The Folkness of Harry Shearer

Growing up in the suburbs in the early 1990s, two cultural experiences were almost certain: The Simpsons and MTV. I was 11 when I watched the pilot episode of the former, a Christmas special called “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” which aired in December of 1989. Despite (and likely because of) my parents’ objections to the show, I remember watching it often during its early run—long enough to watch the focus shift from Bart to Homer, from “Don’t Have a Cow, Man,” to “D’oh!” I also watched The Simpsons grow from a family-centric sitcom to a true ensemble. Of course, I didn’t know then that many of the best characters on the show—Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner—were voiced by Harry Shearer.

A few years later, my friends and I were joking about turning our guitar amps up to 11 during a rehearsal for our high school rock band. I wouldn’t actually watch the film This Is Spinal Tap (1984) until college, but in the golden era of MTV, that joke was so ubiquitous that it didn’t matter. Like The Simpsons, the satirical jokes and voices from This Is Spinal Tap had become an indelible part of the common vernacular, lodged in the memories and throats of everyday popular culture.

As Harry Shearer’s unforgettable character Derek Smalls explains in the above epigraph, my childhood is shot through with that vernacular culture, preserved like a moose in a national park. This odd metaphor is even more apt given the 2023 announcement that Shearer’s radio program, Le Show, would find a home in the Library of Congress’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting. Since 1983, Le Show has been Shearer’s comic and intellectual playground. In the words of the archive’s collection summary, “Le Show episodes typically include news stories often read with sardonic inflections and commentary, along with comic sketches and original songs that parody powerful political, corporate, media, and show business figures.”² A reported 2,000 hours of Le Show is now publicly accessible in the archive, allowing the moose of Shearer’s decade-spanning commentary on the news to be preserved on a public stage forever.

In this essay, I will touch on the cultural and historical implications of preserving Le Show, and with it Harry Shearer’s contributions to American vernacular culture. I am particularly interested in the rhetorical method whereby Shearer’s work has come to be so impactful. As such, I will argue for what I call the folkness of Harry Shearer. I use “folkness” here to describe an active, living enactment of folklore, where cultural narratives and traditions are not merely preserved but are dynamically expressed and reshaped discursively in everyday life. Simply put, folkness is the rhetoric of folklore. It is folklore activated and in-process, resonating across culture.

Shearer’s voice, characters, writing, and comedy have not only entertained but also significantly shaped public discourse. To label his work as mere “entertainment” diminishes its profound impact and value in American cultural history. Instead, I think that it is more useful to understand Shearer’s work as folklore—as an undercurrent, or distillation of contemporary vernacular culture that, though his unique approach, has had a profound rhetorical effect. Folklore is both reflective and constitutive of American culture. Shearer’s perspective, while often dressed up in a character, a voice, or couched within the parameters of a specific Le Show segment, is vibrant and persuasive. Thus, in preserving the idiosyncratic facets of everyday life as highlighted in Shearer’s Le Show, we are not just archiving media; we are preserving a particular and important point of view and with it, a set of temporally situated values. We are preserving folkness.

“Folkness” is a term I borrow from Charles Seeger, the musicologist father of the famous folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. The elder Seeger described folkness as:

As a rhetorician studying folk music, this definition stood out in its similarity to scholar of ancient rhetoric Jeffrey Walker’s research on Aristotle’s three species of rhetoric, particularly epideictic. Unlike the other two categories, which took as their focus past events (judicial) or future possibilities (deliberative), Aristotle described epideictic as rhetoric of “praise” and “blame,” most often found in ceremonial circumstances, and influencing present ideals by way of (in his example) funeral oratory. In his brilliant investigation of rhetoric’s earliest Western origins, Walker expanded on that definition, showing how epideictic rhetoric was at the root of all rhetoric and could therefore mold a society’s fundamental values, ideologies, and deep commitments, shaping both personal and collective identities. Epideictic, he argued, not only reinforces existing beliefs but can also challenge and transform them.⁴ That sounded like a folk song to me.

Also drawing upon Seeger, in my book about the Alan Lomax archive I wrote that epideictic “is just one ancient civilization’s name for knowing the songs, getting the jokes, and being susceptible to the particular ignominies of a given group of people. In Charles Seeger’s rendering, folkness names the same, only in a different register and in language fashioned for a different era.”⁵ Folkness is a useful concept and tool for understanding and analyzing “everyday” historical values—where they are located in public discourse, how they circulate, and especially what to do about the contradictions that they reveal at the heart of so-called cultural ideals. As such, folkness is a key to both the reification and evolution of moral responsibility. Folkness gives us access to that cutting edge of culture. Think Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” or N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton.” Those songs represented “the word on the street” in the legible vernacular of everyday people. The 25 years between them demonstrates the shifting values of their authors responding to their particular contemporary exigencies. Thus, the “praise” and “blame” of virtues and vice that epideictic discourse is based on are not stable, at least not for long. Folkness is a way to name the moral complexities and mutability of epideictic rhetoric without undermining its impact. We find folkness in artful but ordinary declarations of faith and freedom and fairness, as well as under what circumstances a fart is funny. Folkness calls to the fore values that are contingent, emergent, and thus as likely to be found in comedy and satire as they are in funeral oration or a marriage ceremony. Thus, folkness orients us to but can also set us free from the dichotomous binaries of right and wrong, us and them, mine and yours. As epideictic rhetoric, folkness is what determines the parameters of those binaries.

With his expansive roles as a writer, actor, director, musician, composer, and radio producer and host, Shearer epitomizes the role of an epideictic rhetorician. He is an expert in and producer of folkness. His wide-ranging contributions to the cultural folklore of the late 20th and early 21st centuries demonstrate a profound mastery over the narratives that shape popular culture. As a producer and curator of folkness, Shearer’s work—ranging from his voice acting on The Simpsons to his collaborative projects with Christopher Guest and Michael McKean in This Is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind—resonates deeply by highlighting societal contradictions and inviting audiences to navigate these complexities with humor, effectively making them co-participants in the satire. Shearer is, thus, not just a master jokesmith, but a creator of mediated moral ecosystems that are inherently participatory. Audiences don’t just get the jokes; they use them, navigationally, to help make sense of the world.

Shearer’s distinctive approach to satire—melding humor with sonic delivery—creates a powerful epideictic impact, a craft he has been honing since the beginning of his career. The balance of this essay will explore the two main areas where Shearer’s influence is most pronounced: his innovative use of sound and voice in projects like The Simpsons and Le Show, and his keen sense of satire as demonstrated in his film roles and radio productions. These segments aim to dissect how Shearer’s unique comedic voice—his folkness—has left a lasting impact on American vernacular culture.

During a 2015 interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Harry Shearer provides a brief overview of his early career. As a child actor for radio and TV, Shearer learned firsthand the power of the voice to evoke character, charisma, and comedy. Jack Benny was an early mentor and Shearer, even at 7 and 8, could tell by watching him and others he starred alongside how the delivery, the style, and the sound of the voice might contribute to the success of a show.

We are now very familiar with the expansive sonic range of Shearer’s voice, demonstrated vividly through his portrayal of various characters on The Simpsons. This vocal flexibility, however, was honed early in his career. During his interview with Maron, Shearer emphasized the critical importance of capturing the precise sound of a performance, which is directly related to the credibility of the story or bit being communicated. Shearer said that “getting the style of your target, of your intended frame that you’re using exactly right is so powerful. And is very, very, very (three very’s) important.”⁶

The sound of a performance went beyond just the voice of a character. Shearer became an expert listener and reproducer of the sound and feel of an entire scene or circumstance—the sonic equivalent of what filmmakers call mise-en-scène. Comedic impression was a part of it but extended to the entire sonic event—not just the people, but the entire soundscape.

In his early radio work, this observational imitation would become a key element. On the Maron podcast he called it going on a “sonic adventure.” One such adventure is reflected in the story of when David Lander, Michael McKean, and Shearer got a job on the radio in the late sixties. What started as more traditional comedy sketches morphed into something that utilized the sonic tropes of the radio. Shearer said that he, Lander, and McKean became interested in making their sketches sound “realer.” Using the “rock radio news break” as the recognizable genre, they used real news to create real-sounding, but ultimately mock, newscasts (a 1960s version of what Orson Wells did with War of the Worlds in the 1930s, perhaps). Listeners would recognize them as newscasts within the intended soundscape, and then be surprised and delighted when, having laid a foundation of sonic authenticity, Shearer and company would use that realness as a gateway into comedic material. On the radio, this was achieved through the careful manipulation and composition of sound: the serious radio news voice, the trope of the rock-station news break, the inclusion of musical intros and outros, and any number of other small sonic cues that communicate to the audience “this is serious” right before letting them in on the joke. This method—the mixing of the so-called real with the comedic and the satiric—became the basis of so much of what would follow.

Harry Shearer’s enduring success, particularly with his long-running Le Show, stems from his steadfast commitment to a simple yet effective formula: “Keep it real, then make it funny.” This approach not only defines his style but also infuses his work with a profound sense of folkness. Folklore resonates deeply as it constructs vivid portrayals of “the real,” serving not just as a reflection but as an invitation for us, the folk, to engage directly with these authentic experiences through our senses. Folkness is effective insofar as we feel that real, and thus ourselves, in the discourse folklore creates.

Shearer has mastered this key epideictic move, melding the flexibility and versatility of his voice with the sonic tools of the radio to produce both identification and participation. For rhetoricians, “identification” is a familiar notion theorized by Kenneth Burke, who argued that rhetorical persuasion occurs when two parties come to see something that they share in common, be it “sensations, concepts, images, ideas, [or] attitudes.”⁷ Such “consubstantiation” produces an “acting-together” in the face of what Burke saw as humanity’s general state: division.

We also see this idea in the work of visual theorist Scott McCloud. In his book Understanding Comics, McCloud uses the image of Bart Simpson (among others) to aid his argument about why comics have the impact that they do on the reader. “Why are we so involved?” he asks. “Why would anyone, young or old, respond to a cartoon as much or more than a realistic image?”⁸ He provides two main reasons; first, the notion of amplification through simplification—or that “by stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t.”⁹ Second, he points to the universality of cartoon imagery. Such universality creates a two-way identification: The cartoon image has a broad possibility for audience representation. It may be a Goofy cartoon, but when he dresses up like a golfer, he represents the tropes associated with golf. More importantly, what makes that Goofy cartoon funny is its relatability. We see ourselves in Goofy’s comedic antics. “The cartoon,” McCloud argues, “is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness is pulled…an empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it.”¹⁰

McCloud’s argument is based on his work as a visual artist and cartoonist, but it applies to sonic art as well. Shearer creates identification in much the same way, “cartooning” with his voice. I use the word “cartoon” here in the comedic sense, but also and especially in the sense of a cartoon’s simple representation of reality. As often as it is funny, Shearer’s audio work is stark and unadorned. This is especially true for Le Show. Interestingly, and according to Marshall McLuhan’s tried-and-true theory of hot and cold media, radio (including Shearer’s radio work), should function as a “hot medium.” McLuhan categorizes hot media by their “high definition” and as being “filled with data” to the extent that the audience isn’t relied upon to compensate for the gaps.¹¹

Hot media (radio, but also print, photography, and film, among others) diminish rather than encourage audience participation. Hot media, then, would not generally be containers for folkness. And while the higher-definition soundscapes of Shearer’s old days might be better defined as hot, the sound, simplicity, and familiarity of Shearer’s voice have a cooling effect. I would argue that this is because, whether as a character (or rather, caricature) in a film written by Christopher Guest, a voice on The Simpsons, or as himself on Le Show, Shearer presents himself, his voice, and thus his work as a cartoon. That cartoon is sometimes political, sometimes whimsical, but it is always topical, and it is never frivolous. Most often, Shearer is mediated to his audience through the sound of his voice. McLuhan confirms that a “cartoon is ‘low definition,’ simply because very little visual [or in this case, sonic] information is provided.”¹² Sonic folkness is simple, but not unsophisticated. It is cartoonish, but not always comedic. If Shearer’s deft use of sound sketches the outlines of such a cartoon, his mastery of satire imbues these forms with color, enhancing his rhetorical goals with layers of meaning and critique. This dynamic interplay of sound and satire transforms Shearer’s work into a vividly drawn, evocative cartoon that resonates with its audience as folkness, making complex ideas not only accessible but engaging and thus culturally resonant.

As a rhetorical technique, satire operates in much the same way as the cartoon. To be effective, satire works best—or at least has its most significant and far-reaching impact—when presented simply. On the epideictic scale, satire leans toward blame, or critique of the culture that it comments on. But, generally, it brings an “all-in-good-fun” element to that critique. The tongue in the cheek of the rhetorical satirist gives them more leeway than we might typically afford other kinds of discourse. Satire softens the blow of criticism by making it funny or pointing out the ridiculousness of the people, institutions, or politics being critiqued.

Political cartoons often rely on satire to do their work, and this approach effectively simplifies, humanizes, and clarifies political discourse and issues that may otherwise seem obscure, complex, or inaccessible. Drawing on a number of relevant sources, Tommy Bruhn and Joanna Doona argue that by

Harry Shearer’s Le Show does just this, and more. The program’s format is spartan, often just relying on the sound of Shearer’s voice reading news segments within various well-known segments like “News of the Warm,” “News of the Godly,” or “Le Show’s Apologies of the Week.” The stories are curated from real news reports, and Shearer often spends several minutes reading a given article before adding his own brief commentary. His framing and vocal delivery are such that only a few words are needed. To accomplish its satirical (and thus, rhetorical) goals, Le Show exposes discrepancies between the public statements and actions of politicians, corporations, and other public figures, often illuminating the underlying motives or the incompetence that might not be apparent in the straightforward reporting of these issues. Interestingly, the absurdity, hypocrisy, and irony of the contemporary politics, culture, and media Shearer presents often speak for themselves. They just need a little nudge from the host.

This approach not only informs but educates its audience, providing a detailed news story that may or may not be on their radar, but it also thus provides an epideictic nudge toward a more nuanced value judgment about the topic covered. In a recent “News of Bees” segment in which Shearer discusses the bumblebees’ sense of smell, he cites a new study showing that higher temperatures lead to bees’ diminishing ability to smell, making them less able to detect pollen and thus threatening their viability.¹⁶ This story reinforced a value many already possess (climate change awareness is crucial), while also providing the audience with something new and interesting to consider that might lead to further action: the sensory experience of nonhuman insects. Such a story is typical of Le Show. Its satire is subtle: The segment leans into the irony that it takes something recognizable to the human experience, like smell, to create identification and thus care of crucial-to-our-ecosystem nonhuman insects. Furthermore, Shearer’s delivery is playful and proceeds as Jewel Akens’s song, “The Birds and the Bees,” plays in the background. Almost like an adult version of Sesame Street, important learning about complex ideas is packaged in something playful and even fun.

We see masterful instances of such play in other news programs such as The Daily Show or the late, great Colbert Report. And while some would question the categorization of Le Show or these other programs as real or “straight” news, their impact can be traced to both their commitment to political communication and their satiric presentation. In an edited collection titled Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Amber Day acknowledges the paradox of a “fake” news program being a source of real political engagement. Such programs are a “blend of satire and political nonfiction that enables and articulates an incisive critique of the inadequacies of contemporary political discourse.”¹⁷ Shearer and other hosts of such programs stand in for their audience’s frustrations and “express that dissatisfaction through [their] comedic transformation of the real.”¹⁸ I see folkness in that act of proxy—in the audience’s reliance on the host to speak their mind artfully, with rhetorical power, and (most of all) with wit. In the same collection, writing about The Daily Show, Joanne Morreale writes that by framing its news segments around the satirical critique of political discourse, the program helps to create a more attuned and educated audience. She also recognizes such satire as epideictic rhetoric: “[The Daily Show] is an epideictic form that argues the value of deliberation as it incorporates deliberative techniques. It thus works as a pedagogical tool that teaches critical thinking and judgment to provide the foundation for deliberation.”¹⁹ News programs that rely on satire as a primary rhetorical framing create in their audience immediacy to the topic being discussed, from presidential politics to “News of Bees.”

Furthermore, As Harriet and Irving Deer argue, satire is a form of rhetorical play. We are “playing” because our moral universe has become fragmented:

In other words, satire is necessary lest our ideals become too holy and we become transfixed within the righteousness of our worship of them. Indeed, the most useful satire may not be in critique of our adversary’s gods (which is what you find, frequently, on The Daily Show, or on the Colbert Report), but of our own.

Shearer and his frequent collaborators use satire across that trajectory, but I think it is most effective when it is subtle and surprising. For example, and to conclude, I’ll return to This Is Spinal Tap. When creating the mockumentary, the filmmakers played it so carefully that even the director of photography on the film wasn’t in on the joke—at least not at first. As director Rob Reiner recalls: “We had Peter Smokler as the DP on the film. We hired him because he shot lots of rock ’n’ roll documentaries. We thought he would be the perfect guy. […As] we were going through [the production of Spinal Tap], he kept saying to me, ‘I don’t understand what’s funny about this. This is exactly what [rock stars] do.’”²²

The satire was so subtle, it was nearly undetectable. Only those with the proverbial eyes to see and ears to hear could sense it, and even then, This Is Spinal Tap was more a love letter to the people and music it was making a punchline of. This same approach underscores the many films that followed This Is Spinal Tap—those directed by Christopher Guest and usually including Harry Shearer, each one a love letter to the communities, movements, dog shows, or folk revivals they make fun of.

This article originated from a talk I gave at Penn State in August of 2023. It was part of a larger symposium organized by Rosa Eberly, in anticipation of the Library of Congress incorporating Le Show into their archives. For my presentation, I played the guitar and sang “Old Joe’s Place,” a song credited to the Folksmen, a band that only exists in the world of the film A Mighty Wind. I worked to embody a Shearer character in that moment, leaning hard into a trope of what I called the Singing Academic—a tweedy, elbow-patched version of my own academic persona, but turned up to 11. I imagined myself as a scholar who takes advantage of a captive audience to trot out my real passion: folk music. It wasn’t very far from the truth. Turning it up to 11 meant that not only did I sing, but (cringe) I invited the whole room to sing along with me. I thought Harry would approve. What I learned in that moment is that for “Old Joe’s Place” and many of the other songs Shearer co-wrote for A Mighty Wind, it can be hard to detect the satire, or hear anything other than corny songs sung by earnest folkies. Our public memory of the folk revival basically matches what we see on the screen. I think that is actually the point, and there is a subtle warning here about folkness as well. Our memory of the political importance of the folk movement as subversive has been coopted by time and several decades of regurgitation and Time-Life collections. A Mighty Wind is both a love letter to that era and also a subtle, satirical acknowledgment of the ways most of us have forgotten the political distance between the Weavers (Pete Seeger’s group) or Dylan and their commercial copycats, the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary. Folkness is found in both the remembering and the forgetting. Satire is a tool to check that our values aren’t too beholden to imperfect memories, that we don’t mistake the Folksmen for the Weavers. It invites us to remember with a more critical eye and ear the issues as they really are rather than their bland substitutes.

If my bit at the Penn State event was singing, in this essay it has been tap dancing. In order to garner attention to Le Show’s preservation, I’ve been dancing around Shearer’s more famous projects. But in many ways, those projects are the Folksmen to Shearer’s always present, always exigent commentary in his Le Show episodes. I can only imagine what a rich resource they will be for historians in years to come. Surely, we can read the newspapers and watch archived news programs, but in the weekly news commentary of Le Show, we are the recipients of what it was like to live through those decades, those presidencies, those hurricanes, those awkward public apologies. On Le Show, we get Harry Shearer unencumbered by the opinions of his co-creators, the confines of his most beloved characters (Derek Smalls or Mr. Burns), or the rhetorical goals of some other network producer. In each of these cases, the proverbial zucchini is wrapped in tinfoil by some other influence or author. But, Le Show is his; there is no artificial enhancement. Present throughout Le Show is the aforementioned emphasis on sound and satire, and within that frame, and using the tropes of radio, we hear the folkness of Harry Shearer. On Le Show, Shearer is hopeful and cantankerous, serious and playful, ornery and amiable—and he is always interested.

So, in conclusion: Why was the zucchini wrapped in tinfoil? In one of This Is Spinal Tap’s most famous scenes, Derek Smalls sets off a metal detector at an airport checkpoint, and to his embarrassment, an airport security employee discovers that it is because Derek has a vegetable, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed in his trousers. When asked recently about the memorable scene, Shearer replied: “If you stuff a zucchini in your trousers and then get onstage and sweat for two hours, you’ll be glad it’s wrapped in tinfoil!”²³