In many ways, Peter Sagal is a typical Oak Parker. He doesn’t use his car very much. He runs marathons. He’s the coach of his daughter’s T-ball team. His wife is on the board of the Oak Park and River Forest Children’s Chorus. He frequents the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter. He’s an aficionado of the village’s playgrounds. He appreciates the excellent schools and the relatively low crime rate.
“I don’t think we’d survive on the North Shore-all those lawyers, therapists and doctors,” he said with a smile during a recent interview at the Buzz Cafe.
Like many other Oak Parkers, he expresses his political views with money-in his case, by avoiding Oberweis Dairy. “I’m sorry, Mr. Oberweis, I don’t like your integration stance, so I’m not going to indulge in your chocolate malts,” he says.
Sagal didn’t show his vulnerable side very often at the Buzz, but he did reveal, a bit sheepishly, that he hopes he’s gotten more interesting in the last few years. At the very least, he’s gotten more productive. The host of National Public Radio’s humorous current events quiz show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” is the author of a play-Denial, which recently completed a run in New York City-and he’s just finished a new work, The Book of Vice.
The playwright
Denial first opened in New Haven in 1995. Its current incarnation, which ran from April 13 to May 14 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York, is a play about a professor who denies the Holocaust ever happened, and a Jewish ACLU attorney who represents him when he is charged with inciting violence. “A lot of my plays are about people who tried to convince people of things that aren’t true,” he says.
Wilborn Hampton in The New York Times called it “an engrossing legal drama that examines the moral and ethical dilemmas inherent in the First Amendment.” According to Hampton, the heart of the play’s conflict “is the question of how much sufferance a free society should give its crackpots to maintain its liberties. And at what point does the threat of violence to citizens validate curtailing an individual’s rights?”
Sagal is not sure he would write such a play at this point in his life. “I wrote a lot about conversations that are very forthright,” he says. Now, he doesn’t think those ever really happen in real life.
The playwright has a long history in the theater. He was a self-proclaimed “theater geek” at Harvard, where he acted and directed plays when he attended school there in the mid-1980s. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he worked at the now-defunct Los Angeles Theater Center, which served, he says, as his graduate school.
Denial’s run is over, but Milton Bradley, a one-act play by Sagal, is now being performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, also in New York. In the play, “a rabbi must eulogize a woman who, in life, was anything but pleasant,” says the theater’s website.
The author
The Book of Vice, meanwhile, which will be published in October, seems more suited to the quick-witted host of a humorous radio show. It is a compendium of naughty things-like gambling, pornography, and conspicuous consumption-and how to do them. Sagal has plenty of experience with topics such as these: he once ghost-wrote the memoirs of a former porn impresario.
While doing research for the book, he wasn’t afraid to go out into the world and see for himself the exposed underbelly of America. For example, he visited porn star Nina Hartley, who lives in a loft … that’s also a dungeon … that’s also a film studio.
Some authors might have been susceptible to temptation, but Sagal seems to have taken a more serious, straight-laced approach.
“I didn’t actually do many of these things myself, but reported on them,” he says.
The host
Though Sagal loves writing books and plays, he is best-known at this point for Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me! the witty and edifying news quiz show that airs on Saturday mornings at 10 a.m., and has 2.3 million listeners-“more than This American Life, according to Malatia”-on over 400 stations. The show is taped before a live audience at Chase Bank Auditorium in Chicago on Thursday nights. Sagal provides a spark for a group of equally witty panelists such as Paula Poundstone and Roy Blount, Jr.
Blount has high praise for Sagal.
“Peter has a wider range of knowledge or genuine knowingness than anybody I know. That is to say, there is no cultural allusion, high or low, that he won’t pick up on,” Blount wrote in an e-mail. “That makes him an excellent host for a humorous show and also a great conversationalist.”
Sagal himself, however, displays more modesty. His attitude toward the show, he says, has changed markedly since he started out on the show as a panelist in 1998.
“When we first started, I had big ambitions to somehow change the discourse, or point out society’s hypocrisy and foolishness to itself,” he wrote in an e-mail.
But given today’s often-somber news scene, Sagal says, entertainment is exactly what’s needed: “Sometimes, giving someone permission to laugh at what’s going on is quite a service,” he observed. What he and his panelists try to do is “give [the audience] a break from the hard slog that the week’s news has become.”
The show does have some educational value, though. “You get the broad strokes,” says Poundstone, referring to current events, though she added that they come sugar-coated.
Behind the sugar, Sagal and his colleagues do show some teeth: When they pick on politicians, they don’t demonstrate an ideological bias, instead using common sense as their standard. “I’m a big fan of Jon Stewart,” he says. “If a Democrat does something dumb, he’ll make fun of it.”
While he does joke about politics-“It’s a current events show, after all”-he tries to focus on humorous actions, not policy choices. “My role is not to be a political commentator,” he says. “My role is to be a comedian.”
On one recent show at the end of May, for instance, “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas was suggested as a good theme song for Hillary Clinton, a listener was quizzed on a weight loss plan for Iraqi President Jalal Talibani which features-you guessed it-benchmarks, and Dennis Kucinich did his best impersonation of Donald Duck while delivering the first few lines of the “Gettysburg Address.”
Ultimately, Sagal has fun doing “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” But when he talks about his other roles as playwright and author, it seems obvious he wouldn’t be nearly as satisfied focusing on just one aspect of his professional life.