NPR’s ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!’ You Can’t Make This Stuff Up. Or Can You? – New York Times
IT’S hard to picture the anchor of NBC’s nightly television newscast enjoying “appointment radio,” but that’s what Brian Williams said he does at home each weekend. He sits with his avalanche of Sunday papers, yelling out answers to public radio’s comedy news quiz, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”
“Like so many fans of the show,” Mr. Williams said recently, “I have said to more than one family member at times, ‘Boy, I bet I could do well on there.’ ”
You think? But acing the quiz isn’t really point of the eight-year-old National Public Radio show, which features the host, Peter Sagal, testing callers on the week’s dumbest events and most misguided newsmakers. It’s about how the news can be so absurd (the Defense Department develops human cannonball technology; Keith Richards falls out of a palm tree) that listeners are challenged to distinguish real events from the ones invented by the show’s writers.
The weekly quiz is also a verbal throw-down staged by Mr. Sagal and a rotating crew of three panelists, who vie to top one another’s ad libs and provoke the biggest laughs from a studio audience.
Aw, man! Murray, intrepid host of the upcoming fan gathering Felberpalooza, got interviewed and everything.
WWDTM is starting to hit it really big – they credit 2 recent changes for getting more listeners, more visibility, and more big name guests and big name fans (such as Brian Williams, who will appear June 24).
1. They changed format from call-in from around the country, to live audience taping, with panelists (and occasionally guests) flying in to tape the show on Thursdays, usually in Chicago. The live audience laughing really makes the show hit on all cylinders.
2. They made full-length audio of each week’s show available for free on iTunes, as a podcast. Since then, they’ve picked up a lot of fans who don’t otherwise listen to National Public Radio.
3. They have a disco machine on stage, and they aren’t afraid to use it. This fact is not generally known by most fans, but there it is, sitting on a table to the left of the panelists, and looking not a little like an alien spaceship. Here’s a photo from a recent post at Adam Felber’s blog:
It’s a non-stop news quiz party at WWDTM tapings, as you can clearly see for yourself. And yes, I’m counting the days until we get to go.