For the first few moments of his show in Lawrence on Saturday night, Ira Glass spoke from a pitch-black stage to the capacity crowd at the Lied Center.
In the dark, he played audio clips of high school girls, caught in gang violence, talking about the possibility of being shot on a street corner. In other mediums, Glass pointed out, those girls might be seen as punks. But the power of radio is that you can't see them at all. "On the radio, if somebody is talking and they mean it and it means something to them, you can't help but have it go to your heart," he said.
During his nearly two-hour talk, the host of This American Life explained why his show is addictive and how he reels his listeners in. It's not just about finding the right people; it's about abandoning the emotional straight-jacket of traditional news.
"I want to start by talking about something that I wish somebody had said to me during college: the importance of amusing yourself," Glass said.
When he started TAL -- now the most popular podcast in the nation
most weeks -- one of the main objectives was having fun. "That really
was built into the DNA of our show," he said. "This notion that, in
addition to doing all the idealistic things that public broadcasting
does, part of the idea of the show and part of what was new about the
show was that, just as aggressively, it would be entertainment. It would
be unabashedly entertainment."
Throughout the evening, Glass referred to his fellow broadcast journalists as "my people." And, his people, he said, have a bizarre allegiance to segregating the serious from the funny. Because of that dry delineation, his people are losing audience to the likes of Stephen Colbert and Sean Hannity every year. "And one of the ways opinion in all its forms kicks our asses is that opinion talks in a normal voice," he said.
"Most broadcast journalists through this accident of tone, through this super-serious, corny, old-fashioned tone, what they portray is a world utterly without surprise and pleasure and humor and sense of discovery and joy," he said. "So by going out in the world with the mission of making stories whose message is, 'Look at this! It's amazing!' what that's doing is reasserting that the world is a place where pleasure and surprise and humor and joy are all possible. Like, thank God, we still live in a world where that's not just possible, but it's around us all the time. So this is my problem with most journalists on the radio and TV is that they make the world seem less interesting and smaller and ... stupid."
Glass' style, mixing the serious with the amusing, isn't just winning high-brow journalism awards. The average listening time for his hour-long show, he pointed out, is nearly 50 minutes -- which means, once people tune in, they can't turn it off. So how does he do it? By employing a structure that's as old as God. "It's not only in the Bible; it is the Bible," Glass said with a laugh.
Step one: Start a sequence of events. It doesn't matter if the action is about a guy in his office under the most mundane of circumstance. It's like a train leaving the station; you have to see where it goes. "It's not about argument," Glass said. "It's not about logic. It's not about reason. It's about motion. ... You can create suspense with the simplest of tools."
Step two: Amid the action, pause for reflection. "What is the universal something in this story; what's the universal thing it's gesturing at?" Glass said. "On the radio you want to say what the thing is. ... We say the moral of the story when talk to each other, and the radio needs to do that, too."
Of course, the structure doesn't make finding surprising, poignant stories any easier. To get those three or four gems that air each week, Glass said, his staff follow-up on submitted stories, scour the internet for applicable content and, when all else fails, they call their friends. "It's sort of like we need lightning to hit every week," he said. "And you can make lightning hit, if you give it a chance, if you walk around in the rain enough."
He shared plenty of those stories on Saturday night. He played clips of a man mistaking a midget co-worker for his colleague's nine-year-old daughter and a husband pouring his wife's ashes into the cemetery parking lot because he was outraged by a $16 fee. He told some personal stories, too, about his grandmother meeting Hitler and his in-laws nearly conversing with the 9/11 hijackers. And he proved his point about the insight and humor of his stories. With an ice storm making the roads more treacherous by the minute, the audience was captivated for nearly two-and-a-half hours by an awkward-looking dude, playing some CDs on an otherwise empty stage.
But Glass ended with a yarn that wasn't his own.
With the quintessential This American Life-style music swelling behind him, the radio host told a rendition of the Arabian Nights, the story of a woman who is spared by a murderous king for 1,001 nights because she keeps her captor wrapped up in the suspense of the stories she tells. "So remember what I'm telling you today, because these are tools that can save your life," Glass joked.
There was a serious lesson in Arabian Nights, too. Because of the woman's stories, Glass said, the king learned empathy. He ultimately spared the woman's life.
"Narrative is a back door to a really deep place in us," Glass said. "A place where reason doesn't necessarily hold sway. All of us in the room tonight live in a very unusual cultural moment where we're bombarded by stories like no other people who have ever lived. ... It's not just that we see actors everyday. Everything is a story. The NFL is a story and every story on the Internet is a story. Every ad is a story, every song is a story, and just, like, every little thing, all day long, is a story coming at us. I don't know about you, but it's rare for a story to feel like it's possible that that story could be me; that that's what it would be like to be that person. When that happens, you definitely notice because it's so unusual. And I don't know if it's important to make stories that have that power, but it's important to me. Like, when it happens, I feel more sane."
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I was actually just out looking for some Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five Videos when I saw this post...
Carolyn (or other TAL friends),
I was wondering if there's any way to get a transcription or audio from the show? I've been hunting since Saturday for the David Sedaris clip about the Central Park Zoo that Ira played. What a spellbinding story (and what spellbinding storytellers, both Ira and David). That Sedaris clip seems to be nowhere to be found.
Enjoyed your review, by the way.
Carolyn,
I sought out a review of this performance because I was so delighted by what he presented to us Saturday night that I didn't know how I would sum it up if asked to write a review. To touch on the best parts is a daunting task when someone wows his audience as consistently as Glass did.
That said, I think you did a beautiful job. This article's a keeper -- thanks for documenting the night so well!
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