September 27, 2007

The listener limerick pulpit
Peter Sagal can get you Carl Kasell’s voice
By Brian Early bearly@hippopress.com

Peter Sagal is the host of National Public Radio’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, a humorous news quiz show that airs weekends on New Hampshire Public Radio (Saturdays at 11 a.m., Sundays at 1 p.m.) and other public radio stations throughout the U.S. Usually the show is performed in Chicago, but it takes frequent road trips. Sagal and his crew will tape this week’s show at the Palace Theatre in Manchester on Thursday, Sept. 28. The show (which will feature Dean Kamen in the “Not My Job” segment) sold out weeks in advance (but catch it this weekend or catch it whenever via podcast at www.npr.org/programs/waitwait). The show tests call-in contestants and weekly panelists on the week’s news. The panelists win bragging rights; the listener contestants can win Carl Kasell’s voice on their home answering machine.

Q:As you tour with the show, how [do the] audiences influence the performance?
The main difference, particularly when we go to some of the smaller markets, [is that] people are so delighted to see us, and I think this has something to do with the fact that people [who] live out in the country listen to NPR and they feel ... like they are outposts of this national community, and then when we come, from the mother ship, they are so delighted. So generally it’s pretty raucous. The other nice thing: when we go on the road, we may never be back, so we tend to get large audiences. Recently we sold out a 2,000-seat house, the Wait Chapel at Winston-Salem. ....

How do you engage the audience? Do you have to tell city-specific jokes?
We’ll do a little nod to where we are, particularly in my opening quasi-monologue. Generally ... we do our show. People come to see the show that they hear on the radio, and we want to deliver. ... If I’m in front of 2,000 people, say, in Winston-Salem, N.C., who are very happy to see us, you want to keep them happy. If you play to them overmuch, if you start doing things just for them ... the 2.3 or 2.4 million who will be listening to us on public radio stations and podcasts, well, they kind of get left out. ... Garrison Keillor is our model on this. He’s really good at that. He’s really good at making the audience in front of him ... a part of the show that’s he doing for the much [larger] audience.

That’s something you learn over time?
Yeah, you do. It’s something that all of us have had to learn. Paula Poundstone is a good example of this. She thrives on live audiences. She’s amazing. If you have ever seen her stand-up act, a lot of it isn’t prepared material but improvisational interactions with the audience. She’s talking to the people in front of her. That’s her comedy. And she’s great at it. One of the things she had to learn is she can’t really do that [on this show], because the people in front of her can’t be seen or in many cases heard by the people listening to the show. It’s one of the many skills we had to learn to do the show.

I read in a Chicago Tribune interview that you said you wanted to be a part of the national conversation. How do you do that?
It’s something you sort of earn. And I think there are people who ... have earned it. Those people are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Dave Letterman with his monologue and Jay Leno with his monologue. ... I sit around and see a news story happen, say [General] Petraeus’ testimony, and then I wonder what Jon Stewart is going to say about this. ... And the next day I’ll talk about it with my friend: “Did you see Stewart? He was terrific.” I would love it if people — and I think people do because they tell me they do — think the same way: “I can’t wait ’til the weekend when I hear what Wait Wait is going to do with this.” And that’s all I want. I want people to think of us as one of the posts they stop at. You get the serious news from X, your analysis from Y and you get your low humor from us.

One of the great things that have been happening is with our guests. With Patrick Fitzgerald this past summer, we were the first people to interview him since the Scooter Libby thing went down. And that was quite literally a part of the national news, it was in the New York Times two days later.

A lot of times, it’s smaller than that. We made a joke about Petraeus that the Daily Kos picked on and kicked around the Internet, and I love that — not their approval in particular, but I love the fact that stuff we’re doing people are going, “Oh yeah, that sums it up exactly....” I love that. That’s a tremendously gratifying thing for someone in my business.

You do a lot of the writing ... the day the show is recorded, to stay current.... Do you find when it airs ... the news [has changed]?
...We’ve gotten burned a couple of times. … A couple of months ago ... I had to ... run down and rerecord something because Paris Hilton had been sent back to jail.

— Brian Early.