This select, interdisciplinary symposium featured presentations on and conversations about the archives-in-progress of Harry Shearer’s weekly radio program, Le Show, now in its thirty-ninth year. The CAS 2023 Summer Symposium included sessions on the Penn State campus as well as presentations from remote correspondents, including a conversation with Harry Shearer.
On Sunday morning December 4, 1983, Shearer took his talents to public radio with a program initially called The Voice of America, then The Hour of Power, and finally Le Show. Since that date, writer, actor, director, musician, composer, and multimedia artist Shearer has nearly every week written, performed, produced, and delivered an hour of news, music, satire, and impromptu commentary via terrestrial and satellite radio broadcast and, more recently, podcast.
If journalism is the first rough draft of history, Le Show is the second, revised through a lens of satire, each week managing not only to teach but somehow to delight — though the delight is sometimes excruciating. Harry Shearer is a portal: Learn one thing from Le Show, and you’ll quickly learn half a dozen more by logical consequence. Shearer’s thousands of impersonations — what rhetoric handbooks have for millennia categorized as ethopoeia and prosopopoeia — along with scores of characters of his own creation make Le Show a massive series of conceptual and sonic hyperlinks to late 20th- and early 21st- century news and culture.
The Le Show archive is part of the Library of Congress’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The AAPB Le Show archive offers online access to more than 2,000 programs and pre-recorded elements digitized from Shearer’s own collection. The Library of Congress exhibit on the Le Show archive was curated by Rosa A. Eberly, Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the departments of Communication Arts & Sciences and English; Eberly was also instrumental in getting the Le Show archive to the Library of Congress. The symposium was sponsored by Penn State’s Department of Communication Arts & Sciences, College of the Liberal Arts, Center for Humanities and Information, and Department of English.
See Speakers page of this website for details on the symposium’s featured speakers.
Contact:
Rosa A. Eberly rhosa@psu.edu , @rhosa on Twitter
Harry Shearer at WWNO in 2019. Photo by Rosa A. Eberly.