From The Comic's Comic

How to talk to a comedic legend without mentioning your favorite sketches of theirs

Look. It’s Harry Shearer!

No. Look. I’ve got to level with you in two regards before we get to my interview with Shearer. There aren’t nearly as many questions about The Simpsons as you’re going to want to see asked and answered here. I get that. But I didn’t ask for more than a half-hour of his time, and his body of work is so lengthy and so great, I didn’t want to get bogged down in Simpsons trivia or minutia that he’s probably already addressed in some form or fashionable interview over the past 32 years since the legendary TV cartoon first went on the air on FOX in 1989 with Shearer voicing the likes of Mr. Burns, Smithers, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner and Kent Brockman, among others.

Second thing second. I know, I know, LAST THINGS FIRST! But here’s the deal: I really wanted my first comments and questions to center on two of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live pieces, both of which include Shearer to great effect. And yes, I understand that most people’s favorite SNL casts and characters happen around the time they themselves as viewers of coming of age. So maybe it’s timely. Maybe it’s kismet. Maybe it’s Maybelline. Whatever the reason, I still crack up whenever I think about the short film about male synchronized swimming (with swim partners Shearer and Martin Short, and their coach Christopher Guest) and remain amazed that SNL never wanted to pay for the music licensing or whatever reason it’s not available on YouTube or anywhere in pristine form to enjoy over and over again.

Shearer’s other contribution to an all-time SNL classic was the 60 Minutes spoof, with him as Mike Wallace, investigating a company making fraudulent gag gifts.

But one of my close comedy friends, who knows Shearer well, told me not to mention SNL at all?!?!? Apparently a very sore subject. Good thing I asked my friend for advice BEFORE the interview! But now what?

Thankfully, there’s so much else to cover, from Shearer’s start as a child actor working alongside two legends in Jack Benny and Mel Blanc, his early days with Micheal McKean and David L. Lander in The Credibility Gap, the origin story of Derek Smalls and Spinal Tap, and how he’s somehow been doing Spinal Tap and his weekly radio show/podcast, Le Show, for even longer than he’s been voicing characters on The Simpsons. And we talk about Paul Harvey, too! Fun facts, all!

He’s still making weekly episodes of Le Show, which include his reading of headlines with commentary, musical parodies, interviews and more, for broadcast and podcast!

If you’re not already subscribed to my podcast, seek it out and subscribe to Last Things First on the podcast platform of your choice! Among them: Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Stitcher; Amazon Music/Audible; iHeartRadio; Player.FM; and my original hosting platform, Libsyn.

Here is an edited and slightly condensed transcript of my conversation with Harry Shearer!

Sean L. McCarthy: Last things first, let’s take a second to acknowledge two things: 1) congratulations to you on, what is it now, 70 years in show-business?

Harry Shearer: Yeah, I guess so.

McCarthy: That’s pretty amazing. And in those 70 years, you’ve gone from being on the radio with Jack Benny to doing interviews over Skype. It’s quite remarkable that we can have this ease of technology and are able to communicate this way and broadcast. What is your current setup that you use when you’re recording Le Show?

Shearer: Well, it’s pretty traditional radio. I mean I have a studio in my house. I don’t originate live from there. I record either the whole show or segments for the show in the studio. If I’m in New Orleans, where I can originate live, I then take that material in, in the only form that you can — this should come as news to Apple and its fanboys — the only way, even in 2021, that you can bring outside material to be aired on a radio station, which is a CD. Which is why I still have a laptop with a built-in CD recorder and player. Even though Apple considers Pro laptops at this point to not need CD players and recorders. That’s my little hit at Apple right now. So I got that in. But that’s how I do it. If I record the whole show when I’m in Los Angeles and I have to do that, then I send it to the originating station in New Orleans via FTP and don’t ask me what the initials stand for. It’s some kind of protocol. And they air it from there.

McCarthy: Does it feel more comfortable or different when you’re recording from home rather than in the studio?

Shearer: Absolutely, absolutely. First of all, it’s a different time of day. It’s on a different day. But if you know you can stop and start, you stop and start. If you know you can’t stop and start, you don’t. So you get a different momentum, a different flow, a different energy level. It’s unavoidable. I try my best to make it sound relatively the same, but, you know, I feel the difference. Absolutely.

McCarthy: When did you start putting Le Show online for people to, for lack of a better word, podcast it?

Shearer: Yeah, well, it was one of the first shows to be put online as a podcast. I remember there was a week, very early on, when I was the number one podcast. That shows you how long ago it was.

McCarthy: We’ll get there again, we’ll get there.

Shearer: Yeah, right. So it’s pretty much when when podcasting began, like around 2000-2001. Something like that.

McCarthy: What was it like in those early days when you virtually had it all to yourself?

Shearer: I mean, it’s all conceptual. You don’t experience anything, you know. The only experiential thing, which I don’t have to deal with, is that I play some music on my show. And when it’s translated into podcast terms, the music has to be edited in some way because there’s some regulation.

McCarthy: All sorts of random process of licensing issues come into play. Politics aside, I’m curious what you thought of Paul Harvey as a broadcaster?

Shearer: Well, he was one of the great influences on me, basically, just as a performer on radio. I mean, I disagreed pretty much with everything he said, except, and this is, this is a historical footnote. Most people if you asked them, and had any answer at all what spurred the turn in American public opinion against the Vietnam War? Would say Walter Cronkite. But in fact, an earlier turn on the same subject was experienced by Paul Harvey, when his son became draft age. And now you know the rest of the story. (HE SAID, IMPERSONATING THE LATE BROADCASTING LEGEND). I actually had the privilege of sitting in on one of his radio broadcasts. I wangled my way in, and he was famous for, among other things, his pauses. I mean, I should explain to people who have never heard him, that yes, I disagreed with the content of what he said most of the time, but I was in awe of his style and practice and approach to talking on the radio, and it was very much to my ear, a musical approach. He and an incredibly musical voice, way of talking. He did that off the air as well as on the air, and the pauses were like, when a jazz musician, I think it was Miles (Davis) said, it’s the notes I don’t play that count. And so I experienced that in the studio with him and I realized that the pauses were nothing more than him looking from one page to another to see which thing he wanted to read next. It just turned into a style..

McCarthy: That’s amazing. Yeah, listening to Le Show, I could definitely hear the influence, and as I’m a newspaper reporter by trade, and I’ve been podcasting for since 2015. So I’m still, I’m still relatively young in this game, in terms of learning how to speak for an audio audience, and listening reminded me, I don’t need to speak quite so quickly.

Shearer: Radio began as a medium, where am radio. AM means amplitude modulation. And that meant that the louder the content, the stronger the signal. And that’s where the dread of dead air came from. Dead air meaning silence. So there’s always been this spookery about silence and radio. It was poison. And Paul Harvey was I think the first person to realize the technical reason for it didn’t apply anymore and therefore it could be tried with the impunity.

McCarthy: You know, they say, one, one of the many classic cliches, they say is, don’t meet your heroes, and I’m not referring to Paul Harvey. But it struck me as quite remarkable that as a kid, you met and worked with Jack Benny, Mel Blanc, and Abbott and Costello. As a 7-8-9 year-old, were they your heroes? Did you know what you were getting yourself into it at that early age?

Shearer at the table going over radio scripts with Jack Benny and Mel Blanc.

Shearer: Oh I knew. I was a huge fan of radio and television as a kid. The best evidence of that is that a friend of my father’s had a home phonograph record set up and he could actually long playing records as a hobby, and so he would interview his friends, children and things like that. So there’s an LP of him interviewing me, asking me what my favorite radio shows were, and I’m telling him what shows they were, what network they were on, what night they originated, what city they originated in at the age of three, so I knew the world, I very much knew the world I was walking into. Benny was probably the closest I had to a hero, although I would never have described it that way. But, you know, I was aware and an appreciator of his work by the time I walked into that world, as well as Abbott and Costello and I forget the other one you mentioned, oh Mel Blanc. Yeah I mean Mel Blanc was somebody whose work was part of, you know, the best library of cartoons ever, before The Simpsons!

McCarthy: You would have to be considered kind of like a modern day Mel Blanc.

Shearer: Yeah, I mean, it’s totally ironic. It’s way too glib and convenient to have actually happened, but it did, you know, I mean, if you look at this life I’ve had in a long enough lens: It’s well…. He started with Mel Blanc and then he ended up being Mel Blanc! But, you know, it’s 1,400 different coincidences conspired to make that come about.

McCarthy: I guess one of those major coincidences was after you took a break in your teen years to go to school and think about being a teacher and other occupations, when you fell into The Credibility Gap. And met Michael McKean. That’s one of those happenstance things right? You don’t know that when you meet this person you’re gonna end up working with them for the next 50 years.

Shearer: Oh yeah. It was first David L. Lander, who just passed away recently, who then said I have this friend, McKean, and then brought him into the group. But yeah, I mean, it’s a stupid series of coincidences because I was basically draft-dodging, teaching school and to have some link to what I really do. I had started doing radio commercials for this nightclub/rock emporium/ movie palace called Kaleidoscope in Hollywood. And a friend of mine was a friend of theirs, that’s what connected us, and I would use their theater room as a studio. Brought in a tape machine, and did these commercials. And because we didn’t have enough money to buy time on the number one station in town. We bought that rock and roll station in town. We bought commercials on the number two rock’n’roll station, and they were stuck because they were number two and desperate to do something to get better ratings, they started this comedic news program called The Credibility Gap which I then got involved in and so it goes from there.

McCarthy: When The Credibility Gap first started on the radio, there wasn’t really a rich tradition of satirical news, right?

Shearer: God, no. Oh my god. I mean there was probably That Was The Week That Was, I think predated us. And that was a television series that basically was brought over from Britain, and had come out of the beyond the fringe school of satirical comedy that was based at Cambridge University and then went to the British stage. And out of that came this TV series called That Was The Week That Was. David Frost was in it. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. And it got brought to the States, and was on for a couple of seasons, and that was our only real predecessor,

McCarthy: Because you were on the radio for at least a year before the National Lampoon started.

Shearer: Oh, more than that. We started in ‘68.

McCarthy: What would you in the rest of The Credibility Gap think of Le Show?

Shearer: Linear descendant. You know, I mean I started doing a different radio show when we were still doing the news program with the Gap, which was just played music and did comedy sketches that had nothing to do with the news. And so, it just seemed natural that I absorbed the news part of the Gap show when that went off the air.

McCarthy: Looking at your story. You don’t have kind of a traditional comedian background, where you’re working in the comedy clubs or you’re, you’re with The Second City, or The Committee up in San Francisco as some of your peers might have been…

Shearer: Thank you for mentioning them. They were the ones that I really adored. No, the Gap was different in that, even when we started doing in person shows, we did a lot of them. We wrote our material. We were not an improv group. I think it’s OK to say at this point that, first of all, the gigging situation was sort of different. You’d get booked for a week into a club. So you had a weeklong gig, and it became our practice, even though we were performing written material and we would write material and put it on stage, the same night. But Thursdays of the week, we would break our normal practice, we would get high before the show, and give ourselves the freedom to see what else was in that sketch or those sketches. That was the night we would improvise our way through a pre-written sketch and discover, hey that’s a good line. We’ll put that in, we’ll leave that in. That’s a good one. But yeah, very different. The idea of being alone in a club. I mean, I had a friend at the time, who sort of had a nervous breakdown from that experience Albert Brooks, you know just was like, you’re touring by yourself. You’re alone on the stage, you’re alone in the hotel room, it’s just ehhhhhh.

McCarthy: It’s so to speak, it’s Real Life. Real Life is tough.

Shearer: Yeah, no kidding.

Real Life (1979): Written by Albert Brooks, Monica Johnson and Harry Shearer

McCarthy: Were you in one of those smoking sessions when you when you came up with Derek Smalls?

Shearer: Came up with the guy before I came up with his name because we did a song on a pilot that Rob Reiner and I — Rob executive produced it and I produced, which was a pilot for a show on ABC, which was called The TV Show, and we just did parodies of everything that was on television. And there was at the time a show on Friday nights on NBC called Midnight Special, where a disc jockey who called himself Wolfman Jack hosted. And so, for our parody, Rob played Wolfman Jack because he didn’t play an instrument. Then Chris Michael and I were the players in the band along with Loudon Wainwright and Russ Kunkel. So I got a look for the guy, and played him. But then, as weeks went on, we thought, we’ve got to do more with those guys, and started thinking about maybe doing a movie. And so that’s when I came up with the name.

McCarthy: But now even portraying Derek Smalls in failed TV pilots and legendary mockumentaries motion pictures, and in concert around the world for more than 40 years. At this point. Is it more comfortable for you now to be Derek Smalls than it is to be Harry Shearer?

Shearer: No, but it’s, I mean, you’re right. I’ve played that character more than any other. I think the three of us found that we had a real comfort zone with these characters when we started doing publicity for the movie, pretty much in England, and we would held these press things. And, from the minute we walked out, we were all in character, which was such a dare I guess to some of the journalists. There was one time in London where I believe he was with the Times of London, a guy yelled out to Chris, ‘Hey Nigel, how’s Jamie Lee?’ And you have never seen anything colder than Chris’s stare when he heard that. We just found it incredibly easy to to be in those characters, and so I have found that to be true of going on as Derek as a solo person.

McCarthy: People younger than me probably only think of you in terms of The Simpsons even though Spinal Tap and Le Show are still big parts of your life, too?

Shearer: I’ve never been in a position, personally, where I had to worry about who was watching or listening and how many of them were there, so I spend almost literally no time thinking about that, as opposed to most people in show business who are, you know, looking at the ratings and looking at the box office and all of that. In that sense, I’ve lived a charmed life.

McCarthy: Do you have any advice for other entertainers?

Shearer: Get out of show business. Get the fuck out of show business!

McCarthy: In terms of that particular affliction though of obsessing over ratings or reviews, or Twitter replies or YouTube comments. How do you disabuse yourself of that if that’s all you know?

Shearer: First of all, it is a blessing. In normal show business, you have to. You have to care about that stuff because it decides whether you work or not. Which one can’t help caring about. I’m aware that I get a remarkably small amount of feedback, because I don’t make it all that easy to feed back to me on the radio show. And, you know, there are times when I wish I had more but I’m fine with it. It doesn’t change anything, whether I had more or less feedback. So it’s just, I was able to get by on a fairly remarkably low level of income for quite a long time, until I became stupidly rich. So I didn’t have to hew to a certain style that was popular at the moment or whatever, to make gobs money because I found a home at the beach that was very cheap, so I thought, well, I have the thing that people work 20 years very hard, trying to be able to move forward. And I already have it. So that was probably a great help.

but since you are you still involved with social media like the rest of us are. What is your perspective on watching how other performers and creative types.

McCarthy: Rob Barnett over at My Damn Channel tells me that you were instrumental in giving him some early advice as part of a deal of having you contribute videos for him. I believe he said that if you’re gonna go the name like My Damn Channel, don’t then extend that branding to everything like my damn coffee mug and my damn T shirt.

Shearer: Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the name.

McCarthy: How did you decide on Le Show?

Shearer: No, I had with, with a certain amount of subversive pause, originally called it the Voice of America. That was somehow kiboshed at some point in the show’s history, and I was searching around for another name. And for a while I called it the Hour of Power, because there was an evangelist who had a show by that name and I have always wanted to be sued by evangelists. In the 80s, there was a trend that just made me laugh all the time which was the trend to put the word le in front of everything to class it up. And I used to take photographs of as many of these things, or businesses as I could so I had in succession. Le Club Le Hot Club and Le Hot Tub Club. And and so a friend of mine when I was searching for the next name, suggested Le Show and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s as good as any.’

McCarthy: Well, I have to say The Big Uneasy is a great title for your documentary.

Shearer: Thank you. Yeah, well I mean it happens, to quote, the only thing I’ve ever quote Henry Kissinger is saying is something he said to President Nixon. ‘It has the added advantage of being true.’ And the big uneasy in fact was, that was the state of New Orleans. And to a certain extent still is because we’re still enjoying the protection “air quotes” of the United States Army Corps of Engineers,

McCarthy: I have to wonder, as a satirist, as an independent journalist, slash documentarian slash broadcaster. Is there one that’s more effective than the other in terms of changing public policy or public opinion, or is it only through a mockumentary such as Spinal Tap?

Shearer: I don’t think people in my business can change anything. We fool ourselves to think that. It would be nice. It would be good for the ego. If there was, you know, something that we actually — I don’t, I can’t think of an example of it. In terms of documentaries. I remember, I think it was 2008, there was a documentary that won the Academy Award called The Cove, maybe it was later than that. It was about the slaughter of dolphins in a cove in Japan, and it had a call to action at the end of the documentary. I remember being told, you’re doing a documentary, you have to have a call to action. And I remember, tou could read up on it that, two, three years later the slaughter was just as bad in that area of Japan as it was before The Cove came out, you can win an Academy fucking Award, you can’t stop the slaughter in one cove.

McCarthy: People on social media like to point out: The Simpsons can often predict the future, but it can’t stop the future. All of the predictions on The Simpsons come true, but they’re not supposed to because they’re all supposed to be so ridiculous.

Shearer: Yeah, they’re supposed to be dystopian.

McCarthy: I somehow didn’t ask you hardly any questions about The Simpsons, and nothing about that Saturday night program that was on TV still for some reason.

Shearer: I can tell you the reason. Seriously. It’s the only show on American television that has never had competition from either of the other two major networks. Ever. If you can get a monopoly slot, you can stay on forever.

McCarthy: That’s even better than Johnny Carson had it.

Shearer: Johnny Carson is the only reason that show exists in the first place.

McCarthy: Right, because he gave up Saturdays in a contract negotiation.

Shearer: Yeah, and the network had that slot cleared by the local stations, so they could put something else in there. The other two networks never had a late-night slot on Saturday, the local stations made too much money with their late-night movies. They were never going to give up that time.

McCarthy: Will The Simpsons will ever give up its time slot? Or is just going to keep going?

Shearer: At one time I’d taken saying that The Simpsons will stay on the air until FOX finds another eight o’clock hit. I’ll stick with that.

McCarthy: Right, because as we’ve learned, even just in 2021. We have the technology to capture all of the words you’ve already said, and reconfigure them so even after you’re gone, they can still use your voice.

Shearer: Don’t give them ideas. But they’ve had a remarkably bad history of getting an eight o’clock hit. That’s how the night opens for TV networks, so they’re highly prized.

McCarthy: Well, Harry Shearer, I just want to say thank you for thank you for sitting and chatting with me. Thank you, thank you for putting helping to put the words okeleedokelee into my head and into my text messaging, and even despite your experience with that Saturday night program on NBC, you somehow managed to be featured in two of my all-time favorite sketches: Male Synchronized Swimming and 60 Minutes. Nothing tops those things to this day, so thank you.

Shearer: Hearing you say that, it’s my pleasure; trying to get those done, was not.

McCarthy: Well, that you got it done is a testament to your genius and to your persistence, so thank you for that as well.