by Faith Salie
Make Your Notes Disappear
I study for this show like Tracy Flick on Adderall. I spend the day of the taping in the hotel room, tirelessly clicking from one news site to another, checking constantly for updates (Drudge and FARK are my best friends on those days). On a legal pad, I scrawl headline after headline: “Man shoots armadillo; bullet hits mother-in-law,” “Linguists say Trump talks like 3rd grader.” It’s my pregame ritual. The other comedians mock me for this. Sometimes Adam Felber leans over onstage and pretends he’s cheating by trying to decipher my cursive. But they’re not cheat sheets. I just feel more confident with pages in front of me, because their very presence reminds me that I’ve done all the homework I can do, and now it’s time to stop kneeling to the Geeky Preparation Gods and start invoking the Impromptu Comedy Gods. And anyway, one of the hallmarks of WWDTM is questions you could never possibly answer, like, “Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed never to do what?” (Answer: “Point at fish.”)
I always think, when I glance down at my copious notes, if my jokes don’t kill tonight, at least I can win the news questions in the winner-determining Lightning Round. Even in my early middle age, I still, pathetically, want to ace the test. Plus, my stage-father sends me a no-pressure text before every show: “Please do honor to the family name.”
I learn more, however, from studying the signature ways of my colleagues than from refreshing the Drudge Report. There’s the intellectual wackiness of Luke Burbank that charitably assumes the audience will catch his esoteric references. There’s the self-effacing charm of Tom Bodett, which teaches you can actually be a pleasant person and a comedian. Adam is the Generous Gentleman of Comedy, probably because he’s a successful television writer who’s made a career out of making others sound funny. He never steps on your joke and cheerfully invites you to take his and pun-run with it. When Mo answers a question, he sounds like he’s playing an urgent game of Password. He has no fear that voicing his stream of consciousness will embarrass him. I’ve borrowed this from him—a faith that thinking out loud might be funny. Try it—it’s a bit scary to do in front of one person, much less millions. However, I can never borrow from the unfiltered rants of Paula. They are inimitable. Even if she’s not exactly saying something funny, her indignation at the way the world works makes her a comic genius.
Some trios have better chemistry than others, and you leave the show feeling like everyone played a great game, because you tagged one another’s jokes in a kind of comedaraderie, which is a word I just made up and kind of like. We all hope to push away from the table after recording, feeling like it was that kind of show. It doesn’t always happen. Even Peter, who has unfailingly delivered laughs for going on twenty years, very occasionally remarks, after leaving the stage, that he wishes a show had felt funnier.
While writing this chapter, I reached out to my fellow panelists to ask them how they prepare. The first person to e-mail me back was Charlie Pierce, who never tires of mocking/celebrating the ancient Roman roots of my children’s names.
You mean other than using my Jesuit training in the classics to think up cool names for your kids??
How are Hadrian and Calpurnia?
The second to respond was my pal Adam Felber.
17 years ago, when the show was in its infancy, I hardly prepared at all. Even if I knew an answer, I often went for a joke instead. Who cares? I thought. I’m FUNNY. Then one day, one of the producers called me. Anyway, he confirmed that I was funny (yay!)…and then let me know that if I wanted to stick around on the show, I needed to win every once in a while. I literally couldn’t have afforded to lose the gig at that point, so I hit the books.
Since that day, I’ve pretty much had the same method: The Wednesday before the show I’ll hit one news site (it changes, but always one of the big services), and read the past week’s worth of world, national, political, and entertainment headlines. Then I’ll hit a site or two that aggregates weird or funny stories and do the same.
After that reading, I’m done. I don’t try to come up with a take on the news or arm myself with quips. I think of my long years doing improv as my comedic Cialis: When the time comes, I’ll be ready.
Two of the women panelists chimed in.
From Kyrie O’Connor:
I decided early in life, long before I knew what a feminist was, that I was not going to be the Girl Who Studied. Nobody liked that girl unless they needed to copy her homework. My strategy of trying to absorb enough from the universe to get by worked well in high school, badly in college, and aces in the workplace where, let’s face it, nobody’s all that bright. For “Wait Wait,” I figured out early on that if I checked npr.org for what regime was overthrown and fark.com to see who stuffed frozen king crab down his pants, I’d be OK.
And from Amy Dickinson, of “Ask Amy” fame:
I channel my favorite person from my childhood TV watching, Rose Marie, from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I simply try to do what I think she would do. Would Rose Marie wear a dress? Spray her hair with Aqua Net? Yes, yes, she would. Would she try to wisecrack her way past Dick Van Dyke, Morey Amsterdam, and Carl Reiner? Yes—she definitely would.
I try to read the newspaper regularly the week I’m on the show, but mainly I am never very prepared—everything I think I know flies out of my head backstage and I’m trapped with only the outfit and helmet hair as protection. When I don’t know the answer to a question, which is almost always, I try to set myself on fire so at least as I go down—I’ll go down in flames. The men I tend to be booked with on the show don’t seem to prepare at all. They don’t even really bother to get dressed.
Then this from Maz Jobrani, who doesn’t mind being known as “the Persian Pink Panther”:
When I first started I would read CNN.com the week of the show and also go on Fark.com. Now since I’ve got two young kids and have a pretty busy work schedule, I find myself cramming the day of. I also try to listen to NPR whenever I’m in the car, but my four-year-old daughter keeps wanting to hear Nick Jonas so that doesn’t help! Unless there’s a question about Nick Jonas, in which case I’ll probably get that one right. (By the way, as a comedian I had an epiphany that my job isn’t to win the show but to try to be funny. Seems like whenever I win I’m less funny. Hmmm.)
And from Alonzo Bodden, who won Last Comic Standing:
I might have a chance to look at the NPR app and see what’s trending but usually I show up knowing there’ll be at least one question that I will know nothing about. They ask me about a naked guy shopping in a German grocery store, then they ask Maz, the Iranian, about Iran. It’s just not fair.
I’m not sure how others prepare but I just have a good time and stay funny in the moment, and, oh, I try not to do shows with Adam. He’s pretty sharp.
Please read this, from Roy Blount Jr, in his southern accent, which places you in a rocking chair on a porch in south Georgia.
I immerse myself in fark.com, which keeps me at the cutting edge of weird news developments, for as long as I can stand it—about an hour and a half on Tuesday. Then I cry out, “Enough!” and plop my fate onto the laps of the gods, preferably Venus’s but she’s so crowded.
P. J. O’Rourke sent the following, which I’m certain he composed in between cigar puffs:
Prepare? What is this meaning “prepare?” We do not have this in my country.
I’ve got a five-page list of things to do/buy/sort/pack before I leave on even a one-day hunting trip—beginning with American Kennel Association registration papers for dog’s dame and sire and ending with whiskey, 5 gallons. I have a one-sentence memo to myself about doing WWDTM: “Read Thursday’s New York Times.” And I usually don’t make it through that, getting stuck in the obits, trying to remember if I knew that guy back in the 1960s.
I’ve been a reporter for 45 years. By now, there’s no such thing as “that’s news to me.” Just the names change. And since I can barely remember my own, what’s the use?
I do, however, work hard on my Bluff,
making sure it rings at least a tiny bell of believability and has a punch line. Then I carefully do not e-mail it to WWDTM ahead of time, to keep [Executive Producer Mike] Danforth from pissing in it.
From Tom Bodett:
I have an hour-and-a-half drive to the airport and listen to the XM radio feed of headline news with Robin—the talking head—Meade. It is excruciating. She comes across as a chatty neighbor who reads the front page of your newspaper on her way across the lawn and is now filling you in—but the pain helps me think.
I buy a NY Times, NY Post, USA Today and a bag of peanut M&Ms for the flight. When I get to the hotel in Chicago, or wherever, I rewrite the bluff then spend an hour looking at weird news online—the exploding toilets and llamas in the trunk of a Florida couple’s car, which are the bread and butter of WWDTM—that are not covered, even by Robin Meade. One must dig deeper.
Once I’m suitably informed I take a nap and wake up refreshed to find I’ve forgotten almost everything I learned that day. I walk to the theater, eat the free food, and try to distract the other panelists from their work with pictures and stories of my children and pets.
And, at last, a real answer from Charlie arrived.
Because what I do for a living immerses me in Da Big stories of the day for about eight hours out of every 24, I don’t need much show prep on them. But I do check back a week on Fark, because that’s where you find the stories about humans smuggling ferrets in their pants and about stupid criminals. Both of these are guaranteed winners in the later questions of the lightning round.
I must have my 3–5 nap before every show or I get cranky.
Give my best to Diocletian and Livia.
Reading my comrades’ answers confirmed for me my hyperactivity when it comes to homework and taught me three important things: (1) Fark is not the secret weapon I thought it was, (2) when I’m an older man, I can take a nap before the show, and (3) spontaneity trumps preparation.
If you listen to the show, you know the best bits are completely spontaneous. One of my favorite moments came when I was just plain honest. Peter explained that when researchers had asked couples to have more sex, the couples who complied by getting it on reported themselves as getting less happy. This floored me.
FAITH: What??
ADAM: Well, of course.
PETER: I know.
FAITH: What do you mean, of course?
ADAM: Well, you think that just forcing a couple to have twice as much sex is going to make them happier?
FAITH: If someone forced me to have sex, it would be really good…[all of a sudden realizing how horrible this sounds in every possible way] I mean consensually!…And with my husband!!
PETER: Don’t call in, America.
BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT: If somebody forced you to have sex with your husband? That’s the weirdest statement ever. How did you even get kids?
I can’t study for an exchange like that. I definitely did not craft any jokes there, because I wasn’t joking. And maybe it’s for the best that my husband rarely listens to the podcast.
Make an Assist
Approaching the War Memorial Opera house in San Francisco—at 3,146 seats, the largest venue in which I’d ever performed, until the Millennium Park show—I experienced one of those, “Wow, take it all in” moments. Like I’d arrived.
Until I arrived at the door next to the box office. A woman was picking up her Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! tickets.
“Who’s doing the show tonight?” she asked the Box Office Person.
[Muffled Charlie Brown’s teacher sounds from Box Office Person]
“Who? Faith Salie??” lamented the lady. “But we wanted Paula!”
It’s not big fun to be reminded that you’re not someone’s favorite. I get why fans love Paula. Besides the bright red lipstick she always applies just before we go onstage, I have no idea whether she prepares for the show—she doesn’t need to, since her kind of humor transcends topical jokes.
I’ve found over the years that one of my functions on the show is to cue up someone else’s comedy, even inadvertently. I’m not always the funniest, and I’ve grown comfortable with that. Because a show that makes the audience laugh is a great show whether or not I made them laugh. Here’s an exchange with one guest named Brenda who introduced herself as a literary agent for children’s books:
FAITH: Brenda, I have a question about children’s books?
BRENDA: Yes.
FAITH: With all due respect, I sometimes feel about them the way I do about modern art, where you look at it and you go, “I could do that.”
BRENDA: I bet you do, Faith. And maybe you would like to write a children’s book.
FAITH: I got one about a monkey afraid of the dark.
PETER: I don’t think you respect the form, Faith. That’s what I think.
PAULA: I remember once I was cleaning up late at night, I was putting things away. And I came across a book, I don’t know who bought it, but it was a cardboard book called The Book of Shapes. And I swear to you, it was six pages long, and that’s because it went as far as oval. And I looked at the cover, and it was coauthored. By the way, the books that have sponges in them…that go in the bathtub? The text isn’t any good at all.
Paula took my premise and sprinted with it. Farther and faster than I could, and she was hilarious. Sometimes you make an assist, and the whole team wins. Sometimes you’re John Stockton to someone else’s Karl Malone.
I had to ask my husband for that sports metaphor.
Make a Mistake
Perhaps the best part of doing WWDTM is the freedom to say stupid shit. Sometimes you say stupid shit on purpose, because it’s a lame joke you just have to expel from your head, and you trust it will be cut from the show. But sometimes, if you’re me, at least, you just say something stupid that could screw up everything, and, because you’re playing with the pros, it all turns out maybe even funnier, by accident. This is what happened when food writer Mark Bittman came on the show:
PETER: So we’re going to ask you three questions about Batman, specifically the movie, Batman and Robin. That was the one with George Clooney as Batman, and it is widely regarded as the very worst…
FAITH: Is that the one…
PETER: …of all the modern Batman films.
FAITH: Is that the one where Batman had nipples?
PETER: That is the one.
MARK BITTMAN: That answers the first question.
PETER: I am never inviting you back, Faith. Answer…TWO questions correctly, and you’ll win our prize.
FAITH: Oh, my God, I’m so sorry. And that’s all I know about it.
PETER: Yeah, thank you, Faith.
FAITH: I’m so sorry.
PETER: Well, we’ll go through this anyway.
Peter was genuinely annoyed with me, which made it even funnier. Moments like those convince everyone the show is definitely not scripted.
After a taping, we take questions from the audience. Someone will often ask, “What’s the funniest thing that ever happened that didn’t make it on air?” Whereupon Peter will launch into a story about the episode that featured someone off to the side of the stage, signing for a few deaf audience members. A guest on that show described a difficult experience as being akin to “shitting a pineapple.” Peter expertly demonstrates how the interpreter signed the shitting of a pineapple. Then we usually sign autographs, and I’m always freshly flattered when someone’s psyched to take a picture with me, especially if she’s eleven years old, and especially if I owe her parents an apology for the content of some of my jokes. Sometimes people tell me after a show that they really like my laugh. I love that. I laugh a lot when I’m on WWDTM. I giggle so often that I’m too busy to count how many laughs I might have provoked.
Is it too much to say this show has given me some real-life lessons? That sometimes you don’t have to work so hard? And being fearless enough to sound stupid can pay off, and you don’t always have to be the winner?
I can hear Peter Sagal
answering me, wearily. “Yes. Yes, Faith, it’s too much to say. It’s just a comedy show, and you’re even nerdier than the rest of us.”
* * *
* The producers rarely put two ladies on the same panel, the exception being Paula, who often gets to perform with another woman, because her comedy apparently possesses an androgynous quality.
I should have known it might not go too well the moment we decided to take separate trains to go downtown. What kind of newlywed couple expecting their first child doesn’t travel together to pick out their baby stuff? But we were running late to meet our friend Tracy, who’d offered to meet us at Buy Buy Baby on a Saturday morning and tell us what we needed to purchase in order to become parents. I was freezing in the February wind as we stood outside the Lincoln Center subway stop while John suddenly had to make a call he didn’t want me to overhear. So we, not altogether cheerfully, decided I’d hop on the next train, and John would follow after his mysterious call.
I expected Tracy to bring her husband, Sam, but I didn’t anticipate finding her elementary school-aged son and daughter waiting with them, just inside the gigantic automatic doors of the Mecca for the fecund. My surprise highlighted the fact that I wasn’t a mother yet, and therefore hadn’t really considered that on weekends parents generally spend time with their children. They were generous about my tardiness, but I was informed we were up against family karate class in forty-five minutes. However, Fortune Magazine named Tracy one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders,” so if anyone could guide us efficiently, it was she. I was ready for a checklist, an inventory of items I could collect to assemble myself into a fantastic—or at least clueful—mother. I brought pen and paper to take notes.