Howard Stern has lost his sting — and his mojo

“The Howard Stern Show,” long in decline, is dead.

In March 2020, when New York City officially went into lockdown, Stern fled to his basement in the Hamptons. Over one year later and now vaccinated, as he first admitted on-air Monday — back from yet another vacation — Stern still has no intention of ever returning to his Midtown studio, his luxury Upper West Side apartment, or any semblance of pre-pandemic life.

The Howard Stern who stayed on air as planes flew into the World Trade Center is unrecognizable.

“Things will never get back to normal,” he declared just two weeks ago. “I do not believe the pandemic will ever be over.”

For a once-constant listener like me, this is heretical, especially here in New York City, where every single neighborhood is struggling to survive. Also, Howard: This pandemic will end, even though you, a germophobic recluse, clearly wish it would not.

But such sentiments have defined Stern’s show and attitude this past year: pessimism, anger, and a worldview that shrinks ever inward, limited in size and scope to The Basement — the literal and metaphorical dwelling place of this once-great show.

Stern, 67, renewed his contract with SiriusXM last December, signing for five years at a reported $120 million per. This is incredible, considering he works three days a week, Monday through Wednesday, broadcasting maybe three hours per day, about 112 shows per year with 253 days off.

That’s a salary of over $1 million per show.

Once upon a time, you could argue that would be fair compensation; after all, one could never predict what Stern would do or say. As memorialized by an analyst in Stern’s 1997 biopic “Private Parts”:

“The average radio listener listens for 18 minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for, are you ready for this, an hour and 20 minutes . . . Answer most commonly given? ‘I want to see what he’ll say next.’”

As for those who loathed Stern: “The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day . . . Most common answer? ‘I want to see what he’ll say next.’”

Today, it’s all too easy to predict what Stern will say next. Don’t just take my word for it — endless Reddit threads and Facebook groups are devoted to carbon dating the show’s death, parsing over its comedic breadcrumbs and wondering why Stern even bothers anymore.

Indeed, Stern sounds like a guy who should have retired years ago, one begging to be fired, an attempt to end his own misery.

Howard: Your listeners are right there with you. Put us all out of your misery.

Consider a typical show, consisting — on a daily, “Groundhog Day”-like basis — of such content as imitations of his nonagenarian parents and their hearing loss (“What?! What did you say?!”) — as enjoyable as talking to one’s own hard-of-hearing relatives — while revisiting slights and traumas from his childhood yet insisting that decades of three-to-four-day-a-week therapy have made him less angry and more evolved.

We usually segue into graphic, sex-obsessed talks with Ronnie the Limo Driver, a 71-year-old Stern show mainstay who has now become its lead character, eating up airtime and surpassing Stern himself. (Hope Ronnie got a raise for all this heavy lifting, unlistenable though he may be.)

If it’s Monday, we may get a recap of Howard’s weekend, which typically involves how many Peloton classes he took, updates on his lifelong disordered eating, current blood levels, and rants on why the one-percenters who live near him in the Hamptons, post-vaccine, won’t wear masks all the time.

If his much younger model wife, Beth, comes up, it’s to discuss how efficiently she cleans (now that the maids are gone), her eating habits and blood levels, and the hundreds of rescue cats that cycle in and out of their house.

If “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” happens to be airing, we can count on a mind-numbing, 45-minute soliloquy.

Next, we’ll probably take some calls from the mentally impaired characters known as “The Wack Pack,” or be subjected to prank phone calls that Stern insists are real but are clearly fake and scripted.

In lieu of picking on society’s weakest, Stern will turn his rage on most any staffer in his sights. It says something that even the most picked-upon loyalist — say, his producer of 37 years — doesn’t even bother to really fight back anymore.]

Why? My guess is that Stern’s rants are so expected and so often…