It Must Have Been Something He Said : Radio: Harry Shearer celebrates 10 years of ‘Le Show’ with a recording and turns out a musical, ‘J. Edgar.’

There’s a story humorist Harry Shearer loves to tell that inspired a satirical bit on his long-running syndicated radio program, “Le Show.”

Shearer built his own satellite dish and on it has watched and heard material not intended for public consumption. One such moment involved CBS newsman Dan Rather on a trip to Soweto just after the release of South African leader Nelson Mandela. The audio and video are running, but it is clearly not an official news segment.

“There’s 500,000 people chanting and dancing behind him,” Shearer recounts. “He’s crouched, hunkered down on the top of a flatbed pick-up truck and he’s really uncomfortable. It’s cold, he’s not happy, doesn’t like being on top of the truck. He’s there because of the shot and he’s just sitting there grousing for like 10 minutes and finally he says to a makeup lady, ‘Question: I did not wash my hair last night because sometimes the stiffness helps, but the question now is should I wash it tonight? I guess that’s something we’re going to have to decide as we go along.’ ”

This snippet led to a “Le Show” bit titled “Dan Rather Gets His Hair Dyed,” and has been included with 13 other parodies in a recording called “It Must’ve Been Something I Said,” released this week to tie in with the 10th anniversary of Shearer’s radio program.

The record also features a rap about the Rodney G. King beating, called “Cops With Attitude”; a spoof on the ethnocentric coverage of Olympic sporting events, called “Ice Tennis”; and a Madonnaesque composition called “Expose Yourself.”

Meanwhile, Shearer has written, directed and co-starred in a theatrical production of his first musical, “J. Edgar,” a story about former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his relationship with his longtime assistant, Clyde Tolson.

The musical, produced by L.A. Theater Works and performed last Wednesday through Friday at Guest Quarters Suite Hotel in Santa Monica, was taped for broadcast and will air on KCRW-FM (89.9) this spring. KCRW is also the local outlet for “Le Show,” Sundays at 10 a.m.

The play is a pet project for Shearer, who had been tossing the idea around for several years with writing partner Tom Leopold. When L.A. Theater Works director Susan Loewenberg asked Shearer if there was anything he’d like to write and direct, he tentatively suggested a musical about Hoover.

Loewenberg was intrigued and gave him the go-ahead.

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“Basically, all the public events in J. Edgar Hoover’s life pass as if on a moving screen in the background of a very poignant love story,” Shearer said. “So we conceived it as a pre-rock, pre-Lloyd Webber era musical.”

The love story between Hoover, played by Kelsey Grammar, and Tolson, played by John Goodman, required the two television stars to sing love songs to each other.

“Let me do this right,” the Hoover character says at one point as he gets down on one knee. “Clyde Tolson, will you be my lifetime assistant?”

Tolson responds in song: “How could a job title sound so romantic? / How could a promotion produce such emotion? / I feel so proud / Got to shout it loud! Lifetime Assistant.”

Shearer played reporter Walter Winchell while his Spinal Tap cohorts Christopher Guest and Michael McKean portrayed Roy Cohn and President Truman. Marian Mercer took the role of Hoover’s mother.

“We stay very cheap and tacky,” Shearer said. “He’s dead. We can exploit him. We’re just having fun with him.”

Over the 40 years he has been in show business--since his start as a child actor on Jack Benny’s radio show--Shearer’s career has been a model of eclecticism.

He assumed the film role of has-been rocker Derek Smalls in the mock documentary “This Is Spinal Tap” and has impersonated on his radio show such disparate figures as Dick Clark, Madonna and radio psychologist Dr. David Viscott. His versatile vocal cords are regularly heard in a variety of roles on “The Simpsons.” He is also well known for his off-center bits and impersonations while a cast member on “Saturday Night Live “ in the 1980s, and he co-wrote the film “Real Life” with Albert Brooks.

Shearer appears to thrive on juggling several projects simultaneously.

“I kind of love what I’m doing at any given moment,” he said over lunch recently at a Hollywood restaurant. “The closer what I’m doing is to what I had in mind when I started the particular project, the more I love it.”

Shearer chose to write a play about Hoover because he was fascinated by the way the former FBI director devoted himself to gathering information about people’s private lives, yet managed to keep his own so hidden.

Although Hoover is an easy target, Shearer often chooses less likely victims to lampoon in his weekly satires on “Le Show.”

“I don’t want to do what another guy’s doing,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll hear another person do Dick Clark in your lifetime. I don’t limit my range of satire to the people I disagree with. I try to make fun of anything and everybody that’s around.”

It is that freedom to tackle anything and everything that has kept Shearer doing “Le Show” over the past decade. “I think it’s a unique situation in show business because I have access to something that approaches a mass audience and yet nobody reads a script and nobody hears the stuff before it goes on the air and I never have a meeting afterward,” Shearer said of the program, which is heard on about 70 stations nationwide. “It’s just me and the audience. And the communications media serve the function that I believe they should, which is to connect us, instead of keeping us apart. It’s kind of the reverse from the way the rest of this town works.”