TONY NAGELMANN
Nearly 2.7 million weekly listeners tune in to 450 stations to listen to Peter Sagal’s antics on ‘Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!’
passion for theater thrived. He was a member of the school’s Hasty Pudding theatrical troupe, Harvard’s renowned sketch comedy team. “Harvard gives you this chance to just go out and do things,” Sagal says. “There’s this presumption that you can do anything you want at Harvard. I didn’t major in theater; I just did it, putting on plays all the time.” Sagal headed West with a friend after college and soon found himself working as the literary manager for a regional theater in Los Angeles. The position gave him 42
Wavelength
insight into the playwriting process and the manuscripts he was reviewing inspired him to follow in their creators’ footsteps. He left his L.A. job in 1990 to begin writing but had a few detours on his way to New York’s theater industry, including freelance writing gigs, a stint ghostwriting a porn director’s biography and almost starring in a Michael Jackson video. “I was supposed to be a snake charmer in ‘Do You Remember the Time,’ but we never shot the scene,” Sagal says. By 1997, Sagal was living in Brooklyn and working as a playwright. His first child with wife Beth was on the way. And that’s when he got a call from Chicago Public Radio. “They hired me to be one of the original panelists, and then they decided later that they wanted to switch things up a bit and try me out as host,” Sagal says. Liking the new formula, Wait Wait producers decided to make things permanent, so Sagal loaded up the car and moved the family to Chicago. “In a period of three months, I had nothing but tremendous change—a new career, a new city, I was becoming a parent and homeowner,” he says. “It was so much change, and I had no control.” Celebrating more than a decade as the Wait Wait host, Sagal, whose show won a Peabody Award in 2008, is now the father of three girls ages 4, 7 and 10. He and his wife of almost 15 years live in a 104-year-old Victorian house on Chicago’s urban fringe. He drives a minivan, has a deck and has become an avid runner, completing four marathons. “It’s the same suburban life I grew up in,” he says. Sagal’s first book, The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them), first hit store shelves in 2007. A series of essays about sketchy behavior, Sagal’s book, which was recently released in paperback, let him peer deeper into lifestyles he had only glimpsed while ghostwriting for the porn director. Living a somewhat vanilla life, where hot dogs and strong coffee are his worst vices, Sagal says he was a bit nervous about crossing into society’s darker side—gambling, swinging, prostitution, pornography—but he knew the payoff would be worth his discomfort. “I think the Eliot Spitzer situation is the perfect reason I had to write this book,” he says. “I had to answer my own curiosity and find out what drives people to these choices. It also happened to be an occasion for me to be funny, and I tend to lean toward any opportunity to be funny.” Fans can catch Sagal leaning toward funny every Saturday at 11 a.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. on KJZZ. And, if things go well, you might soon see a TV-version of the quiz show, which shot a pilot with CBS Entertainment last fall.