Harry Shearer’s Le Show: Sonic Portal to News, Satire, Memory, History

Shearer, the only child of eastern European immigrants, each the sole surviving family member to escape the Holocaust,⁹ grew up in Los Angeles. In 1966 Shearer’s childhood home, on West Boulevard between West Adams Avenue and Washington Boulevard, became part of "the number two westbound lane of Interstate 10."¹⁰

While Le Show, too, grew up in Southern California — Santa Monica,¹¹ to be precise — Shearer has through the decades broadcast the program from cities across and beyond the United States: episodes from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlantic City, Austin, London, Milan, Edinburgh, and Melbourne suggest the program's cosmopolitan stance.¹² Since 2014 WWNO in New Orleans, Shearer's adopted hometown, has been the host station for Le Show.

Shearer's radio work began when he was seven years old, on the Jack Benny Program.¹³ "I started in show business at the top, and I've been working my way down ever since," Shearer quipped in a 2016 interview.

At age nine, Shearer appeared uncredited as David in The Robe (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1953), a role that made him "the first Cinemascope child."¹⁴ The same year he appeared in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (Universal-International Pictures). During radio’s golden age,¹⁵ Shearer also performed on the Lux Radio Theater and the radio soap opera When a Girl Marries, staying with Benny through the program's transition to television in 1950.

Shearer did occasional work on other television shows, including Private Secretary,¹⁶ General Electric Theater, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Shearer’s stint as Eddie Haskell in the pilot of Leave It to Beaver persuaded his parents to end his childhood acting career so that he could stay in public school rather than do regular work as a single character on a television series.¹⁷

After attending UCLA to study political science, working on The Daily Bruin student newspaper, editing the college humor magazine, and interning for two summers as an ad copywriter in New York City,¹⁸ Shearer worked as a staffer in the California State Legislature, taught public school in Compton, and wrote the statement to the press after the Grateful Dead's October 2, 1967, arrest for marijuana possession in San Francisco.¹⁹ Shearer subsequently did freelance reporting as a stringer for Newsweek, eluded the military draft for a year at Harvard,²⁰ and in 1968 found himself back on the radio — KRLA and KPPC in Los Angeles — with the comedy and news satire group The Credibility Gap, then also featuring Richard Beebe, David L. Lander, and Michael McKean.

Le Show board.

While the seeds of Le Show were sown in that same commercial radio milieu, Le Show came into its own on KCRW,²¹ an eclectic public station owned by Santa Monica College, from whence the program originated until April 14, 2013.²² "I had an idea what kind of show it would be," Shearer said in a 2021 interview about the origins of Le Show: "topical sketch comedy with some music and some talk. The key to me was the comedy. And I thought, 'I'll do this for a year and somebody in television will dig it and say, "Hey, do that on TV."' And that never happened."

Yet Shearer’s influence has been quietly ubiquitous in post-1960s U.S. media culture.

In addition to his two unhappy stints on Saturday Night Live,²³ Shearer co-wrote with Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson the 1979 film Real Life.²⁴

His roles as pod-imprisoned bassist Derek Smalls in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984)²⁵ and as transitioning acoustic bass player Mark/Marta Shubb in A Mighty Wind (2003) top his film acting work as an adult.²⁶ He also appeared in The Right Stuff (1983), The Fisher King (1991), Godzilla (1998), The Truman Show (1998), and, among many other films, Wayne's World 2 (1993) as disc jockey Handsome Dan.

Those who have never heard of Harry Shearer almost certainly have heard him.

Among other voice acting roles, Shearer has created the voices for scores of characters, from C. Montgomery Burns and Waylon Smithers, to Rev. Lovejoy, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner, and Kent Brockman (plus “God, The Devil, and Hitler,” Shearer adds²⁷) on the longest-running scripted series in television history, The Simpsons.

How did Shearer get that job? Matt Groening was a fan of Le Show.²⁸

While comedy and satire are Shearer’s habitual creative registers, his 2011 documentary, The Big Uneasy, reveals that Shearer is as grave as he is funny. The Big Uneasy tells in painstaking detail how and why New Orleans flooded after Hurricane Katrina — short version: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.²⁹ The Big Uneasy cautions viewers about a "culture of impunity" in the Corps and other institutions. That thread of warning also runs through Le Show, with its recurring segments on whistleblowers, inspectors general, public health, and digital surveillance.

Dynamic tensions between fact and fancy — between empirical reality and, in Shearer’s words, "that business called show" — crisscross Shearer's lifetime of creative work. His cameo at a crucial moment in The Truman Show along with his authoritative position in documentaries on Holocaust humor (The Last Laugh, 2016), radio artist Joe Frank (Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There, 2018), and the British pop band XTC (XTC: This Is Pop, 2017) suggest his range as a cultural critic.

Despite his work in television, film, theater,³⁰ and prose,³¹ it is Shearer’s lifelong love of radio³² that has propelled him through more than nearly 2,000 consecutive weeks of creating fresh sonic material. Shearer’s appreciation for the medium of radio, "the magic of live,"³³ and the power of the aural imagination infuse each week’s Le Show. Shearer’s stunning capacity for creating and voicing new characters,³⁴ what is often called "impersonation" and which rhetoric handbooks have for millennia categorized as ethopoeia,³⁵ puts Le Show in a category of its own. Finally, Shearer’s passion for public service journalism — he told a National Press Club luncheon audience that he was "fascinated and seduced by journalism" as a child³⁶ — motivates him to share every week on Le Show authoritative reports which, he reasons, listeners have not encountered elsewhere in U.S. media.

Harry Shearer is a portal: Learn one thing from Le Show, and you’ll quickly learn half a dozen more by logical consequence. Shearer's thousands of impersonations along with the dozens of characters of his own creation make Le Show a massive series of conceptual and sonic hyperlinks to late-20th- and early-21st- century news and culture.

The consequences of Shearer’s sonic satire remain, as ever, up to his listeners.

"Shearer himself says that satire could be defined as the enemy of revolution: a safety valve for anger," wrote Lucy Jolin in CAM, the University of Cambridge’s alumni magazine, in 2022. Shearer continued: "The last thing a committed organiser wants to generate in a crowd is laughter: it dissipates the will to action. I have the opportunity, in my weekly radio show, to make fun of whatever I want. I took great advantage of that during the Trump years, and I noticed that I was less angry about Trump than all my friends, because I had an outlet. It’s hard to attack a building when you’re laughing."³⁷

This exhibit offers a brief historical overview of Le Show from analog to digital and then showcases examples of Shearer's sonic satire and information-sharing on Le Show over the decades in “A Le Show Sampler.” Be sure to read Shearer’s own recollections of the four decades of Le Show — so far — here.

Next: Brief Historical Overview of Le Show