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

Brief Historical Overview of Le Show

In 1983, Shearer prototyped the program that became Le Show on KMET in Los Angeles. Shearer was fired twice, "once for playing a Mel Tormé record and once for using the word 'penis' in a sketch."³⁸

Unchained from the limitations of commercial radio, Santa Monica’s KCRW, the call letters an acronym for College Radio Workshop, provided the perfect public radio home for Shearer and Le Show for more than three decades. While commercial and some public radio stations embraced niche marketing in the 1980s, KCRW's cultural programming included jazz, classical, pop, folk, and avant-garde music as well as poetry.

"Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko gave a live reading on his recent visit to Southern California," Mathis Chavanov wrote in an October 1985 feature on KCRW in the Los Angeles Times. "There also is African music, a garden show, early jazz, a food show, medieval and Renaissance music, a holistic medicine show, comedy, Duke Ellington's music[,] and drama ranging from the adventures of British detectives Paul Temple and Lord Peter Wimsey to the broodings of Joe Frank, a Washington, D.C.-based writer and Kafka freak."³⁹

Longtime "iron-willed"⁴⁰ KCRW station manager Ruth (Hirschman) Seymour told the Los Angeles Times that what the station was doing in the mid-1980s was "very risky. We're going against every rule of commercial radio." Seymour added that KCRW "always program(s) for one person.... [who] had better be at least as bright as you are and probably smarter."⁴¹

Seymour "served as KCRW's general manager from 1978 until 2010, building it into a highly regarded station, airing programs from NPR (National Public Radio), PRI (Public Radio International) and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), as well as providing original programming."⁴² The City of Santa Monica paid KCRW $40,000 in 1985 "to support the regular broadcasts of council meetings,"⁴³ cementing the station's claim to operate in the public interest.

Among KCRW's highest-profile original programming was Le Show, which, Shearer said, "started out as a place for me to do satirical comedy every week, to be with an audience and to have a place to write and create without having to do standup and entertain drunks for a living."⁴⁴ As Paul Brownfield wrote in an October 2001 feature on Le Show in the Los Angeles Times, Shearer understands "the value of doing satire free of charge, on public radio: You get to say what you want."⁴⁵

The early years of Le Show are braided among the respective satisfactions and disappointments of two other of Shearer's major projects, the genre-inventing mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap and Shearer's second stint on Saturday Night Live.

"I joined [SNL] at the time when unprofessionalism had become the professional choice," Shearer told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. "You were looked down on for showing up on time and knowing your lines. Spinal Tap had been a kind of succès d'estime for me. A lot of assurances were made. A lot of them were violated. I was told they wanted me to do political and topical material for the show, but virtually everything I wrote was killed. Eventually, you begin spending your time worrying why things don't get on instead of being creative. You're in a classic underling position."⁴⁶

Poster for Saturday Night Live, featuring Harry Shearer as part of the cast.

Soon after Shearer left Saturday Night Live, television critic Tom Shales expressed his own disappointment: "Harry Shearer, one of the most inventive writer-performers in the group, grew bored and disillusioned and left the show."⁴⁷

Shearer’s radio work from this period is poignant, the distance between New York and Santa Monica, television and radio, resonant and palpable.

Sitting in on January 2, 1985, for regular KCRW host Deirdre O'Donoghue during the 10 p.m. to midnight Saturday Night Avant Pop or SNAP program,⁴⁸ Shearer began, after two deep breaths, this way: "Well, good evening. It's just past 10 o'clock at night…. I'm coming from a different place these days. I need to get the energy from feeling, you know, the electricity of just a live house. So, if you'll excuse me. This may help for you, but it sure will help for me." The sound of a wildly enthusiastic audience, recorded two nights earlier from MTV's New Year's Eve broadcast, continues for more than a minute.⁴⁹ "All right," Shearer says. "Thank you, J.J. That's what I needed."

Shearer then plays four songs without interruption. After the fourth track, XTC's "Love on a Farm Boy's Wages," Shearer welcomes listeners to the program using the generic conventions of an SNL monologue. "Thank you, XTC, and thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much. I've had a great week here with the kids at the station. They've been wonderful. We've just been having an unbelievably great time. And I think we've got kind of a good show for you tonight. I hope so, anyway."

After playing The Kinks' "Do It Again," Shearer introduces himself to listeners: "Well, now I'm gonna cop to the whole thing: Hi. This is not Deirdre O'Donoghue. This is her program called SNAP. It occurs normally every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday evening between ten and midnight here on KCRW. And Deirdre has graciously offered me her time tonight. I'm your host. My name, Yours Truly. Oh, stop this unseemly false modesty. Okay, I will. My name is Harry Shearer, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you again for welcoming me back (big exhale) to where, I guess, I belong."⁵⁰

Shearer's return to KCRW made headlines.

Promo image for KCRW featuring Harry Shearer.

"The ex-'Saturday Night Live' writer/performer returned to KCRW and his creative roots over the weekend. His new hour comedy show … features something that KCRW manager [Ruth Seymour] describes as 'essentially serious' topical humor."⁵¹

"Shearer came home to Los Angeles — and to KCRW — as he says, 'to repair psychic damage.' Saturday Night Live audiences miss him. Whenever he and Martin Short appeared, separately or together, their episodes were so funny that, in retrospect, they seem piquant. Fortunately, Shearer has been able to enjoy some occupational therapy: He can be heard Sunday mornings at 10 a.m. on KCRW-FM in a comedy throwback to his days with the Credibility Gap."⁵²

Some of Shearer's SNL satires of public figures — including CBS 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace and fashion critic Mr. Blackwell — followed Shearer back to Le Show. And the imaginative affordances of radio allowed Shearer the freedom to do what SNL had not: make a program almost entirely of his own invention, the quality almost entirely under his own control.

In the 1980s, Le Show's listening audience grew along with KCRW's thanks to KCRW's SASS satellite and National Public Radio. While commercial networks were still using the Bell system to transfer programming, "NPR had completed the first nationwide radio satellite distribution network by 1980," NPR historian Julie Rogers has written. "This system offered superior sound quality and 15 origination points across the country, giving local voices more opportunities to reach a national audience."⁵³

Le Show was heard not just around the country but "around the world."⁵⁴ For many years Shearer ended Le Show by reciting from memory the various networks carrying the program; what follows is an example from 2013: "Ladies and gentlemen, that's going to conclude this weekend's edition of Le Show. The program returns next week at the same time over these same stations: over NPR Worldwide; throughout Europe on the USEN 440 cable system in Japan; around the world through the facilities of the American Forces Network; up and down the East Coast of North America by the shortwave giant WBCQ The Planet, 7.490 megahertz shortwave;⁵⁵ on the Mighty 104 in Berlin; around the world via the Internets, at two different locations live and archived whenever you want it, harryshearer.com and kcrw.com; available for your smartphone through stitcher.com; and available as a free podcast through iTunes, Sideshow Network, and KCRW.com…."

As stations added, dropped, or failed to add Le Show to their program schedule, Shearer addressed the changes, albeit briefly and with characteristic self-deprecation: "We have successfully scared away San Francisco. But that just means that now the focus of which station will be scared away next shifts across the country. And in that regard I'd like to welcome KSJN in Saint Paul and several other radio stations in Minnesota which have rejoined the — I guess 'static in size' would be the best way to put it — Le Show radio network a couple of weeks ago."

Shearer also regularly but briefly commented on changes in radio technology and NPR formats, usually by making fun: "We're live from the Le Show-a-torium. Of course we're tape-delayed a lot of places now. It's not really a radio show so much as a training program for NPR engineers."

After 9/11, Shearer decreased the amount of music in each week’s Le Show to accommodate more "news from outside the bubble" of the U.S. media.

As he told NOLA.com in a 2013 story marking the program's thirtieth anniversary, "During the run-up to the Iraq war I noticed that increasingly (thanks to the Internet) I could read and hear news from all over the world, and that what was being reported in this country during the run-up to the war didn't necessarily match what one could hear or read in England and Australia. And I thought, 'Gee, I can read and hear this stuff, and I have a microphone. I might as well put the two together.' In short order came the flood in New Orleans, and one had the same experience. What we knew here did not match what people around the rest of the country knew. Willy-nilly [Le Show has] become more involved with sharing information than it ever was intended to be."⁵⁶

Though announcement of Shearer's 2008 star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame headlined Le Show among his work on The Simpsons and in This Is Spinal Tap,⁵⁷ in 2013 Shearer's years at KCRW ended as they had begun, with psychic damage. New KCRW management decided to end its relationship with Shearer and, via broadcast in southern California, with Le Show.

Once again, Le Show made headlines.

Shearer explained to Los Angeles Magazine days after KCRW announced the change,

All ([KCRW] general manager Jennifer Ferro) said was basically, "We want to make some changes, it's time to bring in some new voices," — sort of boilerplate management verbiage. The surprise to me was when she said, "It's effective immediately." There was no commentary about whether there was anything wrong with the show.

It didn't escape my notice that when you'd walk down the hall of the station a few years back, when it was festooned with photographs of everybody who contributed anything to the on-air content, the only face that I never saw in that hallway was mine. I went, "Well, in compensation for not being in the hallway, I get total freedom. I'll take that deal."⁵⁸

Los Angeles Magazine writer Catherine Green summed up the news: "Just like that, the hour-long mix of music, politics, sports, and industry chatter — an L.A. institution — was without a radio home…. The show, which attracted a national following, aired on more than 80 stations around the country along with a few in Europe and Japan. Each episode quickly became available online, gathering more listeners through satellite and digital channels. The broad reach of the show may have been what assured KCRW that Shearer would be fine without the L.A.-based platform. KCRW will continue to distribute Le Show, making it available to other affiliate stations and podcast distributors."

"For many listeners," Green continued, "the toughest pill to swallow was that they were denied the chance to hear Shearer say farewell on the air. Days after it was announced KCRW would no longer broadcast Le Show on terrestrial radio, Shearer was still stung by the decision — 'Well, I'm always angry. That's what makes people funny' — but looking forward to the next chapter…."⁵⁹

Shearer told the story on his website, too, adding, "I'm not saying I haven't thought about ending the series. I think about it every week as I contemplate another Saturday with no idea yet of what I'll do on Sunday. But, nearly halfway through the 30th year of the broadcast, I know there’s much more to say, and, sadly, much more information that isn't being shared with the audience anywhere else on the dial."⁶⁰

For years Shearer had described Santa Monica, the coastal Southern California origination point of Le Show, as "the edge of America, the home of the homeless." When he went on the air for the first time after the divorce from KCRW, Shearer acknowledged that Le Show itself was "homeless in the home of the homeless."

Yet Shearer did not find it difficult to transfer origination of Le Show from one of his places of residence to another. While KCRW was reportedly telling Le Show listeners who called to complain about not hearing Le Show on the air that "change is hard," a few weeks later Shearer changed the name of his Le Show radio network to "change is easy," a reference to the nickname of the city where Le Show would eventually originate: WWNO in New Orleans, the Big Easy.

And three months after parting ways with KCRW, Le Show returned to the Southern California airwaves, hosted by album-oriented rock station KCSN, owned by Cal State Northridge.⁶¹

The suddenness with which this program left the Southern California airwaves was surprising — a bit mortifying, I'll admit — to yours truly. That has been rectified as of today ... thanks to our new Los Angeles-area broadcast home, KCSN Northridge/Los Angeles. You may hear during the broadcast at times some eating sounds that will be me consuming about 45 years' worth of derogatory words about the San Fernando Valley since KCSN is comfortably ensconced in the deepest part — dare I say heart? — of the San Fernando Valley. We are glad to be with them. Thanks to KCSN for coming to the assistance of Le Show. This program of course goes out as a podcast, it's streamed, it exists in all kinds of digital forms. But at its heart it is a broadcast, and I've always relished the idea of being on the radio with you once a week and I'm relishing the idea right now of saying to folks around the world, hello welcome to — and to Southern Californians, hello welcome back to — Le Show.

Shearer followed his opening monologue with "Mr. Radio" by the Electric Light Orchestra. Later in the program he played John Hartford's "Turn Your Radio On."

The arrangement with KCSN lasted a little more than a year. But Le Show remains on the air in major cities and college towns across the country, hosted by WWNO in New Orleans, from whence Shearer broadcasts approximately half of each year's programs live in a studio a few hundred yards from Lake Pontchartrain, close by another edge of America.