Wait Wait You Can’t Do That On Radio

We’ve already told you about the weekly tapings of locally produced NPR hit Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. We decided to attend yesterday's taping when we heard that Sarah Silverman was to be a call-in guest, since we honestly can’t get enough of that gal. Though we do admit to being totally mystified as to why a woman that cool is dating Jimmy Kimmel. Ah, those vexing mysteries of life.

We arrived at the taping to see the auditorium packed with the sort of NPR liberal geeks you would expect at a live taping. We realized that with our Pavement tour shirt, suit coat, jeans and dog-eared copy of What’s The Matter With Kansas? we would fit right in.

The surprising thing about the taping was that it lasted well over 90 minutes when the actually show runs for only 55 minutes when it airs on Saturdays. We discovered that this overage is the real reason to attend a taping. If we hadn’t, we would have missed the following:

• Seemingly demure Trib advice columnist Amy Dickinson’s over the top portrayal of Katherine Hepburn as an octogenarian phone sex operator.
• Silverman telling Mo Rocca she could “hear the Jew” in his voice.
• One hapless caller who continued to get an answer to a question wrong even after every member of the show gave him the correct answer.
• We learned that host Peter Sagal did in fact write the sequel to Dirty Dancing without realizing he was writing the sequel to Dirty Dancing. This brought up the age-old conundrum: If you write a crappy movie but don’t know you’re doing it, is it really your fault?
• We finally heard what one of announcer Carl Kassel’s answering machine message recordings sound like and realized that prize is far cooler than we possibly could have imagined.
• Katie Couric used to get Kassell coffee when she interned for him in the mid-'70s.