The New Vice President
From our November 2007 issue: In his new book, Peter Sagal, the smart and impish host of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!, turns his attention to porn, gluttony, swingers' clubs, and other forms of behavior that he'd never, ever have the nerve to do on his own.
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The Wait Wait staff occupies a tiny warren of cubicles in the WBEZ offices, housed in a squat building in the middle of Navy Pier. During the course of a typical week, Sagal and the four producers who work with him coordinate guests' appearances and develop quiz questions based on the week's news. Thursday is the culmination of their efforts: In the afternoon, the staff reads through the script in preparation for that evening's taping; Kasell flies in from Washington, D.C.; Berman, who works out of the WBUR office in Boston, listens in on speakerphone.
One recent Thursday, the staffers gathered around a conference table and took notes as Sagal speed-read through his parts, tugging compulsively at his eyebrows—the thickest hair on his close-cropped head. There were a few moments of bogging down in the minutiae that seem to attend any staff meeting as the group fine-tuned the script to hone jokes and emphasize their newsiness. One digression, for example, found them debating the right adjective to convey the Toyota Prius's reputation for poor horsepower in response to the news that Al Gore III got ticketed for going more than 100 miles per hour in his ("Granola-powered" eventually won out).
Sagal says the show's switch in 2005 to taping in front of an audience has spurred its growth; listenership is up by a third in the past two years, according to Arbitron, the radio-ratings service. Originally, the panelists on Wait Wait called in from studios near their respective homes, but now they fly in from across the country. Even though Wait Wait consists entirely of people sitting around talking, the tapings regularly sell out at $20 a ticket. "Part of the fascination of radio is how intimate it is," says Roxanne Roberts, a longtime Wait Wait panelist and a good friend of Sagal's. "People hear your voice, they hear you laugh, they hear you talk about yourself and your life, and they feel they have some sense of you. They're dying to see you in person and to find out to what extent you match up with the fantasy they have of you."
For years, Sagal has been warming up the crowd by telling them that NPR's demographic research has determined that "most of our audience—not you, I can tell—was socially unsuccessful in high school." He retired the line after the Millennium Park taping, but it served him well. "We're public radio dorks, all of us, including me," he says. "We identify as that and we're proud of that. We've learned that the audience loves being teased about it and loves being identified as part of the cult."
The guy who wrote a metabiography of an ersatz porn director seems to fit right in with an audience that cares more about Lewis Libby than Lindsay Lohan. Sagal also has an ex-nerd's tendency to overcompensate for being unathletic as a child: An off-and-on runner since he was 15, he dealt with turning 40 by running the Chicago Marathon, and last year he ran the Boston Marathon as well. (We will leave it for someone else to decide whether his taste for slightly loud clothing or the fecklessness he describes in his Times essays, including getting stuck on a neighbor's roof, and another time being conned out of $40 by a woman pleading car trouble, is also characteristic of the NPR crowd.)
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