shock wave b'bye

Imus show ending

Don Imus is tuning out. Big Apple radio’s original shock jock announced Monday that his long-running “Imus in the Morning” show will end on March 29, pulling the plug on a staple of the city’s airwaves since 1971.

“Turn out the lights ... the party’s over,” the show’s Twitter account announced Monday morning.

This would be an anticlimactic end for the divisive DJ’s career, which has weathered numerous scandals — most notably when Imus, 77, was kicked off WFAN in 2007 for making racist and sexist remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.

The one-time railroad worker first made a name for himself on radio in California and Cleveland before debuting “Imus in the Morning” on New York’s WNBC — where he introduced Gotham to the shock-jock hosting style.

He switched to WFAN in 1988 and the show went into national syndication in 1993, building a huge audience, generating large revenues and drawing big-name guests including Bill Clinton during his first presidential campaign and then-Sen. Barack Obama.

“The I-man” was also frequently under the spotlight for his offensive remarks both on and off the air — including calling publishers Simon & Schuster “thieving Jews” and the show’s newsreader “fat” and “painfully stupid.”

But the final straw came in April 2007, when Imus described Rutgers’ athletes as “nappy-headed hos” and “rough girls” during a discussion about the NCAA women’s hoops tournament.

In the immediate fallout, Imus waved off his remarks as “some idiot comment meant to be amusing” — although he was eventually forced to apologize for the “insensitive and ill-conceived remark.”

WFAN owner CBS Radio first suspended Imus and then canceled the show outright after big advertisers pulled their support.

Late that year, he landed at ABC Radio, where he has remained until now, stationed at WABC in New York.

Imus said Monday his contract with syndicator Cumulus Media was slated to run out in December, but the company recently declared bankruptcy and told him it was going to stop paying him after March.

“What would be the point of paying me millions of dollars when they could save that?” he mused.