For the past 20 years, the great actor/comedian/voicemaster Harry Shearer has been doing an obscure weekly radio show with some of the best political and cultural humor I’ve heard. The show, called (warning to French-bashers) Le Show, is heard on local public radio stations across the country. A station in DC ran it for a few weeks and then decided nobody was listening and dropped it. Fortunately Shearer has his own web site with an audio link to each show.
Shearer has appeared in two great “mockumentaries”: This Is Spinal Tap and, more recently, A Mighty Wind. He also does some of the best voices on The Simpsons: Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, Otto, Lenny and more.
His radio show is a mix of eclectic music, musings, regular features (Apologies of the Week, Reading from the Trades) and brief skits which he writes and for which he usually does all the voices. Although his politics are more or less liberal, he skewers people across the political spectrum. One of his latest creations is “The Gore Room,” a liberal radio alternative to Rush Limbaugh, featuring an insufferably earnest Al Gore and his wisecracking sidekick Al Franken. He also does periodic phone conversations between Bush 41 and Bush 43, and “Dick Cheney: Confidential,” in which the vice president emerges from his undisclosed location to perform some shadowy task for the administration.
Shearer certainly isn’t getting rich from this show. It’s obviously a labor of love. Check it out, as they say.
