One of the nice things about going to early service at church is that I’m home in time for the radio show Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! on the public radio station in Nashville. (Check your local listings, as the saying goes, or listen any time at the show’s web site.)
This show is a tongue-in-cheek quiz about the week’s news featuring a panel of writers, journalists and celebrities. (The group of rotating semi-regulars includes Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca, P.J. O’Rourke and my pastor’s distant cousin, Roy Blount Jr.)
The very funny Peter Sagal is host of the program, while Carl Kasell, the morning newscaster for NPR, is the announcer. He is also the prize.
Let me explain that. There are no monetary or merchandise prizes on the show, but listeners who call in and win get the chance to have Kasell record the outgoing message on their home answering machine in his deep, authoritative voice. (You can hear some samples of his messages on the web site.)
The show has several different segments. One segment is a “bluff the listener” game where each of the three panelists announces a bizarre supposed news story and the listener must figure out which one is real. There’s also a segment where a celebrity guest answers questions in hopes of earning the prize for a randomly-selected home listener. “Carl Kasell’s Countdown” features questions accompanied by tongue-in-cheek musical selections. For example, the week that Al-Zarqawi met his fate, a question with his name as the answer was accompanied by the funky “You Dropped A Bomb On Me.”
Because NPR airs a newscast at the top of each hour, there’s a brief teaser prior to the newscast but the show proper doesn’t start until five minutes later. This teaser is not included in the version of the show which you can download from the web site — as I discovered a few months ago. The week of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident, the teaser was the funniest part of the show. Sagal simply came out and started reading off hunting safety tips, completely dead-pan. The studio audience got the reference and began laughing, more and more loudly, until Sagal wrapped things up. “Remember, guns don’t shoot people … we’ll find out who does, this week on ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!’”
This is definitely worth checking out.
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