Absolutely this.
I admit that Peter Sagel sometimes get on my nerves but the panelists’ off-the-cuff remarks more than makes up for that. Also, Bill Kurtis.
As for AMA, I haven’t listened to it in probably a year because the only time I ever caught it was in the car back when I worked a later shift. I liked its quirkiness, the premise, and Jonathan Colton, but the overall format felt forced and therefore somewhat uncomfortable to hear. Hopefully they’ve gotten over that hump.
I don’t think they have.
Please forgive my Get-Off-My-Lawn-ness, but AMA comes across as a kid’s version of a fun quiz show. The questions aren’t hard so I feel impatient, and the playful banter feels like young people playing dress up, trying on playing banter and tying it to the memes of the day.
There, I said it. I am so damn old. Oy and sigh.
ETA: Colton is fun, funny, and a great musician.
I like “Ask Me Another” well enough, but I’m not even sure they play it consistently in this market (Chicago.) There’s also that “Whaddaya Know” show that I seem to only catch on out-of-market NPR stations. (Is that even still on? I remember it being on in the afternoon on WBEZ maybe ten years ago, and then it disappeared and I could only find it on one of the Wisconsin NPR stations.)
That said, “Ask Me Another” is just another one of those pleasant NPR programs to me, kind of in the same category as Whaddaya Know and Prairie Home companion. Don’t love it, don’t hate it, but it passes the time while driving. Wait Wait – to me – is uproarious and contains some of my favorite radio memories. Most recently (last year), was Ryan Dempster telling his Harry Caray story/joke, with impresion. (Yeah, I know I’m not highlighting the basic panel and host-- I love Paula Poundstone, Mo Rocca, PJ, Roy, Peter Sagal – but as a Cubs fan who remembers Harry well, this was one of my favorite Wait Wait moments.)
I listen to wait wait don’t tell me occasionally when it’s on. I like the show and I sometimes learn new things.
Get over yourself. I’m totally familiar with current events. I’ve listened to the show a number of times and I’ll be able to answer 90%+ of the quiz questions. I find the show to be insanely annoying. This doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It means that it’s not my type of humor. Likewise, people who don’t like it aren’t ignorant rubes compared to your genius level knowledge of politics and pop culture.
Yeah, you certainly don’t need to know the week’s news to enjoy (or not enjoy) the program. You either like the humor, or not. I love improv and I love the type of current events improv they do on this show (I just adore Peter Sagal, for instance, and every time it’s a guest host – even when it was Tom Hanks – I’m a little disappointed, as I find Peter’s wit so sharp and exactly up my alley.) But even if I miss a week or three of news (which I’ve done many times), the show still is funny to me because I like the style of humor they do, and I get to learn about the news I missed in the process! Win-win for me! So if one doesn’t like it or finds it annoying, it has little to do with one’s current events knowledge.
I thought I was the only one disappointed by Tom Hanks. I wanted to love it so much, but it wasn’t Peter.
I like both shows.
I wish I’d never seen a picture of Peter Sagal. I always thought of him as scrawny geek, but as it turns out he looks exactly like a very handsome super-villain. Too incongruent.
bolding mine
Astonishingly, it is possible for people to dislike something that you love without them actually being “clueless,” or ignorant, or humor-challenged, or any other term you wish to hurl at them.
I know it’s hard to believe. But it’s true.
+2
I used to listen to “Whad’ya Know?”, as it was started in Madison when I was going to school there. It looks like it had, indeed, lost distribution on NPR stations, and Wisconsin Public Radio stopped production of it as a radio show in 2016. I do wonder if WWDTM superceded WYK in its niche (smart snarky NPR quiz show).
However, Michael Feldman and Lyle Anderson are still producing new episodes of Whad’ya Know?, distributed on Facebook, and as podcasts.
Exactly.
I enjoy both shows but they do ocassionally hit stretches of “OMG let this segment end already”. And I’m with you in that WWDTM gets better when the ensemble gets going rather than having Peter running it per script, and that is sometimes evident when they run an outtake segment in one of the recess compilation shows or in the podcast. Similarly *Ask Me Another *also has material they don’t run in the regular broadcast that sometimes they share and at times makes me wonder why was *that *left on the cutting room floor. Could do with fewer “yeah, we know, we are part of the Brooklyn hipster community, we’re self-aware” callouts.
Over here! Another enjoyable (though not must-stop-and-listen) show, I discovered it a couple years ago and if I can catch it I will give it a listen now and then. I have fun listening to the panelists trying to figure out a clue about something *not *entirely obscure but which they had not paid much attention to.
For me, with WWDTM, I like the idea, and I like some of the jokes, but the panel/contestants seem all too impressed with their own cleverness. They’re funny, but they’re not as funny as they think they are or as funny as they are determined to keep pointing out to the audience.
AMA feels like pub trivia on the radio. Some of the quizzes miss altogether, some are very easy, but it’s fun to play along. I think it’s very much aimed at my demographic.
Says You is just sad. About half the time I listen, the quiz doesn’t pan out at all (the audience submitted ones are especially awful) and there are a lot of uncomfortably bad jokes (again, way too obsessed with their own cleverness - which is worse when it isn’t especially clever). It’s like a cringe comedy version of a radio quiz show.
WWDTM makes me snort with laughter several times an episode. I really enjoy it. Ask me Another I listen to because of Coulton, mostly; the quizzes are okay. Says You alternates between fogey quizzes (“Which of these songs from the 1960s has the word ‘Baby’ in the title?” christ almighty) and reasonably fun word games; I don’t laugh much, but some of the word games are fun enough.
Prairie Home Companion may have changed its name, but it’s no more tolerable than ever.
Same here. But you do have to sorta follow the news a bit to appreciate it.
I used to tune in in case I could catch the News from Lake Wobegon or Guy Noir. And now those are no more, yet I still am at risk of hearing someone intentionally blow a raspberry into a mic. No thanks!
I mean, sure, I guess you might have to care about the news, but I’ve used Wait Wait to fill me in on the news when I’ve missed it. I don’t think you need to follow the news to appreciate the comedy. I think I would enjoy the program even if it was the same comics talking about the news in, I dunno, Tajikistan or something.
Well, I disagree. I dont think you need to be a news freak, but some knowledge about current affairs makes some of the in jokes more humorous.
Maybe some of the more in-jokes, I suppose (I’m not even sure what they are, but I guess I’m “in”), but the general tenor of the comedy you can tell whether you like or not without any familiarity of what the heck is going on in the world.
I went out of my way to listen to that when it was Richard Sher (loved the one where he said, “We’re not talking about photography, we’re talking about art” and the reaction that got). Now it always feels like a guest host.
Used to listen to The Jefferson Hour every Sunday night, but kind of fell out of the habit sometime after they switched it to streaming only.