started a food drive for rival 95.1 WAYV's morning DJ Russ Monroe after he was fired a week before Christmas. The pair, as part of the prank, called WAYV live on the air to solicit a donation, which led to a hang up.