What’s Normal Now

Last Sunday, at around 9:40 a.m., satirist, writer and comic actor Harry Shearer parked his flagless Volvo at Santa Monica College and trudged down to the basement studios of KCRW-FM (89.9) to do his weekly show of music and topical satire, “Le Show.”

As it happened, Shearer entered the studio as Liane Hansen, host of “NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday,” was interviewing humorist Andy Borowitz about comedians and political humor. It was one of those stories the media have been doing lately: When Is It Safe to Be Funny Again? “They’re not making jokes now, because 90% of Americans are behind him,” Borowitz was saying about the sudden dearth of Bush jokes. “That’s the thing about humor. It’s self-regulating. If you know your audience, and you know 90% of them are behind what the president is doing, you don’t make jokes about the president. You don’t want to fail.”

Shearer seemed pleased to have heard something that struck him as foolish so close to air. As a humorist occupying a kind of bunker beneath the political and entertainment establishments, Shearer hasn’t really pulled back since Sept. 11, despite the exit polls. He’s done three editions of “Le Show,” using his gift for voices (Shearer does many of the characters on “The Simpsons”) to satirize the same figures and the same issues that have suddenly become sacrosanct for comedians and writers working for television networks and movie studios.

Two weeks ago, for instance, Shearer probably became the first satirist, officially, to lampoon Bush since the crisis began, doing one of his phone conversations between “41” and “43,” as he refers to George Bush the elder and Bush the son, the 41st and 43rd presidents of the United States, respectively. “I found my mission,” 43 tells 41 of his determination to stamp out global terrorism. “I haven’t been this focused and this determined since the fourth time I quit drinking.”

That joke happens to be the only one Shearer says he’s second-guessed in the last several weeks. “It gave me a twinge,” he said of hearing it back. “I resist jokes that sound like the writer made the character say it.” But, he ultimately decided, the joke had “an emotional credibility to it.”

On this morning, Shearer imagined a lunch meeting between the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Mike Wallace--a rendezvous at a Harlem soul food restaurant where the “60 Minutes” titan alternated between being confounded by the menu and schmoozing Jackson for a spot on an Afghan peace mission. Shearer writes and records most of the comedy on Saturday, the day before he does the show live in Santa Monica, from 10 to 11 a.m. on KCRW.

“I’m sorry it sounds so self-serving, but I’ve never gotten such a wave of e-mails, not just liking the show or enjoying the show, but actually thanking me for the show’s existence,” Shearer said.

He has yet to fully lampoon other favorite targets, including CBS News paterfamilias Dan Rather, who became a media story himself when he broke down on CBS’ “The Late Show With David Letterman,” once while reciting from “America the Beautiful.”

“Who knows the third stanza of ‘America the Beautiful’ and can just whip it out and then decide they’re moved by it, you know?” Shearer said. “If you analyze what was going on, it’s show business.”

Nor does Shearer buy the premise, circulating among the culturati, that irony is somehow dead. “Some New Yorkers can’t refrain from going back to their old job of deciding what the cultural mood of the country is,” he said. “[Vanity Fair editor in chief] Graydon Carter declares the end of irony for us all. Thanks, Graydon.”

Shearer has been doing “Le Show” for over 17 years, and long ago he understood the value of doing satire free of charge, on public radio: You get to say what you want. This has become particularly valuable now, when so many in the humor business are focused on what not to say and whom not to offend. As viewers of late-night talk shows and the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live” witnessed, self-regulation is not an alien concept in late-night comedy--in fact, for the time being, anyway, it appears to be job one across the dial.

“The problem is, most of those guys, for better or worse, are comedians, and comedy only cuts so deep,” said Shearer, who did two tours of duty as a writer and performer on “Saturday Night Live” and tends not to hide his disdain for its operation. “But what they’re playing around with is stuff that’s normally the province of satirists, and satirists do go a little farther to the edge. That’s our job. So looking for them to do that is like looking for alcoholic beverages in a Seventh-day Adventist grocery store. It looks like the same thing, but it won’t be there.”

And yet, “Le Show,” which is heard on more than 50 NPR stations around the country, may not be as untouchable as Shearer might hope: WAMU in Washington, D.C., he recently discovered, has canceled him, having last aired “Le Show” Sept. 8.

Chris Naylor, the station’s director of public affairs, says the show was pulled in the short term for extended news coverage. But she added that the show was unpopular with listeners, although they were hearing it on tape delay, six days late, Friday nights at 10. “They want something that’s more humorous in that time slot,” Naylor said of management. In October, WAMU will replace “Le Show” with “Whad’Ya Know?” a humorous quiz show.

“I resent what the station in Washington did for two reasons,” Shearer said. “One, if they don’t explain it, which most stations don’t when they do this ... you’re left to think, ‘Well, maybe he chickened out of doing the show, maybe he can’t be funny now.’ So it redounds to my discredit, because they don’t say, ‘Hey, we’re taking it off because we don’t think you can handle this now,’ and it cheats those in the audience who do want to hear it.”

Shearer was in Melbourne, Australia, to tape appearances on a TV program called “The Panel” when the terrorists struck. (Melbourne is 17 hours ahead of Los Angeles.) It was late at night when he logged onto his computer and saw a strange message. “There’s a friend of mine who sends me internal network memos, via e-mail, and he e-mailed me a memo saying, ‘Here’s where you can go to find a camera position on the World Trade Center destruction,’ and I thought, ‘This is a macabre joke.’ ”

Unable to get home, Shearer spent the week in Australia and did his first post-attack “Le Show” from a studio in Melbourne that Sunday, at 3 a.m. He returned to Los Angeles the following day. Since then, he’s been back long enough to glean that “while the stock market index goes down, the hypocrisy index is way up.”

“I haven’t said this yet publicly, but I’m emboldened to because I heard a European aircraft executive say it. So I know it’s not just me now. A lot of airlines had these layoff lists already put together ... there is a lot of ‘out of respect, we’re going to do something we intended to do anyway,’ but now it’s out of respect . There’s a lot of that, and more to come.

“It’s like the war on drugs,” he said of the war on terrorism. “It’s a totally metaphorical war in which some people get killed. I expect the Partnership for a Terrorist Free America to start soon.”

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“Le Show” can be heard Sunday mornings at 10 on KCRW-FM (89.9).