Who's Carl This Time?

CARL KASELL: From NPR and WBEZ-Chicago, this is WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!, the NPR News quiz. I'm Carl Kasell, and here's your host, at the Coronado Performing Arts Center in Rockford, Illinois, Peter Sagal.

(APPLAUSE)

PETER SAGAL, HOST:

Thank you everybody. Thanks, guys. Thank you. It is great to be here in Rockford at this beautiful Coronado Theater. Later on, we are going to be joined by Rockford's own Rick Nielsen, guitarist and founder of Cheap Trick. He'll be right here.

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SAGAL: But first, it has been such a crazy week. Everybody was coming up to us and they were saying, look, we really want to see Kim Kardashian in the new Tyler Perry movie "Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor," but who's got the time? Is there anything you folks at WAIT WAIT can do? Well, there is. Carl will now perform Kim Kardashian's best lines from "Temptation."

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SAGAL: These are all real lines from the movie. Here we go.

KASELL: Ugh, is this wool? It's making me itch.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: And?

KASELL: That's not makeup, that's makedown.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: There, we saved you 12 bucks.

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SAGAL: But we won't charge you anything when you call 1-888-Wait-Wait, that's 888-924-8924. Let's welcome our first listener contestant. Hi, you're on WAIT WAIT...DON'T TELL ME!

VALERIE JAY: Hi, this is Valerie from Fort Worth, Texas.

SAGAL: Hey, how are things in beautiful Fort Worth?

JAY: They're awesome.

SAGAL: That's great. We were in Dallas a little while ago, but we couldn't get...

JAY: I know.

SAGAL: We couldn't get a visa to get over to Fort Worth.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: How are things - I mean, is it very different over in Fort Worth from Dallas?

JAY: It is very different in Fort Worth than Dallas.

SAGAL: I imagine that traveling from one to the other is like going from Kansas to Oz, from black and white to color.

JAY: Yes, and color would be here.

SAGAL: Yeah, exactly.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Well, welcome to the show, Valerie. Let me introduce you to our panel this week. First, say hello to a Second City and "Colbert Report" alum, Mr. Peter Grosz is right here.

JAY: Hi, Peter.

PETER GROSZ: Hi.

(APPLAUSE)

GROSZ: How you doing?

JAY: Good.

GROSZ: Good.

SAGAL: Next, one of the women behind the Washington Post's Reliable Source column, it is Roxanne Roberts.

JAY: Hi, Roxanne.

ROXANNE ROBERTS: Hello, Valerie.

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SAGAL: And a comedian from Chicago and a host at vocalo.org, Mr. Brian Babylon is here.

BRIAN BABYLON: Yes.

JAY: Hi, Brian.

BABYLON: Hey, Val, how are you?

JAY: I'm good.

BABYLON: Great.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Valerie, welcome to our show. You're going to start us off, of course, with Who's Carl This Time. Carl Kasell is going to read you three quotes from the week's news. If you can correctly identify or explain two of them, you will win our prize, Carl's voice on your home answering machine. Are you ready to go?

JAY: I am ready.

SAGAL: All right, here is your first quote.

KASELL: DC, LA and Austin?

SAGAL: That was the Drudge Report, expressing amazement at the list of targets who is threatening to wipe off the face of the earth?

JAY: North Korea.

SAGAL: Yes, indeed, North Korea.

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(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Things are getting tense in the Korean Peninsula. North Korea, it's basically like a crazy guy living under a bridge with an old shopping cart filled with nuclear weapons.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Is threatening war against South Korea and also us. Their young, tubby president posed in front of a map showing U.S. targets for destruction. There was Hawaii, southern California, Washington, D.C. and Austin, Texas.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Austin?

BABYLON: What is that? What does he have against, like, hipster cowboys? I don't understand.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: He doesn't like alt country, and now he's threatening our hipsters.

BABYLON: And that's where we have to draw the line.

GROSZ: I live in Brooklyn, so I'm very worried.

SAGAL: I know.

BABYLON: Williamsburg wasn't on the list?

SAGAL: And you know what, the latest intelligence shows that North Korea has developed an ironic mustache-seeking missile.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: I am not scared, Brian.

ROBERTS: But don't you think this puts Portland at huge risk then, too?

SAGAL: Absolutely.

GROSZ: I think that like being on the east coast, I feel like totally - I used to live in Los Angeles. If I still lived there, I would be legitimately, possibly, almost scared. And on the east coast, I'd be like, I'm just going to see what happens.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Really?

GROSZ: Yeah. I don't think North Korea could wipe, like, a stain off of a table, much less like a city off of a map.

BABYLON: Well, hold on; don't let them hear you say that.

GROSZ: No, they don't listen to this show.

BABYLON: You're right.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: They listen to CAR TALK and then they turn off NPR.

BABYLON: Yeah.

GROSZ: They love those guys and then it's over.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(APPLAUSE)

BABYLON: Well, hold on, Peter.

SAGAL: Yes, Brian?

BABYLON: Isn't North Korea the soldiers that do like the Rockettes marching?

SAGAL: Yeah, they do all this really - what's the word - synchronized marching.

BABYLON: I'm not really worried about them, because that's exhausting.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: I mean they might have nice legs, but they're exhausted from all that.

SAGAL: You think that...

GROSZ: How did they get Rockettes' technology though? Who gave them the kick line?

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Maybe that's it. Maybe it's like we've been worried about them developing rockets, it's just been the Rockettes all along. Why worry?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: Christmas in North Korea is amazing.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Valerie, your next quote is from someone talking about one American's decision this week to give himself a pay cut.

KASELL: It's about as admirable as a mansion owner shutting off his marble fountains during a drought.

SAGAL: That was a man named Philip Bump, writing in the Atlantic Wire. He was writing about whose self-imposed 5 percent pay cut?

JAY: Barack Obama's.

SAGAL: Yes, indeed, President Obama.

(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: This week, President Obama announced he'd take a 5 percent pay cut to express solidarity with all the federal workers who've had to take pay cuts because of the sequester. President Clinton felt our pain. President Obama feels 5 percent of our pain.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Just like the furloughed park rangers, customs workers, he will travel from his free mansion to his free private jumbo jet in his free armored limo.

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SAGAL: And he is changing the name of his enormous private jet to Air Force .95.

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GROSZ: What a socialist. He is giving more money to the government.

SAGAL: I know.

ROBERTS: No, wait.

GROSZ: He can't take money...

ROBERTS: I'll take it.

GROSZ: ...enough money from us...

ROBERTS: I'll take it. It's 20 grand, right?

SAGAL: It's 20 grand.

ROBERTS: I'll take it.

SAGAL: This is amazing. This is 20 grand. I mean, you know, I mean thanks to the President's sacrifice the nation can now afford a 2010 Nissan Versa.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Valerie, you are doing very well. We have one more quote for you. Here it is.

KASELL: Much ado about nothing, I'd say.

SAGAL: That was a comment on a story posted in London's Telegraph newspaper. The story accuses what historical figure of being a food hoarder and a tax evader.

JAY: Oh, I don't know.

SAGAL: Well, to save all these newspapers or not, that is the question.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: Think about a...

JAY: Shakespeare.

SAGAL: Shakespeare, yes.

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(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: You may think that William Shakespeare was just a talented playwright who romanced Gwyneth Paltrow.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: But according to scholars, he was also a greedy bastard. A study of his business records back in Stratford-Upon-Avon shows that he would buy up grain and resell it at a massive profit during shortages. He was also accused of evading taxes on those profits. It turns out there were clues to these business dealings all along in his plays like "Much Ado About the Taxes I Don't Actually Owe You People."

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BABYLON: What was the taxman like back then? I'm curious about that.

SAGAL: I believe he was armed with a large cudgel.

BABYLON: What's the thing with the ball and the spikes?

SAGAL: That would be a mace.

BABYLON: Mace, yeah.

SAGAL: Yes.

BABYLON: That's a taxman for you.

SAGAL: There you are.

GROSZ: Why are there still - who has Shakespeare's tax records? I don't have my W-2s from, like, 2011.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: How do they have these like 500-year-old records? Shakespeare is like the easiest target for like historical revisionism. Like at one point wasn't it like it was seven different guys. And then it was like it was Francis Bacon.

SAGAL: It was Edward de Vere.

GROSZ: Yeah, it was all these. And now he was a grain hoarder. So he's a hoarder. Like we revere hoarders now, we put them on television.

SAGAL: This is true.

GROSZ: Who cares?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: He was a storage warrior.

SAGAL: Yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

GROSZ: He made duck calls with his friends.

BABYLON: I'm thinking like, you know, like old timey hoarding, like I like my hoarding modern, like newspapers.

GROSZ: Yeah.

BABYLON: And QVC purchases. You know, a whole bunch of quills is hard.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: The thing that gets me is the idea that he might have been in legal trouble. That these scholars have to do some tax records that he was underpaying his taxes and therefore he might have been liable. I mean it turns out that Elizabethan collar that you see him wearing; actually, it was like an early 17th century version of a tracking collar.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: And the idea was that if they put it on you, you couldn't leave your house because you couldn't fit through the door.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: He was like the Lindsey Lohan of his day.

GROSZ: That's hilarious.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: But if someone said that too, if they were like Shakespeare used to get drunk and drive a cart into a crowd of people, you know, and...

SAGAL: He was constantly getting on his horse without his underwear. Oh my god. And the paparazzi was out there doing etchings of him.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSZ: Oh, another up pantaloon etching of Shakespeare.

(LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Carl, how did Valerie do on our quiz?

KASELL: Valerie, you had a perfect game, three correct answers. So I'll be doing the message on your answering machine.

SAGAL: Well done.

JAY: I am so lucky.

(APPLAUSE)

SAGAL: Thank you so much for playing, Valerie.

JAY: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.