A missive from subscriber Terence Dackombe;
Ever since our earliest ancestors told the first joke, “A man walks into a cave…”, commentators have debated on why there is a difference between what an American, and a Brit, finds funny.
There are immediate and obvious disparities. UK comedians want to be your mate; for them, life is an ordeal and fundamentally grim. Comics from the USA perform, they are not one of the crowd, and they don’t want you to buy them a beer. They have hope, and they believe the sun will come out tomorrow. The British anticipate a cloudy day ahead.
As Matt commented recently, from the perspective of this side of the Atlantic, we don’t really know how NPR works. What we do know is that it provides a seemingly endless supply of quality programming, which, thanks to the free podcasts, can make even the most frustrating commute considerably more bearable.
Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is, loosely, a quiz, based on the weekly news, recorded on Thursday nights at Chicago’s Chase Auditorium, and broadcast across NPR affiliate stations in America, on Saturday mornings.
It would be tempting to draw comparisons with Radio Four’s News Quiz, or even its televised cousin Have I Got News For You, but here we return to the theme of two nations divided by a common language, or more accurately, divided by comedy.
Both of these British shows are supposed to be based on a bedrock of satire and irony, lampooning the foolish and the pompous. However, over the years (the News Quiz was first heard in 1977) the humour seems to have filtered away, to be replaced by a rather childish, immature reliance on sniggery-pokery about undergarments, toilets, and sexual preferences. Increasing numbers of potential guests return the ‘thanks but no thanks’ slip to ‘Have I Got News For You’.
‘Wait, Wait’ manages to avoid these traps, and regularly provides a mature, but still ‘laugh out loud’, review of the week’s political news stories, draped over the theme of a quiz.
Hosted by the quick-off-the-mark Peter Sagal, and featuring veteran newscaster, Carl Kassel as judge and scorer, the show has a panel of three guests, drawn from a set of about ten regular contributors. With the exception of P.J. O’Rourke, these people are not widely known outside the USA, but listeners from elsewhere will soon pick up that if it is a week when any of Paul Provenza, Mo Rocca, or Paula Poundstone, is on the panel, then it’s a ‘not to be missed’ edition.
Although, as with the best shows, the whole thing feels effortless, the team of up to ten writers contribute about a hundred gags each week, of which maybe ten will beat the cut and make the programme.
The show has a regular set of ‘rounds’ which vary a little week to week, but are always set up to provide the host and guests the opportunity to riff on the hot issues of the week. It helps if the radio audience has some knowledge of world affairs, and perhaps a little understanding of American politics, but the casual listener will still enjoy the lightning fast repartee and razor sharp humour.
Don’t err… wait for ‘Wait, Wait’. The podcast can be downloaded from everywhere you would expect, including iTunes
KVRX is the station for Austin, Texas. I picked it because I thought, y’know, Austin is so painfully wonderful that I thought the station security wouldn’t let you within 200 metres of the mixing desk unless you had the most immaculate record collection ever to grace human ears. And, true to form, it has been 6 hours of bliss.
