“Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” is NPR’s weekly hour-long quiz program. That description is so deceptively simple because, while true, it does not capture the wit, the zany humor or good feeling you get from listening. Peter Sagal has a lot to do with the show’s appeal, having hosted the show’s news-based quiz games since 1998. He’ll be in Atlanta hosting a live “Wait Wait” in front of an audience on March 3 at the Fox Theatre, the show’s first in two years. Sagal joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom ahead of the show to share trivia and reflections on his over-two-decades experience facilitating countless hours of fun on NPR’s most lovable news program.
Interview highlights:
A master of minutiae:
“This is one of my favorite bits of trivia. Do you know why cartoon characters and Disney movies, Pixar movies, all of them, have such unusually large eyes?” asked Sagal. “The answer is, it’s because we humans are programmed by evolution to look at large eyes proportional to a face and feel affection because that’s one of the things that keeps us from eating our babies.”
Why the live experience has been worth the “wait wait:”
“Well, you get to see how incredibly good-looking we all are, and I don’t want to oversell it … but it’s quite exciting,” said Sagal. “You get to hear a lot more material than we broadcast. It’s not unusual for us to record up to two hours of material which gets cut down into the 54 minutes … So that means a lot more ‘Wait Wait’ for your money, I can promise you that. And also … whatever we’re doing, it sounds like we’re having a really good time, and the secret to that I’ve discovered over two decades in broadcasting — the secret to creating that effect is to actually have a good time.”
An illustrious roster of surprising guests:
“We’ve had two presidents … We’ve had Nobel Prize winners, we’ve had cabinet secretaries, we’ve had senators, congressmen, governors, and that’s great. And I particularly love when we can take political figures, especially any major public figure who has a particular reputation for serious work, or whatever it may be, and bring them on the show and let them be goofy. I love that,” said Sagal.
“To the extent that we are performing a public service, I think that public service is, sometimes we were able to take very well-known people in the news, which can sometimes be a very dehumanizing experience … and humanize them. So maybe if you hated, say, I don’t know, Bill Clinton, maybe after our interview, you still hate Bill Clinton, but at least you say, ‘Oh, he’s a human being.’ So now you’re hating a human being, which is a small improvement.”
What two decades in radio have taught Peter Sagal:
“I learned that it wasn’t important, or as important, that I have the hottest take, the sharpest joke, the zippiest one-liner. Those are all useful and important, but that I learned to present myself as somebody on the radio that people would want to spend time with. And that really goes for everything we do.”
Sagal continued, “All the people on our show, all the panelists, new and old, they’re very funny. They’re very charming. They’re very talented, but we really like them, because we like to spend time with them, and we’re hoping that by putting them on the air, you will too … The thing that I think we’ve worked on is, we’ve tried to be, over the years, a place where people can come, and even though we don’t know your name — yet — you still feel at home with friends. That’s what we’ve worked on for these two decades.”
NPR’s comedy-news-quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” will be recorded in front of a live audience at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta on March 3. Tickets and more information are available at www.foxtheatre.org/events/detail/wait-wait-dont-tell-me-2022.
