Larry King was a guest on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this past week and when asked about his interviewing style he actually said he prefers to know as little as possible about his guests. His reasoning: if he knows about them he’s not curious to learn more, and it’s his curiosity about them that drives the questions.
I’ve always thought that Larry King was one of the worst interviewers in the business. He could have the most interesting guest under the sun and botch it; if Jesus Christ returned to Earth and did King’s show he’d probably begin by asking him “Did your friends ever call you Chris to not sound so religious?” and then switch to “Your predictions for the NBA playoffs”.
OTOH, King has been in the business since 1453 and has earned gazillions of dollars and his stand up show is drawing big audiences so he must know something.
I was never a King fan, and the few times I saw him, I thought he could take any interview and turn it into a boring kibbitz-fest. An interviewer should always do research on his or her guest unless the interviewer doesn’t mind sounding like an idiot and potentially missing some important details.
On the surface, it sounds like bullshit. If you don’t know anything about your guest, how do you know which questions to ask? By the time you finish going through the basics to figure out what their deal is, the interview’s over and you’ve bored your audience.
If he’s not curious to learn about a guest he either shouldn’t have that guest on or shouldn’t be interviewing people for a living.
The only good part of an interviewer not knowing anything about a guest is there is no danger of the even worse problem where the conversation consists of the host reading a series of questions, waiting for a pause and then without paying any attention to the answer moving on to the next question.
Oh and in Larry’s case it’d be good if he could have at least kept track of say which Beatle was alive.
I remember seeing that live and having little doubt that Jerry was really pissed.
To me the total anti-King is Jon Stewart. If the guest is a writer he clearly either reads his guest’s book or reads a really good synopsis because he asks questions that a “real journalist” would be proud of and also has that Johnny Carson ability to make his guests look entertaining even if it’s a career academic you’ve never heard of.
I agree about Stewart. I’ve heard people say they turn off the show when he has a guest on! I often watch his full interviews online, (which is a pain in the ass but worth it).
I’ve turned off Colbert, because while his improvising during the interview can be impressive, the show’s gag doesn’t always hold up very well. (Of course, when it works, it is amazing.)
Stewart’s interviews are almost always engaging except when the author and the book are both very, very dry.
I’ve wondered about that. Does an interviewer such as Jon Stewart actually read the whole book, or does a researcher summarize it for him, and mark interesting passages to ask about?
I usually feel the exact opposite – Stewart’s interviews are often insufferable (e.g. he tries way too hard to be chummy with celebrities) and Colbert’s interviews are usually funny and intelligent.
With regards to the poll, the interviewer’s ability makes a huge difference, but even so it’s better to be knowledgeable than ignorant.
Tom Snyder beats Larry King any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Then, when you dig a bit deeper, you discover that there’s some horseshit in there, too–possibly left over from when King started doing interviews, and guests were tracking it in from the street.
I heard this on the radio, and when he said it, it made a bit of sense, but in the cold light of day, it makes very little sense. I can appreciate the idea of not researching your guest to the point of pre-ordaining the exact text of the interview, you should ask a question, interpret the response, and followup accordingly. But to do NO research means you don’t know what questions are going to be interesting for your viewers.
I loved Tom Snyder. He could be interviewing Henry Kissinger and get off on a tangent about the best place to get a Philly Cheese Steak (not an actual example but he would do things at least that absurdist) but unlike Larry King, with Snyder it worked.
My favourite interviewers have always been people like Dick Cavett, Patrick Watson, Brian Linehan, Elwy Yost, Jian Gomeshi… Their interlocutors were always flattered that these people knew so much about the minutiae of their careers and that they weren’t getting the same fwcking questions one more time…
I think they should research because it’s not about the interviewer learning about the guest. It’s about the audience getting to learn. If the interviewer doesn’t have sufficient background, he/she won’t be able to ask probing, interesting questions–they may go down the wrong path entirely or ask things that are too basic.
I think Charlie Rose is by far the most intelligent and most informed interviewer on TV and one who has the most general background knowledge on damn near everything. But he is absolutely terrible about interrupting interesting points a guest is about to make in order to ask something totally unrelated, and he will occasionally argue with his guest in an apparent effort to force them to agree with what is obviously his idea of the answer, or insist that they answer a question in the way he’s posed it. I saw William F. Buckley amusedly refuse to do this one time, saying the “construction” of the question precluded an accurate response.
I think the difference there is that Snyder was genuinely conversational where King gave the impression of just firing off questions at random, no matter what the guest had just said.
