Peter Sagal with Lois Reitzes on Atlanta's WABE FM

Local radio personality Lois Reitzes interviewed Peter Sagal for her program City Lights on WABE-FM in Atlanta. I enjoyed hearing the backstage perspective on his radio program Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Lois asked him about a distinction he draws between insults and mockery. Sagal says he hopes never to insult anyone. "It doesn't help the person you insult," he said. "No one ever says, 'He called me a moron. Maybe I should reconsider my approach.'" He added that insults don't do anything for the insulter beyond feeding the adrenaline rush we're all addicted to on social media.

"But mockery," he says, "brings powerful people down to our human level. It doesn't change anyone, or else Ted Cruz would've resigned years ago," but it's a comfort and it takes the anger out of the news. That's what has brought me back to his show regularly for many years now.

That, and the enjoyment I have just feeling that I know the panelists. Sagal's producer and benevolent overlord Doug Berman, who also produced the much-beloved Car Talk, taught Sagal that it's not how clever you are, but whether people who listen alone in their cars or in the shower get to feel that you're someone they like to be with.

I first heard the show when it was studio-only panel show, and the jokes were about Bill Clinton and the Blue Dress Scandal. When the ex-President was a guest on the show years later, Sagal started by asking Mr. Clinton, "Have you ever heard our show, Sir?" Hearing "no," Sagal said, "Then I just want you to know that we have always treated you with the utmost respect." Big laugh. By the way, Clinton had to answer trivia questions about My Little Pony.

Recently, Sagal made me cry. He waited to the last five minutes of the show to pay tribute to longtime panelist P. J. O'Rourke who had just died of lung cancer. "That persona of the cantankerous grouch was just that, a persona," Sagal told us. When Sagal's mother died, O'Rourke in a note told him that "you never get over it, but" you develop a nostalgic ache that becomes "a kind of comfort."

The next week, Sagal played clips of O'Rourke from the show, including one from 2016 in which the conservative columnist made an announcement, later quoted on NPR's website:

I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises.... It's the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she's way behind in second place. She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters.