Ask Me Another

» see npr.org/programs/ask-me-another as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Ask Me Another premiered on 4 May 2012, a co-production of NPR and WNYC Studios. The host was the Canadian American comedian Ophira Eisenberg and the format was a pub quiz with a budget. Four or five games an episode, built out of wordplay rather than general knowledge, played by contestants pulled from a Brooklyn audience with drinks in front of them.

Jonathan Coulton was the house band, which in practice meant one man with a guitar rewriting songs into puzzles. He would perform a well known track with the lyrics replaced by clues, and the contestant had to name whatever the new words were pointing at. Art Chung ran the puzzles from the side as the show's referee for its first six years. The celebrity segment at the end of each episode was called the VIP round, and the production treated it as a reward rather than the reason to tune in, which is a distinction most interview shows never manage.

Almost all of it was recorded at The Bell House in Gowanus, in front of a paying audience. Making a radio show that way costs a great deal more than making one in a booth, and the money is audible. The laughs are real and so are the pauses, and a contestant getting a question wrong in front of a room full of strangers has a quality no studio pickup can fake.

~ the trouble with a live comedy show on public radio ~

NPR already had a quiz institution in Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, which had been running since 1998 and sat on hundreds of station schedules. Ask Me Another needed its own slot on those same schedules and never quite got enough of them. The reporting at the time of the cancellation put it plainly. The team's work was not in question, but the network had limited resources and the audience never grew to the size the format cost to produce.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the last taping ~

The announcement came on 21 June 2021, through the show's own social accounts, with a date attached for the final taping. Eisenberg said publicly that she had been shocked by the news, and also that listeners had been loud in their support over the previous year. A pandemic had taken the live format away and left the team making the show through video calls, and the audience had noticed them going on with it anyway.

The final episode went out on 24 September 2021, the ninth year. The team's goodbye post on NPR's own site went up the same day. Affiliate stations kept airing repeats until 28 January 2022, so the show was on the radio for four more months after it stopped existing, which is why half the databases that track podcasts carry the January date as the end.

I have never listened to a full episode of this one. The show was built out of one room in Brooklyn and out of an American arrangement where a public network pays to put a quiz about song lyrics on the air as a civic good. Turkish radio has no slot shaped like that for it to arrive in. The NPR program page is still up, five years on, listing the final episodes in order.

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