Ira Glass at the Overture Center
Coming to a town like Madison, and performing at a theater so close in proximity and time to the one-year anniversary of last year’s pro-union protests, seemed a prime opportunity for radio legend Ira Glass to pander heavily to the Scott Walker-haters in the Overture Center crowd Saturday. But he largely skipped the easy target to instead revel in how Wisconsin went from a peaceful cheese-eating haven to a cultural war zone in the course of a year—the mixed reception to his Wisconsin-centric material in Milwaukee might have had something to do with that. Instead, the This American Life host put on his unbiased professor hat for the audience as he broke down the anatomy of what makes a good episode of TAL, and in the process dove into what exactly makes up the components of a good story.
The most important part of any story? Momentum—a narrative component that Glass even builds into the production setup of his show. He struts back and forth across the sparse stage, opting to cue up his own audio excerpts via his iPad to keep each clip tightly timed with the points he makes. He broke down a few older stories to demonstrate that even when stories on the show describe something mundane, they suck in the listener by creating mystery at every turn. “Every story is a detective story,” he explained.
Glass stressed that “good stories happen to those who can tell them,” both ripping on people who can’t share an anecdote without putting their audience to sleep and demonstrating what makes the TAL format so compelling. There’s something especially earnest about hearing a person tell their own story, in their own words, while the reporter stands aside and just reacts honestly to what they have to say—a feeling that Glass and his corps of producers strive for each week.
There were plenty of production horror stories as well—Glass played one story that was funny, charming, and fit the weekly show’s theme perfectly, only to be scrapped at the last minute because producers discovered that it was completely made up. But Glass explained that sifting and winnowing comes with the territory of doing a weekly show with a high bar for quality. “You can make sure that lightning hits you every week,” Glass said. “You just have to wander around in the rain for a long time.”
Glass concluded the show with a brief Q&A session, which a particularly ambitious 10-year-old seized upon in order to ask what he needed to do to be taken seriously on the merits of his work instead of his experience level. The kid suffered the thousand-yard stares of the insecure twentysomethings in the crowd as Glass explained that the Internet is the ultimate meritocracy, eliminating all the barriers to getting good work out in front of people. So in a way, he did touch on the political unrest in Wisconsin, but only in the sense of how good ideas and positive actions have a tendency to create a sense of community and interesting stories.
