I know this show never got the love that “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (which precedes AMA on Saturdays here) gets but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Ophira Eisenberg is a great host and quite funny but I am an equal fan of Jonathan Coulton. He’s also very funny and quick witted as well as being an excellent guitarist with a talent for writing and singing funny and clever lyrics to the tune of well known pop songs as clues to the quizzes. They are not quitting, NPR is ending it. Sadly this probably means that my local NPR station will be replacing it with cheaper (and lamer) local programming. That seems to be the trend.
Anyway…I will miss it .
I think I’m mixing this one up with another show that had already ended. Before this, wasn’t there a really laid back sounding host who had another quiz-type show? Obviously not Wait, Wait, but another show that came on the same day.
I didn’t realize Ask Me Another had continued. I kind of lost touch after I moved to listening to everything like a podcast instead of live on air.
I once had a brief (pleasant) back-and-forth with Ophira E on Twitter. I’d asked if anyone had actually written a piece called “Hot Heel Blues”, which they hadn’t (not sure if anyone subsequently has, although she said she’d put Julian Velard on it).
I can’t remember the rest of the conversation other than me making a “[thing I can’t remember] is the name of my one-woman show in Canada” joke; it was a long time ago. Anyway, it was nice.
Covid wasn’t kind to AMA. I think they really tried to revamp over the past year of quarantine but it turned into a celebrity interview show with trivia breaks (with celebrities kind of failing at pub trivia) and away from a pub trivia show with celebrity interview breaks. And that wasn’t as fun for me even though it was obvious why they did it. I used to listen to the podcast every week. I don’t anymore.
Says You drives me nuts. I feel like there’s a good show in there trying to get out, but sadly it’s stuck to its current format with some kind of ok quizzes, a few frequent panel guests that are nowhere near as funny as they think they are and are allowed to go on laughing at their own unfunny jokes for way too long, and the audience submitted entries that are invariably written by people who don’t really understand quizzes so they’re stupid and unbalanced and don’t have any progression and often break their own themes. (Maybe that’s the joke?)
I want to like Says You. It’s exactly the kind of thing I should like. But it needs to be ripped apart and redone from the ground up.
It feels like what you’d get if you recorded me and my friends playing trivia/word games. Unfortunately, we are never as funny as we think we are. I wouldn’t spend an hour listening to me.
I think Says You! is meant to be in the mold of What’s My Line or QI; the quiz is just an excuse to get a bunch of clever people together and give them things to make jokes about. I still remember a round called “common threads” where the question was “banjo, bloodsucker, and Bartok” and Tony said "those are my attorneys. I laughed. I sent in some questions many years ago, but none of them got used. My trivia questions tend to be way too difficult.
Maybe it could use a revamp, though. It hasn’t been quite the same since the original host, Richard Sher, passed away a few years ago. I got to meet him a couple times. I’d still take Arnie for my pub trivia team any day, and I have a not insignificant crush on Carolyn.