Peter Sagal's Funny Takes on Serious News

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Joining us for a few minutes with an answer to that question is none other than Peter Sagal, the host of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! which we'll be doing two shows at Carnegie Hall on Thursday night, December 8th and Friday night December 9th. If all you know about Peter Sagal is that he's the funniest man on public radio, there's a lot more to him than that. He does book reviews and other writing for The New York Times and The Atlantic. He's a playwright and screenwriter and the author of two books. He was here for his more recent one, The Incomplete Book of Running.

The pinned tweet at the top of his Twitter feed is worth a read by everyone. It's called Peter's rules of Twitter. It's 10 simple rules. We'll go over a few. They're both very funny and very emotionally intelligent. Elon Musk, if you're listening, please read them before you close the deal. Peter, always great to have you. Welcome back to the show.

Peter Sagal: Brian, thank you. It's always great to talk to you. I feel like we are two survivors from the Jurassic age of public radio.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Somebody is going to dig up-- I don't want to go there. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Peter Sagal: Yes, here we still are. Always been a famous rhetorical question, but I now know the answer. You give them lots of money. Heartbreaking, I know, but that is in fact, how you do it.

Brian Lehrer: I think we're having some trouble with your line. We'll see if we can get that straightened out. Actually, we're going to call you back on your phone instead of the fancy dancy tech hookup that we have. I will tell everybody else that Peter Sagal is going to be hosting Wait Wait from Carnegie Hall, Thursday, December 8th, Friday, December 9th. We have a special kind of high-level thank-you gift in our pledge drive, which I was going to talk about later, but I'll mention it briefly right now while we're getting him back on the phone.

Contribute $500 and we will thank you with a pair of orchestra tickets to the Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me at Carnegie Hall on Friday, December 9th. That's an incentive for some of you with a little more to donate to the station. Thank you for considering it. I think we have Peter back on the line. Peter, are you there?

Peter Sagal: I am, yes. I think what happened was Carnegie Hall heard me giving away their secret and immediately had me silenced because what if people find out?

Brian Lehrer: I think that happens to me sometimes. Either China or Lincoln Center do that to me. One or the other. I don't know.

Peter Sagal: Exactly, because the secret got out that anybody could play Carnegie Hall simply by paying the rental fee. My God, what would happen to the prestige?

Brian Lehrer: That's how you get to Carnegie Hall. The listing that I have, and clear this up for me and everybody, is for two nights, Thursday, December 8th, and Friday, December 9th, but the show and its finished product, as our listeners know, is just one-hour every weekend. What happens at these Carnegie Hall shows?

Peter Sagal: Let me start from the beginning. Obviously, you're right. We do one hour edited down a week. That will be our Thursday show. What we'll do on Friday, the second night at Carnegie Hall, is we will bring in, first of all, a completely new panel, we'll interview a completely new guest, but a lot of the show will never be broadcast because we're going to put the same questions we put to our weekly panel to our second panel. People might say, "Well, that's no fun. I want to go hear the actual radio thing."

Well, first of all, you'll get to hear the radio thing on the weekend on the radio, but you know what happens when you take panelists like ours, comedians, sometimes much edgier than what you get to hear on our show, and you tell them that this won't be subject to FCC rules? You get some pretty great stuff. We'd like to think of our second show as Wait Wait After Dark and things get a little nutty, so I highly recommend the second show if people can choose.

Brian Lehrer: Which panelists will you have for those shows if you are free to reveal?

Peter Sagal: I am not yet free to reveal. Oh, wait a minute. Yes, I am, yes, I am. I just got told I could. The first show on the eighth, it will be Faith Salie of New York City, Peter Grosz ditto, and [unintelligible 00:04:26]. That's an all-New York panel. In fact, I think, yes, we are actually featuring New York comedians the entire week. It's Faith, Peter, and [unintelligible 00:04:35] on Thursday and Friday Emmy Blotnick, Hari Kondabolu, and the amazing and inimitable Maeve Higgins.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, cool. Oh, that Friday show is really a treat. The Thursday show is great, but I'm especially fans of the people on your Friday lineup. You take the show on the road a lot. You've been not just in New York coming up, but you've been in many cities this year, correct?

Peter Sagal: Well, we're restarting. We like everybody else, had to retreat to our home offices and closets and such for the pandemic, but we have been tentatively going back on the road last year. We did some outdoor shows, which were safer at Tanglewood and the Mann Center in Philadelphia. Now we are back at it. We were just at the Wang Center in Boston on Thursday, we're going to be down in Louisville in a couple of weeks, and then we're coming, as you said, our triumphant return, I'm calling it a triumphant return, to Carnegie Hall in December.

Brian Lehrer: We'll find out on Saturday the 10th whether it was a triumphant return or not.

Peter Sagal: Yes, we will.

Brian Lehrer: Serious question. Do you find the audiences to be different from place to place? Did they laugh in Minnesota just to be nice even if the jokes aren't funny, but in New York, they throw tomatoes? Are there any other patterns?

Peter Sagal: Let me put it this way. In many ways, the best audiences are in the places you would expect least. For example, you'd assume New York, Portland, Minneapolis, these places will be very appreciative of public radio, particularly our brand of public radio, but if we go out to a place like, say, Louisville in Kentucky or Oklahoma City, as we did years ago, it always has the sensation of like we're reaching a remote colony on an off-world planet that hasn't heard from the home planet in a long time.

They're very, very grateful that we came out to see them, these public radio listeners in these less likely places. That said, people in New York-- you know New Yorkers. You've talked to them every day. They have high standards. New Yorkers are always like, "You know there's something else we could be doing. We could be at that pawn contest in Brooklyn right now, so what do you got for us?" We like to rise to the occasion.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. You've been doing Wait Wait since 1998. Congratulations on a great run-

Peter Sagal: I know.

Brian Lehrer: - that is not at all getting old. Do you find that as the times change your approach to the humor on the show has to change? These days it seems like the news is often pretty dark between the war in Ukraine and democracy in peril and everything else. Do you have to find a different lane for Wait Wait to be funny in at different times?

Peter Sagal: We're pretty consistent in what we find funny and that's basically because all we do, and I think this is true of every comedian or maybe even every artist, we just do things that we like and we find funny. We just hope, and so far have been rewarded, that other people will find them funny. That said, though, one thing that has changed is that as things have gotten darker, and you just mentioned some of the ways in which they've gotten darker, I have found that there's just more need for our particular brand of trivial silliness maybe, especially in public radio, but in the world in which we live.

I'll give you a weird example. I used to really dislike, and I know this will surprise people, potty humor, I almost said pot humor, potty humor, toilet humor. I just found it beneath my dignity, such as my dignity is. Then after the election of 2016, all of a sudden I found toilet humor hilarious, and I can't really tell you why except insofar as it seems like, "Yes, we just need to be goofier and sillier and dumber right now just to give everybody a break." People come up to me a lot and they say, "Oh, your show has been such a balm in these last few years, just to have again, our 15 minutes of goofiness."

Brian Lehrer: B-A-L-M.

Peter Sagal: Yes, balm. Yes, not the other kind of balm. We have too many of those. B-A-L-M, balm. It's been a delight. It gives me such a sense of relief and distraction. They're so grateful for me to do it and myself, of course, and my many colleagues and my reaction is always, "Yes, it actually did, if not the same, but even more for us just to have the show to be able to do with my friends and colleagues over the last oh, six or seven years, has been a lifeline for us just to be able to do something and be goofy and strange in the midst of everything else that's going on."

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I totally see it. What a great answer. It was not really what I expected you to say, that you go just to the silly as sometimes just a bit of a relief from everything that's going on. Now, let me ask you, and listeners if you're just joining us, we have a few minutes left with Peter Sagal, host of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me. They're coming to Carnegie Hall with the show on December 8th and 9th. Let me ask you about Peter's rules of Twitter, the set of 10 rules pinned to the top of your Twitter feed. Rule number one is earnest. You wrote you will and have regretted many tweets. You will never regret not tweeting. Why is that at the top?

Peter Sagal: Twitter has been on balance probably not the best thing for me in terms of the way it has distracted me and occasionally gotten me in trouble, but I think I have found my way to a better balance and use of it. That's really the first thing. Like I said, no one has ever laid in bed at night and said, "I should have tweeted that angry reaction, that snap judgment I had without reading much, the world needed to know that."

I think that everybody needs to approach maybe Twitter, maybe all social media with the understanding that it's not required, no one judges you at the end of the day about how many posts you put up so be careful. Remember that your first instinct in so many areas of life is maybe not something to be trusted without thought. That's all I'm trying to say with that one.

Brian Lehrer: Rule number three of Peter's rules of Twitter is never argue with anyone about anything really, but then rule number four is accept pizza and whether hot dogs are sandwiches, and old movies and TV shows. Peter, I'm sorry, but hot dogs are not sandwiches, I don't care what you say.

Peter Sagal: Hot dogs are sandwiches and if you Google Peter Sagal's hot dogs are sandwiches, you will see an absolutely empirical proof of that and we'll end all arguments, but what I was trying to say is that arguments are great. I love arguments. You and I both are Jews. We grew up in an argumentative culture. Some of the best times I've had are good arguments. Twitter is not a place for good arguments. It's something about it. The fact that it's happening in public, the fact that you're limited to how much you can say in any given thing, it's just not good for it.

No argument on Twitter has ever ended in anything good, including illumination for anybody watching. However, there are some arguments that are trivial enough to be just purely fun, including the one over whether hot dogs or sandwiches, which of course they are or where to get the best pizza. New York versus Chicago Pizza, I'll go on about that all day, or talking about movies we grew up with and whether they were great or not.

These are fun discussions because there's absolutely nothing at stake, and I highly encourage those, but if somebody says something that really, really annoys you and they need to be slapped down immediately on Twitter or elsewhere, I commend you to look at rule number one and think about it because you are slapping that person down isn't going to be doing anybody any good. Not the person you're slapping, not yourself, or not anybody watching.

Brian Lehrer: All right. There's a couple of Peter Sagal's 10 rules of Twitter. You know the old joke about the broadcast news version of the 10 Commandments?

Peter Sagal: I don't know it, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: God gave Moses the 10 Commandments today, the most interesting 2 were-- That's the radio version of the 10 Commandments. All right.

Peter Sagal: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, at Carnegie Hall, December 8th and 9th. I mentioned in the intro that you do other things too right for The New York Times and The Atlantic. Do you want to promote anything else that you've got coming up?

Peter Sagal: No. I will say by way of, I don't know if it's self-promotion, but my article for The Atlantic, and it was an honor to write for them, was about a young woman who was killed in Denver, not to bring a bleak note to this conversation at the end, and I'm asking people to take a look at that, not for my own glorification but because the point of it was to make sure that this young woman's story was known. If people have a few minutes, it's something posted online, it's called Killed for Walking Her Dog.

Like I said, I think it's important that people understand that these statistics about gun violence, obviously we're all talking about it on some level, that the people who are names, if you will, in the stories about gun violence, each of them represents a real human being whose life was ended. I wanted to bring attention to just one of them, maybe to stand in for the whole. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: It's an amazing article and listeners who are Wait Wait fans, it's really another side of Peter Sagal that you may not have any idea about, but the amount of time that it becomes clear in this article that you devoted. Two years of following this one victim's story and really trying to get every detail about it, it's really admirable but Peter, I've got to go.

Peter Sagal: Thank you. She was a-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Peter Sagal: No, I was just going to say, like I said, she was a real human being and she, like all the victims of gun violence deserves more than just a name and a story that'll be forgotten in the wake of the next terrible tragedy.

Brian Lehrer: I've got to go because we're in our membership drive here this week. Do you get to get out of pitching because you don't host the local show anywhere?

Peter Sagal: Yes, but it's not because of prestige. WBEZ or local Station here in Chicago used to put me on the air and I was really bad at it. I'm just a bad salesman. I'd start doing pitching and then I'd be like, "Yes, maybe your money should go elsewhere. I don't know. I'm not sure anymore." They fired me.

Brian Lehrer: Peter Sagal, host of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, thanks so much. Keep it up.

Peter Sagal: My pleasure, Brian. You too. I'll see you the next time around.

 

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