This essay introduces the voluminous archives of 40-plus years of Harry Shearer’s Le Show; addresses the historical, cultural, and scholarly value of Le Show; and introduces the concept of the sonic hyperlink to readers of this transdisciplinary journal. If journalism is the first rough draft of history, Le Show is a second, revised through a lens of satire, each week managing not only to teach but somehow to delight—though the delight is sometimes excruciating. Across four decades and dozens of technologies for audio production, recording, and circulation, Le Show has compelled Shearer to create brilliantly produced and delivered topical sonic satire nearly every week. For more than 40 years Le Show has provided listeners with satire, music, and news in different proportions depending on the decade. Le Show has been delivered via terrestrial radio, streaming audio, and podcast. Shearer’s stunning capacity for creating and voicing characters, his facility with audio production and use of “found sound,” and his concern with public memory—the facts of history and what should not be forgotten—make Le Show a massive series of conceptual and sonic hyperlinks to 20th- and early 21st-century news and culture.
On April 27 and 28, 2019, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City gave top billings to two major anniversary events for two significant cultural creations, each of which has become a multigenerational global franchise. The stars of This Is Spinal Tap, the 1984 mockumentary that arguably “began as a failure,”1 reunited at a sold-out Beacon Theatre on a Broadway Saturday night to celebrate the film’s cult status across 35 years.2 The next afternoon, two actors and four executive producers on The Simpsons, the longest-running scripted prime-time television program in US history, assembled on a panel in a packed auditorium on Chambers Street to discuss changes over the series’ 30 years.3 One person had a starring role at both of these high-profile events: Harry Shearer.
That no one at the Tribeca Film Festival realized Shearer’s double billing before I called the press office to attempt to confirm my claim4—one actor top-billed in two major anniversary events in two different media in the same year—underscores Shearer’s unobtrusive yet resonant presence in late 20th- and early 21st-century US culture. Shearer’s headlining appearances on consecutive days at featured events also highlight the wildly disparate projects that Shearer has helped to sustain—and that have helped to sustain him in wildly disparate ways—over the decades.
Most important for the purpose of this essay, however, is this: Between those two Tribeca Film Festival marquee events yet another episode of Le Show, Shearer’s weekly one-hour radio program, came due, as it has at 1 p.m. Eastern time nearly every Sunday since December 1983. Whatever the cultural worth of The Simpsons or This Is Spinal Tap—or of Shearer’s literally thousands of other creative projects dating back to his work as a child actor in the 1940s and ’50s on The Jack Benny Program5—I was drawn to learn more about Shearer’s other work only because I wanted to know everything possible about the creative force—the character, the narrator, reliable and not6—behind Le Show.
If journalism is the first rough draft of history, Le Show is a second, revised through a lens of satire, each week managing not only to teach but somehow to delight—though the delight is sometimes excruciating. Across four decades and dozens of technologies for audio production, recording, and circulation, Le Show has compelled Shearer to create brilliantly produced and delivered topical radio satire nearly every week.7 Yet Le Show is also Shearer’s radio commonplace book, a forum for reading news in public, Shearer’s wingèd words often as extemporaneous and amateur8—in Wayne C. Booth’s literal sense of the word, “for the love of it”9—as The Simpsons is scripted and corporate.10
On the particular Sunday of Harry Shearer’s Tribeca trifecta, between his appearances with Spinal Tap and The Simpsons, Shearer originated Le Show from the cozy SoHo studios of WNYC. For that week’s program Shearer played a prerecorded interview he conducted with Yasha Levine, author of the 2018 book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet. Near the end of the hour Shearer also read, live-to-air, news stories for three regular features of the program, “The Apologies of the Week,” “News of the Godly,” and “News of America’s Longest War.”11
Shearer’s interviews, often broadcast when he is performing on stage or making a film, constitute a proportionally small yet significant part of the cultural value of Le Show. With the instincts of a news editor, Shearer interviews authors and other cultural figures whose work he believes has not received enough attention, often delving into public issues of the utmost gravity—in chiaroscuro contrast to the levity of Shearer’s alter ego, Spinal Tap bass player Derek Smalls.
Those who have never heard of Harry Shearer almost certainly have indeed heard him. Among myriad voice acting roles, Shearer has created the voices for scores of characters over 36 seasons of The Simpsons. How did Shearer get that job? Matt Groening was a fan of Le Show.12
The only child of Eastern European immigrants, each of whom was the sole surviving immediate family member physically to escape the Holocaust,13 Shearer began radio work when he was seven years old, and his influence has been quietly ubiquitous in post-1960s US media culture. In addition to his two unhappy stints on Saturday Night Live, Shearer’s roles as pod-imprisoned bass player Derek Smalls in the rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap and as transitioning acoustic bassist Mark/Marta Shubb in A Mighty Wind top his film acting work as an adult.14 Shearer co-wrote with Albert Brooks and Monica Johnson the 1979 film Real Life, and dynamic tensions between fact and fancy—between empirical reality and, in Shearer’s words, “that business called show”—crisscross his lifetime of creative work. That Shearer has sustained Le Show for more than 40 of the 105 years of radio broadcasting itself makes Le Show historically significant.
Across the years Le Show has provided listeners with satire, music, and news in different proportions depending on the decade. Le Show has been delivered via terrestrial radio, streaming audio, and podcast. The resulting decades of work—all stored on cassettes, digital audiotapes, CDs, and DVDs—sat until late 2021 in the tiny basement of a house next to the rising Pacific Ocean.
This essay introduces the voluminous archives of Harry Shearer’s Le Show to readers of this journal with the hope of furthering the aims of the co-founding editors: “to present how the study and practice of sound connects across multiple fields of inquiry and to increase our understanding of the creative capacity of sound as an art form.”15
As a free-range rhetorician trained by pluralists, I have learned to embrace rather than resent Plato’s pejoration of rhetoric in the instant he coined the word rhētorikē (rhetoric).16 In his so-called dialogue Gorgias, Plato insisted—through the fabricated character modeled on his teacher, Socrates—that rhetoric has no subject matter of its own.17 Of that lemon I have made this lemonade: Rhetoric is a transdiscipline that can crawl up next to any other area of study and explain how it works—not only to disciples of any particular subject matter but to nonspecialists; that is to say, to publics. Rhetoric functions as the common language of public discourse18 and public memory.19 Furthermore, ignoring for the nonce the insidious splitting of rhetoric from poetics that was accomplished, at least in theory, by Plato’s student Aristotle, rhetoricians are inclined to revel in the power of the sounds of words themselves—lovers of the logos with a little lambda—which can lead to pleasure or excess or both. Over millennia, rhetoric has sustained itself not only as an art of discourse-production in various media but also as a source of theory for interpretation. Debra Hawhee invokes Thomas Farrell to remind us that “rhetoric is the art, the fine and useful art, of making things matter.”20 And any field of inquiry or practice has its rhetorics: rhetorics of economics,21 rhetorics of science,22 rhetorics of sociology,23 rhetorics of fiction,24 rhetorics of journalism,25 rhetorics of hypertext,26 and so on; even philosophy has its rhetorics,27 its habitual and/or novel ways of using language and other symbol systems.
Similarly, the transdiscipline that has come to be known as sound studies adds meta-analytical richness to any field or discipline.28 The nexus of rhetoric and sound studies has proven increasingly tantalizing to rhetorical scholars across the humanities in the dozen years since the first review essay combining the fields of inquiry was published.29
Endeavoring to add to those bodies of collaborative, interdisciplinary work, this essay introduces the two major Le Show archives and narrates in passing how the entire Le Show archive came to reside in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the Library of Congress. I then focus on how Shearer actualizes what I’m calling sonic hyperlinks of memory, drawing on John Slatin’s architectonic theory-building around hypertext in rhetorical composition.30
Shearer’s stunning capacity for creating and voicing characters, his facility with audio production and use of “found sound,” and his concern with public memory—the facts of history, what should not be forgotten, and why—make Le Show a massive series of conceptual and sonic hyperlinks to 20th- and early 21st-century news and culture, whether we want to know, or not.
Archives of Harry Shearer’s Le Show
This and the two essays that follow in this issue were initially drafted for the Penn State Department of Communication Arts and Sciences 2023 Select Summer Symposium on the archives of Harry Shearer’s Le Show.31 My department convened the symposium prior to the launch of the LOC/AAPB’s digitized archive of all 40-years-and-counting of Le Show32 and the archive’s featured exhibit, which I curated.33 Yet I use the plural “archives” because there are two major Le Show archives, of different scope and with different research, teaching, and other creative affordances.
The first: At this writing Harry Shearer’s website hosts episodes of Le Show dating back to January 7, 2001, searchable by date and keyword based on program segment titles.34 This Le Show archive affords a quick way to find out, for instance, what Shearer had to say on Le Show directly after 9/11 (by using the website’s “search by date” function)35 or roughly how many times since 2000 Shearer has created sonic satires of National Public Radio (by using the “search by keyword” function to find “CPR,” Continental Public Radio, Shearer’s satiric renaming of NPR)36 or played Dave Frishberg’s “Swan Song.”37 Yet the site’s information architecture misses all of Shearer’s extemporaneous comments and spontaneous rhetorical flourishes. Some segments are not correctly delineated, are labeled inconsistently, or are missing entirely. Indeed, searching that archive in vain for things I’d heard on Le Show propelled me in earnest into research in the digital liberal arts, the tantalizing puzzle of how to search sound without transcription for public goods. In any case, at this writing the Le Show MP3 files on Shearer’s website are downloadable, making that Le Show archive accessible for close listening offline as well as for studying sonic and other data—for listening at a distance, for sampling Harry Shearer, for playing with roughly half of Harry Shearer’s Le Show corpus.38 As with any website sustained primarily by an individual, however, the future of this Le Show archive is uncertain.
The second Le Show archive is now—big exhale39—digitally preserved at the Library of Congress and accessible online via the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (hereafter, the LOC/AAPB Le Show archive). This Le Show archive goes all the way back to the beginning, December 1983, with some early programs missing and some weeks’ offerings consisting only of “elements” of the program, including everything from music beds to featured satire but without a record of the episode as broadcast.
The landing page and central search engine for the LOC/AAPB Le Show archive can be found here: https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/le-show-collection.
The Special Collections exhibition I curated featuring highlights of the Le Show archive across the decades is here: https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show.
The AAPB offers a “Fix It+” feature and a dedicated email address for readers/listeners to report transcription and other archive-related errors to AAPB staff: [email protected].
The LOC/AAPB Le Show archive is stunning for its topical specificity as well as its historical span, making it a cornucopia for research and teaching as well as for various creative entertainments in celebration of the sonic rhetorical arts. This Le Show archive is also a uniquely rich and rare historical archive of changes in communication technologies and the political economy of radio over more than 40 years. Along with the thousands of examples of Shearer’s brilliant sonic satire, the LOC/AAPB Le Show archive is also a robust record of Shearer’s reassuringly human fallibility.
Consider the June 10, 1990, LOC/AAPB Le Show sonic record, which begins a minute before the start of that week’s Le Show, during the 9:59 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time handoff from a KCRW announcer named Julie. This kind of quotidian radio history too often falls between the spreadsheet cracks of archival methods and into obscurity:
“What happens at 5 o’clock this afternoon, Julie?” Shearer asks the announcer.
“Well, I think All Things Considered…I’ll bring you All Things Considered,” Julie replies.
“You will? Thank you.” Shearer says, filling another few seconds.
“I will,” says Julie.
“I’ll receive it,” Shearer answers with 10 more seconds left before the top of the hour.
Shearer then opens the program by reflecting on the “constantly expanding” Le Show network of stations, on the year since the commercial radio giant WGN started carrying the program, and on how radio and other media technologies change human experiences of time.
Now one of the things that really fascinated me about radio, when I was growing up—assuming that that, in fact, did happen—was that time on radio seemed different from time in real life. Time in real life was just a sloppy kind of goopy thing that loped along uncontrollably. Time on radio was, was—and of course now on television as well—is this incredibly precisely, uh, doled out substance, you know, in absolute, precise increments of 15s and 30s and 60s and 15s and 30s and 60s and 120s, like cassettes. But it’s time, see: That’s the fascinating thing about it. And sort of the, the emblem of the precision with which radio would cut up time was, uh, the, um, little beep tone that every radio network and the biggest, the biggest-time radio stations, the, the heftiest radio stations had at the top of the hour. It was, it was automatic. If a program was going through the hour, it didn’t make any difference. I think the only program for which the CBS time signal was ever turned off was, uh, the broadcast of the New York Philharmonic when Toscanini was conducting. Otherwise, no matter what, it always just, it was like church bells, except, of course, it wasn’t.40
Shearer then attempts to play a recording of a WGN air check leading up to Le Show but fails three times to do so.
So, uh, do you remember where we were now? See, it wasn’t worth it, was it? Ah well. Welcome to Le Show.41
After playing Luka Bloom’s “Delirious,” the Rolling Stones’ “It’s All Over Now,” and Rockpile’s “Fool Too Long,” Shearer reflects on his opening monologue and, at least conceptually, sticks the landing: “Well I certainly made a hash of the opening segment of this program, didn’t I, ladies and gentlemen? First of all, the conclusion of all of that was simply, ‘Hey, thanks for a great first year, WGN. Let’s do it some more.’ Okay? That was the point of that—not to linger on the time signal there for what seemed like an eternity, didn’t it?”42
While I have discussed the two major archives of Harry Shearer’s Le Show, there are in fact an indeterminate number of Le Show archives. I have mine as a listener, teacher, and researcher: My home office contains more external hard drives, CDs, DVDs, handwritten notebooks, sketched illustrations, typed notes, and transcripts from various sources than I can count—and more than I can efficiently search. Yet there are many other Le Show archives, evidenced by fellow listeners who have contacted me via the platform formerly known as Twitter, or by email, or who have sent corrected transcripts or missing episodes to AAPB.
As there are many fragmentary Le Show archives, memories of listening to Le Show are by necessity partial: Brandon LaBelle describes sound’s “restless and itinerant behavior” in his essay “On Listening”:
The oscillations between listening and hearing, thus, describe a movement between foreground and background, between an object of attention and its context, between one and many. Given that sound is a movement of air pressure, in a continual state of flux, listening must, in a way, negotiate the sheer intrusiveness of sound.…If we were to listen fully, at all times, we would most likely find ourselves unable to do much else.43
I’m pretty sure I first heard Le Show when I was a master’s student at the University of Chicago in 1986 and 1987. That voice and rhetorical stance stamped themselves on my radio-loving soul—though I did not know who the speaker was. A few years later during my PhD work I heard Le Show again, again late at night, again without knowing who was speaking: Who was that voice on the radio? Could all those voices be coming from one person?
Explaining terrestrial radio to digital natives is something like explaining the invention of writing or the consequences of the printing press: explaining that before the advent of our “digital wonderland,”44 there were still rooms without electronic screens. And no internet, so no streaming. But thanks to the supermetaphysical magic of physical chemistry, music, information, and company traveled via radio waves into small electronic boxes attached to speakers, enlivening our increasingly solitary spaces. On analog radio you might hear a song or someone speaking and not have a human explain what you were listening to—an exhaling and inhaling human, making decisions without algorithms about what would go on the radio. And there would be no caption on your radio to tell you what that something was that you had heard. And there would be no archive or playlist on the internet—the internet that was not yet—so that you could look it up later. Wingèd words indeed.
However oxymoronic the label “HD radio” might be, it was during the mid-2000s that I started listening to Le Show religiously. While my local NPR affiliate no longer carried Le Show on its broadcast station, WPSU HD2 carried it every week at its time of origination, Sunday at 1 p.m. Eastern. Finally, I had to know where this was coming from, who was making it, how it was being made. I had never seen This Is Spinal Tap—I finally saw it a few years ago in a packed Kennedy Center theater,45 and I had never watched The Simpsons—I rarely watch TV, whatever that is anymore.46 All of Shearer’s other projects I have learned about subsequent to his radio program—not that he often mentions them.
I started teaching Le Show in 2010 as a means of teaching critical listening and rhetorical analysis; Le Show is particularly rich for enabling practice with identifying rhetorical figures of speech and thought.47 I started corresponding with Shearer in 2011 and have been fortunate to observe him do Le Show a dozen times—I play the character of the fly on the wall—at WNYC, at Global Media studios in London, at WWNO, and from his homes near Los Angeles and in New Orleans.
In 2014 when I walked up the steps to meet Shearer in the lobby of the Global Media studios in London, I’d never had a conversation with him in person—just lots and lots of emails. He was sitting on the sofa with his white fedora on the table in front of him. He stood and shook my hand. I asked him, “What’s your understanding of why I’m here?”
“Rhetoric,” he said.
Ninety minutes later, as we walked out of the building and toward Leicester Square, I asked him what was going to happen to the program archive, a question that occurred to me less than an hour earlier, as I was observing him.
“It has to go somewhere,” he said, suggesting he had not given it much thought.
The second time I was at his house near Los Angeles, I saw where the physical Le Show archive was stored. And for a few years the thought of that made me sit bolt upright in the middle of the night. What if all that goodness vanished into the hungry—and rising—Pacific? I could not bear the thought of those wingèd words—evidence of not only those many characters but of that singular character—being lost.
According to a news story in the Washington Post,
Eberly was the driving force behind the effort to archive “Le Show.” A student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1980s when she discovered “Le Show,” Eberly spent years religiously listening to the program—eventually working it into her curriculum as a teacher—before she started a correspondence with Shearer about a decade ago. The academic was already interested in digitizing the show’s archive when she visited Shearer’s Santa Monica residence and saw that the only comprehensive collection of “Le Show” episodes existed as cassette tapes, digital audiotapes and CDs in his basement—precariously close, she quickly realized, to the Pacific Ocean.”
“One of the things I study is ancient rhetoric, so I’m pretty well familiar with what texts survive and how they survive and what gets lost,” Eberly said. “And I just really didn’t want this to get lost.”48
At the 2017 Radio Preservation Task Force conference on Capitol Hill, I attended a session that featured the AAPB archives. It was then the idea occurred to me of finding Le Show a home at the Library of Congress. Most fortunately, Josh Shepperd, a RPTF co-founder, came to Penn State a few years later as a Fellow of the Center for Humanities and Information. Thanks to Josh’s encouragement, along with the support of Shearer’s assistant, Pam Halstead, and Alan Gevinson of the Library of Congress, I no longer need, compulsively, to transcribe every week’s Le Show. I have reason to hope that Harry Shearer’s radio program has been, in the words of the Washington Post headline, “immortalized.”49
Le Show’s Sonic Hyperlinks
Along with his comedy and satire, Shearer’s central topics on Le Show throughout its history have been vital public issues, matters of concern, directly or indirectly, to US publics: war, torture, our shared environment, abuses of power, hypocrisies of public figures, technology, elections, the media and entertainment industries.50 Yet the program became much more explicitly news-focused after September 11, 2001. As Shearer explains in his brief overview of Le Show’s history for AAPB:
And then came 9/11. Certainly the biggest domestic news story since the assassinations of the 1960s, and followed, almost as if by plan, by a buildup for the invasion of a Middle Eastern country that had nothing to do with those flights.
The wave of media technology change had now made it possible to access news from sources far beyond New York and DC. I was reading and hearing news from the UK and Australia, and so I knew the names of the three anti-proliferation officials in those countries and the US who were publicly warning, at risk of their careers, that the intelligence being peddled by Dick Cheney & Co. was bogus.51 No American media was sharing this information, so I decided that I would. And, from that decision sprang what a radio exec would describe as a lasting format change for Le Show—less music, more news.52
Unlike radio programs consisting solely of news and public information, however, Shearer’s tacking back and forth between current news and topical satire creates a unique sonic space for aural imagination and public memory. Through his delivery, his use and repurposing of found sound, and his often elaborately produced radio satires, Shearer’s work on Le Show creates sonic hyperlinks that help listeners learn about—and remember—public issues and their histories in novel ways, whether we want to know, or not.
In his groundbreaking 1990 College English article John Slatin described hypertext as “the first verbal medium, after programming languages, to emerge from the computer revolution.” Writing just six years after the development of Transfer Control Protocol / Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP) enabled computer networks to communicate with each other in standardized fashion (that is, to become what we know of as “the internet,”) Slatin stressed that unlike word processing and desktop publishing, which have as their ends “the production of conventional printed documents,” “hypertext exists and can exist only online, only in the computer.”53 Slatin argued that this element of hypertext is crucial in understanding the difference between hypertext and the linearity of print. Explaining that hypertext uses computer memory in a way that has no analogue in the traditional text environment, Slatin argues, “[i]t is the organization of memory in the computer and in the mind that defines hypertext and makes it fundamentally different from conventional text.”54 Slatin concludes by suggesting that “the greatest value of hypertext is its ability to link enormous quantities of material that, in a conventional text environment, would be kept separate.”55 Shifting the context from writing and reading to listening, Slatin’s thick description of hyperlinks helps me to describe how Shearer’s Le Show activates listeners’ aural imaginations via sonic hyperlinks in at least three ways.
First, Shearer’s stunning capacity for voicing characters, human and not—what is often called “impersonation” but what rhetoric handbooks have for millennia categorized as ethopoeia and prosopopoeia56—enables him to create through his delivery micro sonic hyperlinks to historical and fictional characters. Among the most commonly recurring of these micro sonic hyperlinks on Le Show is to longtime Los Angeles Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. Because Shearer rarely mentions Scully by name, no transcript or spreadsheet would reveal this polyphonic public memory device. But searching transcripts for the often-recurring word “bird,” which Shearer pronounces in his version of Scully’s voice (“boid” or even “boird”) in segments about environmental news, could reveal how regularly Shearer’s delivery keeps Scully’s voice alive in public memory.57 Another micro sonic hyperlink of public memory consists in Shearer’s incredulous-sounding pronunciation of “President Trump” after the 2016 election. The sonic rhetorical force of Shearer’s delivery communicates incredulity regarding the facts of the matter—a significant portion of the US public apparently did indeed watch The Apprentice, which in turn somehow infected their vote—with unabated, yet exhausted, disgust at those facts.58 At times Shearer’s pronunciation of “President Trump” travels so far back on his velum that it sounds like it goes up his nose. Close listeners of Le Show will occasionally hear in Shearer’s pronunciation of the word “laaady” an echo of the voice of Jerry Lewis, a recurring object of Shearer’s attention and subsequent satire.59
Second, Shearer’s use of “found sound,” clips of songs and movies or audio he has captured by recording satellite and other broadcasts, constitutes another category of sonic hyperlink in Le Show.60 Shearer has sampled and repurposed dozens of songs and other audio clips into introductions to or music beds that play under recurring segments of the program. A few examples: A remix of Paul McCartney’s 1971 “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey,” with the word “sorry” repeatedly reversed into “see-rah, see-rah, see-rah,” has served as the bed for Shearer’s “Apologies of the Week” segment for decades.61Le Show’s “News of Microplastics” segment is introduced with an edited sample of dialogue from the 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate.62 As news reports emerged of failed US intelligence leading up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Shearer repurposed Doris Day’s “Secret Love” into the theme song for the recurring segment “News of Secret Stuff.”63 And though he has read news reports about Elon Musk for several years, in April 2023 Shearer started a recurring program segment about Musk’s various enterprises called “News of Musk Love.” The segment uses as a bed the 1976 Captain and Tenille song “Muskrat Love.”64
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Shearer added a snip of archival audio, “Here it is!” to the beginning of each program.65 Designated “Ben Beep Open” in the program element filenames,66 the audio is a recording of NBC’s Ben Grauer announcing the arrival of a new year in Times Square in New York City, a weekly sonic link reaching back decades in media history.67 And while Shearer’s regular use of an outtake from the infamous Orson Welles “We Shall Sell No Wine Before Its Time” commercial68 whenever Le Show mentions France is nearly impossible to find by searching the major Le Show archives, it is always a trip to hear,69 a sonic hyperlink reaching back even farther than Shearer’s own origins in radio history, to Welles’s infamous War of The Worlds.70
Third, while Shearer’s delivery and his sampling and repurposing of recorded audio actualize relatively fleeting sonic hyperlinks, Shearer’s topical satires offer sustained interventions into public memory, in an attempt to help listeners remember what might be lost to what Shearer refers to as “the memory hole.”71 As with the previous two kinds of sonic hyperlinks, what I offer next is a tiny fraction of the treasures Le Show has to offer.
In the early decades of Le Show, Shearer regularly created satiric segments called “Alternative Scenario Playhouse,” dramatized flights of fancy in which Shearer voiced and painstakingly produced his imagined versions of what happened behind the scenes of historical events. While there has not been a segment with that title for nearly a decade, Shearer’s imagined satires of the private interactions among public figures and their families and associates spans presidential administrations from Nixon to Trump.72 While presidential administrations are unlikely to be forgotten at least in broad strokes, more likely to slip into the memory hole are facets of US history that were poorly covered by journalists when they happened or that the American people might prefer to forget—or, in the cases of the last few examples in this essay, both.
The consequences of the 2007–2009 global financial crisis and so-called Great Recession continue into the third decade of the twenty-first century.73 But what caused the crisis in the first place? Shearer’s satiric song “Mr. Goldman and Mr. Sachs,” a very teachable text, puts the causes to music with lyrics for all who want to learn—and remember—what happened:
Additional stanzas reveal more historical details, and the song culminates with the principals sharing their realization that if they become a bank, their bailout would be “covered by the payers of tax.” And so it was.75
Even before the US war in Afghanistan became the country’s longest war (so far), Shearer formally titled a Le Show feature “News of America’s Longest War,” suggesting the lessons never learned from the United States’ disastrous military defeat in Vietnam decades earlier. While “News of America’s Longest War” did not become a titled Le Show segment until 2018, Shearer regularly kept listeners up to date on that war and the war in Iraq by reading underreported news items and delivering topical sonic satire. As the reality of what the United States had done in, first, going to war in error76 and then torturing war prisoners to force confessions in defiance of international law,77 Shearer’s sonic satire became more searing, at once reflecting and deflecting the gravity of the injustices committed in the name of US security.
In one of his most biting sonic satires, Shearer combines lyrics of his own invention, delivered in his ethopoeisis of then-President Barack Obama’s voice, with recorded sound of a speech by Obama famously confessing that “we tortured some folks” during the George W. Bush administration:
Along with the topical sonic satire, Shearer read news reports about how US torture was allowed to happen, reports that he did not think were receiving adequate attention.
It was not until 2016 that news reports finally identified the “experts” who gave medical approval for the US practice of torturing war prisoners at Guantánamo Naval Base79 and at “black sites” or secret prisons in Europe and the Middle East.80 In response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union,81 two former Air Force psychologists, James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, were identified as “the architects” of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program.82 Four months later on Le Show, Shearer’s scorching sonic satire branded the names of the pair into public memory in a song called, simply, “Mitchell and Jessen,” the discordant music and disjointed syntax reflecting the immorality of the practices described:
What better hope than a song for keeping these names in public memory?
Another sonic intervention into US public memory about state-sponsored torture during the George W. Bush administration concerned John Yoo, who wrote the 2002 memos providing arguments to shield US officials from being charged with war crimes.84 Not only memorable, but arguably an ear-worm, Shearer’s brilliant “Who Is Yoo?” is a deep-cut heteroglossic hyperlink, taking as its sonic point of departure the Who’s 1978 title track, “Who Are You,” one of the band’s biggest hits.85 Shearer set up the initial airing of “Who Is Yoo?” by playing the Marvin Gaye song “You”86 and then noting:
Speaking of Yoo, a name that should have been I think all over the news this week because of what I’ll discuss in a moment—but you know they really didn’t have time because they were discussing whether Democrats were hurting themselves, over and over again—you know, I never thought that it would be possible to bore me with political coverage, but thank you cable news channels: You’ve made me miss ‘Missing White Girls.’ Anyway, yes, the Yoo that should have been on your mind this week in an alternative universe is John Yoo, former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote what have come to be known as ‘the torture memos.’ And he should have been newsworthy this week because the memos finally were released, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act action.
Shearer discusses the torture memos for five minutes, including graphic details never disclosed before the FOIA report, and then presents this devastating masterpiece of sonic satire, set to the music of a 1978 rock ’n’ roll superhit:
The sonic hyperlink of “Who Is You?” is all the deeper in the context of Shearer’s work with David L. Lander, (Spinal Tap bandmate) Michael McKean, and Richard Beebe in the 1970s comedy troupe the Credibility Gap. Shearer and Lander’s best-known sketch involves the name of three popular bands, the Who, Yes, and the Guess Who. Shearer plays a rock ’n’ roll promoter and Lander an ad executive who together misunderstand each other hilariously,88 all the while ripping off the comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.89 Shearer and Lander’s collaborative punchline in the Credibility Gap’s version of “Who’s on First” does homage to the inventional practice of topical, imitative comedy:
Shearer: What’s your problem?
Lander: I’ve been writing for 11 minutes, and I got nothing on the paper. That’s my problem. Why don’t you take the paper, you take the pen, and you write it down.
Shearer: Are you crazy?! If I could write, I wouldn’t have had to steal this bit!90
Harry Shearer’s Chiaroscuro Character
In 2018 Shearer released a Derek Smalls solo album, Smalls Change: Meditations Upon Ageing, which found Derek backed not only by rock ’n’ roll deities but also the Hungarian Studio Orchestra. While a planned US tour in the wake of the album did not come to fruition,91 Derek did rock with the all-star band and not one but two symphony orchestras at the Wiltern in Los Angeles92 and the Saenger in New Orleans.93 The climax of the concert at the Saenger was a spectacularly hyperbolic reprise of Spinal Tap’s “Big Bottom,” this time accompanied by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and fronted by a dozen booming sousaphones. A massively spectacular inflatable pink torpedo hovered over the stage, occasionally bouncing against the reverberating proscenium arch in the atmospheric theater.
At noon Central time the next day, another Le Show came due. As ever, I tuned in, unsure exactly what to expect. Yet I had to believe that, after the previous evening at the Saenger, Shearer would not be doing the program live from WWNO, from whence Le Show has originated since shortly after its departure from KCRW in 2013.94 There is no better example of the stark contrast between the almost absurd levity of Shearer’s comic alter ego Derek Smalls and the gravity of Shearer’s topics on Le Show—no better example of the chiaroscuro nature of Shearer’s own character—than the sonic space between the excesses of Derek and company at the Saenger on Saturday night and the laconic severity of the next day’s Le Show.
The program opened with the shortest—and starkest—of the thousands of Le Show openings I’ve heard: “This is Le Show.”
And then Shearer got right to it:
There are numerous news stories this week about what would appear to be horrifying incidents in Syria, one more time. There are not numerous news stories about what we have good reason to believe are a continuation of horrifying incidents in Yemen and in other parts of the world. And so to widen the focus of what we think is worth paying attention to, I have a special guest here on the program today. He’s Dr. Homer Venters. He’s a physician, and he’s also director of programs for Physicians for Human Rights. And he came to my attention because I happen to be on a list that receives updates on some of what PHR is doing and witnessing in various parts of the world. Dr. Venters, welcome to the program.95
Shearer went on to interview Venters about the history and purpose of Physicians for Human Rights and that organization’s work documenting past and present mass atrocities around the globe—including gassing, sexual assault, and murder. Shearer asks what Rohingya survivors fleeing Myanmar say they are being told about what is being done to them. Venters answers, “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of these encounters myself, the forensic encounters with survivors. We ask people a lot of questions about what, you know, this sounds very horrific, but, ‘What were people saying as they were shooting you? What were people saying as they were raping you? Or setting your house on fire? Or killing your child?’” Venters explains that kind of specific information is critical to establishing whether atrocities are widespread and systematic and thus, in turn, “precursors of genocide.”
Shearer’s interview with Venters consumes 43 of the 59 minutes of that week’s Le Show, punctuated by three songs, the first of which is Charlie Woods’s “You Don’t Really Want to Know.”
Shearer has rarely spoken or written publicly about his parents’ physical escape from the Holocaust and the murder of the rest of each of their immediate families by the Third Reich. Shearer mentions the fact in passing in a 2022 interview with Brian Fishbach in Jewish Journal,96 and, when asked by Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast whether his “parents were running from Hitler,” Shearer replied, “they weren’t running toward him.”97 Decades of listening to Le Show and learning about Shearer’s other work—especially the chiaroscuro contrasts between Derek Smalls’s folly and Shearer’s Le Show interviews that air while Harry’s busy being Derek—convince me that Shearer’s recurring attention to torture may well be his way of using sonic rhetoric to “make things matter”:98 to keep our attention on the most atrocious abuses of power—whether we really want to know, or not.99
Notes
Charles Bramesco, “This Is Spinal Tap at 35: The Faux-Rockers Reunite at Tribeca Film Festival,” The Guardian, April 28, 2019; see also Janet Maslin, “Film: ‘This Is Spinal Tap’: A Mock Documentary,” New York Times, March 2, 1984, C6: “Mr. Shearer is quietly funny as the nondescript Tap member, the one who sees Nigel and David as ‘fire’ and ‘ice’ and thinks his own role is ‘to be in the middle of that, like lukewarm water.’” This Is Spinal Tap has gone on to become “perhaps the standard against which all other music mockumentaries are measured,” Thomas M. Kitts and Nick Baxter-Moore, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Humor (Taylor & Francis, 2019), 255.
Benjamin Lindsay. “Why Sting Can’t Watch This Is Spinal Tap Without Crying,” Vanity Fair, April 28, 2019.
Emma Dibdin, “Tribeca: ‘The Simpsons’ Team Talk Dream Guest Stars and Fox-Disney Changes at 30th Anniversary Panel,” Hollywood Reporter, April 28, 2019.
Kara Croke, publicist, Sunshine Sachs, telephone interview with the author, April 4, 2019.
Shearer quipped in a 2016 interview that he “started in show business at the top, and I’ve been working my way down ever since.” “Behind Closed Doors with Harry Shearer,” moderated by Peter Morris, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Los Angeles, July 25, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC_2tl7XhhQ. As a child actor, Shearer’s appearances were uncredited. For more on The Jack Benny Program see Kathy Fuller-Seely, “The Jack Benny Program,” https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/JackBennyProgram.pdf and Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy (University of California Press, 2017).
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd. ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211ff.
The “Collection Summary” landing page of the AAPB Le Show Special Collections archive features six examples of Shearer’s work on Le Show across four decades: https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/le-show-collection. My curated exhibit https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show features many more. For listeners unacquainted with Shearer’s genius, I offer this masterpiece, first broadcast on Le Show when commercial talk radio superstar Rush Limbaugh announced he was reentering treatment for addiction to painkillers. Shearer created psychotropic sonic satire to answer the question, “But one wonders, what exactly is going on at that unidentified treatment facility into which Limbaugh has checked himself?” Le Show, October 12, 2003, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-7630efc2ab1, 01:30:35ff.
Listen, for example, to the opening of the August 17, 2014, program: https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/august-17-2014/; this program opening does not yet seem to exist in the AAPB/LOC Le Show archive.
Wayne C. Booth, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
John Alberti, ed., Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2004).
“Le Show; 2019-04-28,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-0a9a4482457. The author was in studio with Shearer at WNYC that day.
“‘I speak Simpson’: Interview with Harry Shearer,” Jewish Chronicle, October 10, 2008, 22.
“What happened happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted.” Jean Améry, At The Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Indiana University Press, 1980), quoted in Losing Trust in the World: Holocaust Scholars Confront Torture, ed. Leonard Grob and John K. Roth (University of Washington Press, 2017), xi.
…not his adult film-acting work, as I mistakenly wrote in an early draft of this essay—though Shearer’s music video of his satiric song “Touch My Junk: The TSA Song” plays on a few of the tropes of adult film-acting to satirize post-9/11 airport security and homophobia at once: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njUDcTZuax8
Jay Needham and Phylis West Johnson, “Introduction: Inaugural Words from the Co-Founding Editors,” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 1, no. 1: 1–5.
Plato, Gorgias, 449a, Loeb Classical Library 166 (Harvard University Press, 2014), 264; Edward Schiappa, “Did Plato Coin Rhētorikē?” American Journal of Philology 111, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 457–70.
Plato, Gorgias, 449d–456a, Loeb Classical Library 166 (Harvard University Press, 2014), 268–91.
Kirt H. Wilson and Rosa A Eberly, “Rhetoric and Public Discourse: The Common Goods of Public Discourse,” in Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Andrea Lunsford, Kirt H. Wilson, Rosa A. Eberly (Sage Publications, 2009), 423–32.
Rosa A. Eberly, “‘Everywhere You Go, It’s There’: Forgetting and Remembering the University of Texas Tower Shootings,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (University of Alabama Press, 2004).
Thomas B. Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4 (2008): 470; quoted in Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 3.
Deirdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Harvard University Press, 1990).
Richard Harvey Brown, Society as Text: Essays on Rhetoric, Reason, and Reality (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Booth, A Rhetoric of Fiction.
Sharan Leigh Daniel, “Rhetoric and Journalism as Common Arts of Public Discourse: A Theoretical, Historical, and Critical Perspective” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002).
John M. Slatin, “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium,” College English 52, no. 8 (1990): 870–83.
Donald Verene, The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 2021).
Jonathan Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012), 3–4.
Joshua Gunn, Greg Goodale, Mirko M. Hall, Rosa A. Eberly, “Auscultating Again: Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 (2013): 475–89.
Slatin, “Reading Hypertext.”
CAS 2023 Summer Symposium on Harry Shearer’s Le Show, August 1–3, 2023, Penn State University, https://sites.psu.edu/cas2023summersymposium/.
Before it became Le Show, Shearer’s radio program was called “Voice of America” and “The Hour of Power,” https://americanarchive.org/catalog?f%5Bexhibits%5D%5B%5D=le-show&sort=asset_date+asc&f[access_types][]=online.
Rosa A. Eberly, “Harry Shearer’s Le Show: Sonic Portal to News, Satire, Memory, History,” American Archive of Public Broadcasting, December 4, 2023, https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show.
For example, https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/june-16–2013/?tag=cpr#t=29:08
However illuminating the datafication of sound might be for various research (and surveillance) purposes, I stand with Jonathan Sterne and Mehak Sawhney on what they call “the will to datafy”: “[W]hen assessing the politics of machine listening, we only need to modify the acousmatic question a little and ask: Who is this for?” Jonathan Sterne and Mehak Sawhney, “The Acousmatic Question and the Will to Datafy,” Kalfou 9, no. 2 (Fall 2022), 303.
During the several years that it was unclear whether the Le Show archive would be preserved, I neurotically transcribed (or had research assistants transcribe) each episode. After I saw where the archive was stored, I regularly sat bolt upright in the middle of the night wondering what would become of Shearer’s wingèd words.
Shearer corrects himself later in the program and then returns to folly: “I had Arturo Toscanini conducting the New York Philharmonic on CBS when he really conducted the NBC Symphony. But the point was that they did in fact suspend the time signal for the New York Philharmonic. It just wasn’t because of Toscanini. Or maybe it was, he was a fan. See, that was it, he was a fan of the [pauses] and he used to listen to them.”
“Le Show; 1990-06-10,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-88b737f04bf.
Between the first two songs Shearer inserted a clip of recorded speech without identifying the speaker: “We secured a major stake in the fully synergistic equity that is the Rolling Stones.” The speaker here might be Michael Cohl, who had recently taken over as the Rolling Stones’ promoter, replacing “superpromoter Bill Graham.” Michael Goldberg, “Stones Tour: Money Talks,” Rolling Stone, May 4, 1989 Shearer’s use of recorded speech constitutes another kind of archive within the Le Show archive, one that reflects his longstanding habit of capturing and repurposing archival sound, which I discuss below.
My emphasis. Brandon LaBelle, “On Listening,” Kunstjournalen B-post 12 (2012), https://b-post.no/en/12/labelle.html.
“News of The Digital Wonderland” was another recurring feature of Le Show. See, for example, this Le Show, in which Shearer reads listener correspondence leading up to the FCC-mandated transition to HD television in February 2009: “Le Show; 2009-01-11,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-eab9a0e1419 at 0:01:47.
Emily Gilson. “Review: ‘Harry Shearer: Up to Eleven’ at The Kennedy Center,” DC Theater Arts, July 21, 2018, https://dctheaterarts.org/2018/07/21/review-harry-shearer-up-to-eleven-at-the-kennedy-center/.
Peter Suderman, “Nobody Knows What Television Is Anymore.” Reason, December 2019, https://reason.com/2019/11/07/nobody-knows-what-television-is-anymore/.
Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (University of California Press, 1991).
Thomas Floyd, “Harry Shearer’s ‘Le Show’ Gets Immortalized After 40 years on the Air,” Washington Post, December 8, 2023.
I like to think Derek Smalls might describe Le Show as “preserved for perpefuckingtuity.”
While Le Show has reached listeners in Europe and Japan at points in its history and Shearer has occasionally originated the program from outside the United States, his audience is people who live and vote in the United States. “Le Show Year One through Decade Four by Harry Shearer,” AAPB, n.d., https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show/7-le-show-by-shearer.
In a lead-up to the tenth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Shearer devoted most of the January 27, 2013, Le Show to these failures of US intelligence. His interview with Greg Thielmann is in two parts, starting at the beginning of the program: “Le Show; 2013-01-27,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-17f428ac7eb.
Ibid., “Le Show: Decade Two,” https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show/7-le-show-by-shearer#le-show-decade-two.
Slatin, “Reading Hypertext,” 870. The always-already digital nature of hypertext has been rightly challenged by new materialist and decolonial scholars such as Angela Haas and Manuel Piña. See Angela Haas, “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (2007): 77–100, and Manuel Piña, “(Re)Turning to Hypertext: Mattering Digital Learning Spaces,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 53, no. 2: 153–71.
Slatin, “Reading Hypertext,” 874.
Slatin, “Reading Hypertext,” 881.
Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 71, 123–24.
For example, “Le Show; 2018-11-04,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-c19679bbe12 at 00:24:02ff; “Le Show; 2018-04-01,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-f1b8c173e77 at 28:39ff. The regular echo of Scully in Shearer’s delivery no doubt comes from years of doing Scully’s voice; for example, “Le Show; 2005-04-10; 2014-04-13,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-638f727d3b2 at 54:43 and “Le Show; 1990–02–11; 1990-02-25,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-86060e2c630 at 00:42:166ff, setup at 00:37:09–38:00.
“Le Show; 2017-12-17,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-fd8bfa5827f at 00:04:30–00:04:47; “Le Show; 2018-01-07,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-75a661e8533, 00:27:23–00:27:50.
“Jerry Lewis Telethon” section of Rosa A. Eberly, “Harry Shearer’s Le Show: Sonic Portal to News, Satire, Memory, History,” LOC/AAPB, https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show/4-3-cultural-criticism.
Shearer’s hobby of recording and repurposing satellite news network feeds never intended for broadcast resulted in a series of videos and a museum exhibition. See, for example, Harry Shearer, “Found Objects: ‘Don’t Come in My Ear’—Laura Ingraham,” https://youtu.be/q3lCfHtaR30?si=kMBoVIVZQ4SId1St; Andrew Adam Newman, “Talking Heads Caught in Moments of Silence,” New York Times, December 30, 2008.
“Le Show; 2003-06-08,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-cf990850c4f at 00:20:58ff.
“Le Show; 2018-07-15,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-41ebe35aeee at 00:16:56ff.
For example, https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/august-3-2014/#t=28:00.
“Le Show; 2023-10-15,”, Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-65725a74ee9 at 00:01:35ff.
For example “Le Show; 2013-01-27,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-17f428ac7eb at 00:00:01.
For example, see the program description for January 20, 2013, “Le Show; 2013-01-20 Elements,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-1d9ff70734a.
A compilation of Grauer’s New Year’s Eve announcing can be found here: nyeSStickman, “Ben Grauer at Times Square New Year’s Eve Reports Compilation (1946–1977),” https://youtu.be/5lsROiSWyQ8?si=SjMHaVYh8yj2gfZi.
Grimscribe126, “Original Takes for Orson Welles Wine Commercial,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFevH5vP32s at 00:00:56ff.
For example, https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/september-29-2024/#t=16:25 at 16:55ff.
Jefferson Pooley and Michael Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate, October 28, 2013, https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html.
“Le Show; 2006-07-16,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-1884697155e at 00:01:01ff.
Rosa A. Eberly, “Presidential Satire,” in “Harry Shearer’s Le Show: Sonic Portal to News, Satire, Memory, History.” American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), December 4, 2023, https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/le-show/4-1-presidential-satire.
Stephen Fehr, “10 Years After Great Recession Ends State Still Feel Its Effects,” Pew Trust Magazine, October 11, 2019, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2019/10-years-after-great-recession-ends-states-still-feel-its-effects.
“Le Show; 2009-10-18,” Century of Progress Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-1f1a6ef4d4e.
Paul Kiel, “The Bailout Was 11 Years Ago: We’re Still Tracking Every Penny,” ProPublica, October 3, 2019, https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-was-11-years-ago-were-still-tracking-every-penny.
Harry Shearer, “We Tortured Some Folks,” https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/august-3–2014/#t=41:59.
“Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility: An Overview,” Center for Victims of Torture, May 15, 2024, https://www.cvt.org/what-we-do/advocating-for-change/legacy-of-us-torture/guantanamo-bay-detention-facility-an-overview/.
Julie Hoban, “What Are ‘Black Sites’? 6 Key Things to Know About the CIA’s Secret Prisons Overseas,” Washington Post, January 25, 2017.
Sheri Fink and James Risen, “Psychologists Open a Window on Brutal C.I.A. Interrogations,” New York Times, June 21, 2017.
“A Guide to the Memos on Torture,” n.d., New York Times, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html.
“The Who—Who Are You (Promo Video),” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNbBDrceCy8.
https://harryshearer.com/le-shows/april-6-2008/#t=46:33; the final draft of this song and of several other Le Show satiric songs of this era are on Shearer’s 2008 audio CD “Songs of the Bushmen.”
“The Credibility Gap Perform, ‘Who’s on First?’” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUG5VMd4TFU.
Universal Pictures, “The Naughty Nineties: Who’s on First? Abbott and Costello,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYOUFGfK4bU.
The Credibility Gap, “Who’s on First?” from their album A Great Gift Idea, Reprise, 1974, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUG5VMd4TFU.
Ryan Reed, “Spinal Tap Bassist Returns with David Crosby, Peter Frampton on Solo LP,” Rolling Stone, January 17, 2018.
Chris Willman, “Concert Review: Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls Revives Mock-Rock at the Wiltern,” Variety, November 8, 2019.
Keith Spera, “Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls on aging, the LPO, and why he’d rather be a wombat than Harry Shearer,” NOLA.com, April 11, 2018, https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/keith_spera/spinal-taps-derek-smalls-on-aging-the-lpo-and-why-hed-rather-be-a-wombat/article_fa970f4e-d386-5e0f-a5a3-d6ec57f944f3.html.
Harry Shearer, Special Message Regarding Le Show, https://harryshearer.com/a-special-message-regarding-le-show/; also Le Show, April 21 2013, https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-ea6c955df75?start=0&end=247.72.
Brian Fishbach, “Actor Harry Shearer Has a Thirst for Journalism,” Jewish Journal, February 17, 2022, https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/345108/actor-harry-shearer-has-a-thirst-for-journalism/.
Marc Maron, host, WTF with Marc Maron, podcast, episode 578, “Harry Shearer,” February 19, 2015, https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_578_-_harry_shearer.
Farrell, “The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural Delirium,” in Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency.
This analysis applies as well to Shearer’s relentless coverage of child sexual abuse in his recurring and nearly always repulsive feature, “News of the Godly,” which I do not have time/space to discuss here.
University of California Press