Comedian Mo Rocca, a regular on 'Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me,' discusses his 'Mo'bituary' about the iconic North Dakota jazz singer, Peggy Lee. He shares his admiration for her legacy. Also, explore the Winter Finch forecast in this week's Natural North Dakota segment.
Mo Rocca Transcript
Ashley Thornberg:
This is Main Street on Prairie Public. I'm Ashley Thornberg, and today on the show, you might know him from The Daily Show, or Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, or CBS Sunday Morning, or Henry Ford's Innovation Nation, or My Grandmother's Ravioli. Or maybe you go way back and you know him as the role of Seymour in his university production of Little Shop of Horrors back at Harvard. It's Mo Rocca. Thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
Mo Rocca:
Ashley, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be talking to you.
Ashley Thornberg:
Should I call you Mo or Mo Rocca?
Mo Rocca:
You know, let's just fast track our relationship and just call me Mo. Just Mo.
Ashley Thornberg:
All right. Mo, it's wonderful to have you on, and we are having you on today because of this fascination that you have with two different things. One, obituaries - more on that later - and then two, the legendary singer-songwriter from Wimbledon, North Dakota, Peggy Lee…Those loves came together in a recent episode of Mobituaries. This is where you produce audio obituaries, and the episode is called, “The Death of Cool”. Mo, why did you want to focus on Peggy Lee?
Mo Rocca:
I'm drawn to subjects for different reasons, and oftentimes there will be a figure that I know is important and that I only know a little bit about and it's like an itch I have to scratch…Peggy Lee was one of those people. And candidly, she was a big gap in my Great American Songbook pop culture knowledge.
…I've always been more interested sort of in the American songbook than, say, contemporary music. Peggy Lee was somebody that I'd never really immersed myself in…I'll tell you also, I'm at CBS Sunday Morning, the network's flagship arts and culture show, and Holly Foster Wells, wonderful granddaughter of Peggy Lee, came to us as Peggy Lee's 100th birthday was approaching and said, listen, we would love to work with you guys on a piece and I leapt at it for affirmation reasons. And as I got into it and began listening more and more, I couldn't believe how, and it's a word I don't get to use a lot, how protean, how multifaceted this woman was, and just how many different sounds she had. That's the first thing that really grabbed me is, a lot of time you hear a couple of notes from a singer and you know who that singer is. But there are so many different Peggy Lees. So I needed to know where she was from. And I love North Dakota anyway. I'd been out to the western part of the state when I did a piece about Teddy Roosevelt and went out to the Elkhorn Ranch. And I loved that. So I was looking for an excuse to come back to North Dakota.
So I've basically given you three different reasons, and they're all major factors here.
Ashley Thornberg:
How much time did you get to spend in Wimbledon, North Dakota?
Mo Rocca:
I was in North Dakota, I must confess, for only three or four days. We spent a day in Wimbledon with Holly at the train depot, where Peggy spent her teenage years, and the second floor of which is the Peggy Lee Museum. Maybe the whole thing is the Peggy Lee Museum, but the second floor was where she lived at that time. But I really loved the drive from Fargo where I stayed out to Wimbledon. I love the landscape.
Ashley Thornberg:
Yeah, you get a lot of time to spend in your own imagination. There's not much blocking your imagination when you're driving across North Dakota.
Mo Rocca:
I think that's right, but that time is really important. I live in New York City, and the only time I get to really unwind and think is when I'm washing dishes. I love to wash dishes by hand. I actually don't love to use the washing machine a lot. But driving out to Wimbledon, I even turned off the radio. I was able to just think, “This is where this woman came from. This is the landscape she grew up around.” And I immediately thought, there's something so spare in the way she sings. She cuts out all but the essentials. And I thought, I wonder how much of that was the influence. I'm not really like, “Woo, woo, woo, woo, New Age-y-ary fairy,” and all that - I really do think it must have had a great influence on her sound and her style.
Ashley Thornberg:
I have heard that said about Peggy Lee before too, but I want to just go back to what you said about that meditative state that you get into with your mind. Because I'm always curious with people who are really at the top of their game, and someone who is pulled in as many directions as you are, at that ability to find that mindset. How important is that for you?
Mo Rocca:
It is really, really important. And it's a struggle because I love doing a lot of different things - It keeps me stimulated - but then you need to latch into something if you're going to do a story about it, and you're going to do it the right way. You need to feel something. One of the other episodes in this series was about Jim Thorpe and it took a while to really key into his story - an extremely important story. But with Peggy Lee, keying into it, it meant reading one of the biographies - I've read the Peter Richmond biography - talking to Holly, of course, and then just listening to the music. That was a big part of it. But to answer your question, it's really important to be able to get into the zone, and that requires time.
Ashley Thornberg:
Let's play a little clip from the Mobituary episode, “The Death of Cool”. We are visiting today with Mo Rocca about his Mobituary to Peggy Lee.
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca, “The Death of Cool”
Mo Rocca: That wind, it's like a rumbling.
Holly Foster Wells: It's powerful. It feels like it could blow this house down.
Mo Rocca: I met Peggy Lee's granddaughter, Holly Foster-Wells, on the second floor of an old train depot in the tiny town of Wimbledon, North Dakota. There's no other way to put it. This place is in the middle of nowhere, 30 miles from the big city of Jamestown, North Dakota, where Peggy was born in 1920. Today, this train depot is the Peggy Lee Museum. It's also where Peggy lived when she was a teenager, or standing in her bedroom.
Holly Foster Wells: The first time I came here and I walked upstairs and I stood in front of this window, I burst into tears.
Mo Rocca: By the way, Holly really looks like her grandmother. Blonde hair, same big bright eyes.
Holly Foster Wells: Even today, when we've been talking here, it's like I feel her here.
Ashley Thornberg:
Right away, Mo, this idea that you're ending on there, that she could feel her presence there, did you get that sense too?
Mo Rocca:
Yeah, I did and it's even when you're playing that right now, I'm very moved by it. Because there's something - it's a word that's thrown around, but there's something moving about genius.
This girl who is basically manning this train depot by the age of 14, because her father, whom she loves, has such a terrible drinking problem. Her mother is long dead. The stepmother is abusive. But she's got this radio, and she's hearing this music produced by people unlike anyone she knows. A lot of it is Black music, and she connects to it. She connects to the pain of the music and she really starts thinking about it. And so she's writing poetry in high school, and an artist is being born.
And I even read somewhere that the sound of the train along the tracks - that was her first lesson in rhythm…So she wasn't being signed up for after school classes, driven around. She didn't have helicopter parents sending her for private lessons in voice and drama and dance. This is that kind of alchemy that happens of people who have something inborn, an incredible antennae and sensitivity, and she was a seeker. She was constantly curious with very little formal education, and just kept absorbing and wanting and learning and creating. It's very moving to me.
Ashley Thornberg:
Yeah, it's really interesting to hear you say a word to genius, because it's really easy to just say Einstein or give that term to somebody who works with concrete numbers and things like that. How do you think of genius when it is on this level that's just much harder to articulate?
Mo Rocca:
I think it's vision…There was a club - I wish I had a time machine and could go back to the Basin Street East club, which was in New York City - and there's terrific - actually, I want people to my podcast - but there's also a terrific PBS special about Peggy and she had a vision for - she walked into the club and she said, I need the stage to be pushed out into the center. They basically had to reformat the club. She knew how she wanted the lights to be and how to play to those lights. She knew what she wanted the experience to be for the audience. So that's a vision. That's not a girl singer who's just hired because she has a good voice and is thrown into a situation. That's somebody who says, I'm going to create an experience, a show for you. And Holly says, when she was a little girl, she would travel with her grandmother. Can you imagine that? What a life that would be being eight years old and your grandmother is Peggy Lee and you're traveling around the country with her? And she would see grown men cry when they would hear her sing certain songs…That's about having a vision, but also having the inner core to say, this is my vision and I'm good enough that all these people around me, these talented people, are going to fall in line and work with me on it to achieve it. It's a combination. I think in her case, it's a combination of something inborn, and then something practiced, and then a kind of will to see it through.
Ashley Thornberg:
I want to play another clip from the Mobituary episode, “The Death of Cool”, where she first starts to understand how to become Peggy Lee essentially, and the voice that she has. and I think it perfectly illustrates what you're talking about; this level of genius and how to draw people in. Because typically, you'd expect somebody in a crowded room to be the loudest person to get attention and that's not what she did.
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca, “The Death of Cool”
[Speaker]: People are just laughing and so she's getting pissed off. And she's only like 19 and she's singing in a good club in front of celebrities. She's pissed.
Mo Rocca: And that's when Peggy decided if she couldn't sing over them, she'd sing under them.
[Speaker]: She starts singing softer and softer until people start getting quiet because they can't hear her singing. And now they're listening. And now they're captured. That's when she understood volume wasn't going to be the thing. Nuance was going to be the thing.
Peggy Lee singing “Moments Like This”: Moments like this make me thrill through and through.
Mo Rocca: Now, there's no recording from that evening, but here she is decades later, casting a similar spell over the crowd at Manhattan's Basin Street East Club.
[Speaker]: She knew that the more she could get the room silent, the more she's got them.
Peggy Lee singing “Moments Like This”: Nonchalantly, we’d dine.
[Speaker]: She said the challenge is to leave out all but the essentials.
Mo Rocca: Peggy would cultivate a style that was as minimalist as the landscape she'd grown up in. Cool, but never cold.
Ashley Thornberg:
We have heard that phrase twice now, “all but the essentials”. And previously you used the word nuance.
Mo Rocca:
When you hear her singing just for a brief bit there, you understand why KD Lang and Billie Eilish, Billie Eilish very much today has cited emphatically Peggy Lee as an influence. For CBS Sunday Morning right now, I'm doing a piece about the early career of Barbara Streisand, who was coming up in the early 60s, and in Streisand's memoir she talks also about playing clubs early in her career and rather than trying to please the audience or project out, to turn inward. And by turning inward, you create a magnetic force in that the audience comes to you. Peggy came up earlier, much earlier than Streisand had, and Peggy understood that too, I think…this idea, which is a very bold idea. In that situation, in the 1930s, Peggy was playing at a birthday party for Jack Benny. She was unknown. Jack Benny, a big star. Stars were there. They're talking. They're like, oh, who's this woman who's singing? And she's very young, but she knows to just bring it down and make them come to her. And that's pretty cool.
Ashley Thornberg:
That's power.
Mo Rocca:
Yeah, that's power.
Ashley Thornberg:
I wonder, Mo, do you use a similar structure when you are telling stories? How do you look at a story and break it down to just the essentials?
Mo Rocca:
It's about telling the truth and asking yourself periodically, are these things that I believe as opposed to things that I think the audience wants to hear, and stripping it down to that, which is sometimes scary and hard to do. I think the audience is smart. I think they know when you're BS-ing them and so don't try to fool them…I even just think as an interviewer, and I had to remind myself of this, it's a little bit of a balancing act, because you want to bring energy to an interview, especially if an interviewee is maybe nervous or something. But I also understand in terms of the performance of it that there's a power in restraint.
I think that's something certainly that Peggy understood too, because she could belt - if she wanted to, she could belt. She could sing like these American Idol contestants who every song ends on a big note. But I think she understood that there was a power in restraint. In Peter Richmond's biography, he quotes the late Marge Champion, who was a choreographer and a dancer, about Peggy. She said, “All great stars are keeping a secret.” And Peggy, there always was a sense that she was keeping a secret - not laying it all out there. Which I think a lot of contemporary performers don't understand. That there was a little bit of a mystery to her in that restraint, and I think that she understood that's what would keep drawing people back to her.
Ashley Thornberg:
Right. It's almost like using those people's imaginations as your own tool.
Mo Rocca:
Totally. I think that's absolutely right. I think it's absolutely right.
Ashley Thornberg:
You said that it can be really scary to strip a story down to its essentials and not just give the audience what they want to hear. Can you think of an example of a time, and maybe it's been too long considering how far you've come in your career, but when you were scared to tell the story the way the story demanded?
Mo Rocca:
Oh, boy. Let me think of a good example of that. Well, I think in this recent episode I did on Jim Thorpe, the great Native American athlete and the hero of the 1912 Olympic Games, who then was treated ultimately very unjustly when he had his medals stripped from him. They were only returned posthumously in 2022 to him. But I think because it was a little bit of foreign territory to me - because I've never reported really on sports - I've done Mobituaries about athletes, but this was pretty alien to me because he was an athletic icon, and I am not.
So I think that just saying, look, I've got to find a way to authentically connect with the story so that the audience doesn't feel also like they're getting just a Wikipedia entry on him. That can be a little - I wouldn't say a little nerve-wracking, It's a process - and I'm much more comfortable, it comes much more naturally to me, telling the story of somebody like a Peggy Lee, even though I wasn't really all that familiar with her body of work. But I am familiar with the Great American Songbook, and so that's a language I really understand.
Ashley Thornberg:
Working to authentically connect with the subject and the audience, what does a word like authenticity mean to you?
Mo Rocca:
Well, it's a great question because authenticity has had its meaning leeched from it because everyone is, like, authentic and iconic. These words are so overused, tt's driving me bananas.
Look, I think there's reporting a story, and then I think there's telling a story in a format like a podcast. So if I'm telling a story on CBS Sunday Morning, and it can be up to 10 minutes long - which is in today's TV terms very long, and I think people like that about the show because it goes more in depth - I'm still a reporter, and it's not about my opinions of things. It's inevitably going to reflect my interests, the way the story is told, but I'm still a reporter. I think in a podcast like the Peggy Lee podcast, which is 45 minutes long, it's appropriately more personal. So I can say more directly what I think about different things: my favorite things about her or what touched me. That's more implied in a shorter TV piece. And I should also say that I did do a piece on Peggy Lee first as a TV piece. It is a 10-minute piece, and you can easily find it on YouTubeif you just put Peggy Lee and Mo Rocca into the search, you'll find it. But the podcast is very different, it's not like we just took the TV piece and expanded it. It was meant to feel more intimate and personal, and I think it is.
Ashley Thornberg:
Why do you write or rewrite obituaries?
Mo Rocca:
My father loved them, and my father was not a gloomy person at all. He was a very optimistic, buoyant person. But he used to always say, I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, and when I was a kid, there were two newspapers. It was still a two-newspaper town. And I remember my father would say, oh boy, the obits is my favorite section of the paper. And I have this as well. He had a real sense of the romance of life. And I think a good obituary does feel like a movie preview or trailer for an Oscar-winning biopic. It has that kind of romance and that sort of sweep, because it's the story of someone's life, not their death, if it's done the right way. A good obituary is about someone's life, so I like that. And also, it's a very convenient format because it's a life story, it's a profile, and I like those.
Ashley Thornberg:
Yeah. Well, and a moment ago you used the word intimacy, and typically, obituaries are written by someone who had an intimate relationship with that person. When you're writing obituaries on people you have never met, how do you get into that space of intimacy?
Mo Rocca:
I think it requires - I don't have time to become an expert. I can't get to know someone as much as, say, a biographer would, but it's somewhere not that far from there. I get really wrapped up in these people's lives, and I know it's going to work once I really start feeling something. And it doesn't have to be that, oh, I think this person's the greatest person in the world. I did Benedict Arnold. We did, I should say, because I work with people that work very hard, we're a small team - but last season, we did an episode called “Before They Went Bad”. I was just very curious about people who were heroes before they became villains, and Benedict Arnold was one of those. He was extraordinarily valiant during the early part of the Revolutionary War. And so, I didn't come away loving Benedict Arnold, and I'm not even sure that I came away feeling sorry for him. As I learned the story, I did come away understanding his bitterness. And when he was passed over at different points for military promotions, and then also realizing how many people had switched sides. What he did was terrible. I want to be really clear about that. I don't want to get canceled. What he did was terrible in the end. He could have gotten George Washington himself killed, but I felt like I got to know him better. And I didn't like him, but he became more human to me. And that's when I know for this kind of a format for a podcast, that it's going to work.
Ashley Thornberg:
Is there anybody you wouldn't do a Mobituary on? Hitler seems like an easy question.
Mo Rocca:
Yeah, I wouldn't do one on Adolf Hitler. Somebody even like a Benedict Arnold is an exception to the rule. I don't rule out doing some truly horrible people. But I think there'd have to be another reason beyond that person's life to do it, to maybe talk about what was going on at that period. Sometimes we're doing a person, and it's also a good excuse to talk about what was happening at that time. For instance, one of the upcoming episodes is “A Death of a Dummy”, which is about the death of Charlie McCarthy, who was the wooden ventriloquist dummy that Edgar Bergen became a big star, partnering with, manipulating. And Candice Bergen, his daughter, Murphy Brown, film star, is the one and only interviewee for that. She came in for it, and she was great. But it's a nice opportunity, not only to talk about the phenomenon of a ventriloquist dummy who became a star on the radio, still so odd.
Ashley Thornberg:
My bucket list interview is a mime. One of these days.
Mo Rocca:
Is that right? Okay.
But also a chance to talk about vaudeville, where Edgar Bergen came up. So I love when these lives give me an opportunity to explore different periods in American history.
Ashley Thornberg:
You get into that in the Peggy Lee episode, and again, it's called “The Death of Cool”, and we are visiting today with Mo Racca. And you talk about the fact that this is a young white girl growing up in what is even now a predominantly - I mean, we're 89% white still in 2023 - and it was even more like that in years past. But she was listening to Black people and their music. And I'm thinking even of the recent Elvis movie where he was drawn to that style, but then people were critical of the fact that a white person was able to get famous doing the same thing, much more famous, doing the same thing that these Black people had been doing all along. Can you give our listeners just a little sense of the relations at the time and what it was like for her to be doing the kind of music that she was specific to being from North Dakota?
Mo Rocca:
She'd only done singing in the Lutheran Church growing up really before she was 16 or so. And then she was on a bus performing with bands in North Dakota and then in Minnesota before she was eventually discovered by Benny Goodman when she was singing, I believe it was in Chicago where he discovered her, where he came to hear her sing. Her first hit, “Why Don't You Do Right”, and Lil Green had originally sung it, but Peggy did a cover. And I think that at the time, some people even hearing Peggy's voice thought that she might be Black. There is no doubt that Peggy Lee had more opportunity and became successful more quickly because she wasn't only white, she was also beautiful. She was great. She was a beautiful blonde woman with a great talent. She did quickly create her own sound. So she wasn't simply imitating other singers. I think all great artists begin by imitating somebody. Sinatra, at the beginning of his career, was imitating Bing Crosby. But her relationship with Black artists, I wouldn't even say so much that it was complicated. She worshiped Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. And by the way, I should point out that she ended up singing the Lord's Prayer at Louis Armstrong's funeral. I think the love was mutual. She was the only white artist to be featured on a big birthday celebration, only solo white artist for Duke Ellington. All to say that I think that I wouldn't say that it was an exploitative relationship. I think that there was a lot of mutual respect there. She was an early champion of Ray Charles, and then Ray Charles brought her music to sing. And in this episode, I think we wanted to take pains to put it in context, because I think it's the kind of thing from a contemporary perspective that could be misunderstood.
Ashley Thornberg:
This is on me. We're more than 20 minutes into this conversation, and we have barely heard Peggy Lee sing. So I want to play another clip from your episode where you have talked a lot about her being a prolific songwriter, which is definitely a rarity for women back of that time, but also the way that she could interpret other people's songs. And you get such a good sense for something that you said earlier, which was that there are just so many Peggy Lees.
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca, “The Death of Cool”
Mo Rocca: She took the song “Heart” from the Broadway show Damn Yankees.
[Singing]: You gotta have heart.
Mo Rocca: And gave it a Latin beat. She took the song Lover, a waltz from the Rogers and Hart musical Love Me Tonight. And well, listen to what she did to that.
Mo Rocca: She takes that and turns it into something kind of wild.
[Speaker]:Her final notes have been likened to an orgasm.
Mo Rocca: And in 1958, she took the song Fever, originally recorded by R&B singer Little Willie John. And gave it a new, stripped down arrangement. Just bass, drums, and finger snaps.
[Speaker]
She's keeping so much in. If this is the only thing to signal what you're singing about, that's powerful.
Mo Rocca: It became the biggest hit of her career. That sequence in the middle that sounds almost like beat poetry. Peggy wrote that.
Ashley Thornberg: Did she get the respect she deserved?
Mo Rocca:
I think in the fifties, actually, I think she might have. I think when sort of her magnum opus or one of the first concept albums, Black Coffee, came out, I think that the hipsters not far from where I live now in Greenwich Village of Manhattan, they were smoking cigarettes, listening to her. I think people knew. Yeah. And, you know, Peter Richmond said she belongs on the pop jazz Mount Rushmore, along with Louis Armstrong, Sinatra, and Bing Crosby. I think what's happened is that her name has faded, I think precisely because of how multifaceted she was. Because I think that if you think of somebody like an Ella Fitzgerald, there is one great, wonderful sound. You know Ella Fitzgerald. But I think because in a strange way, Peggy's versatility has made her in a sense more forgettable. She's less sticky in the collective memory because there's not one sound we latch on to. So I think at the time she did get a lot of respect. I think now people don't realize what a forerunner she was as a singer/songwriter.
Ashley Thornberg:
You even have a clip of her sucking on a helium balloon.
Mo Rocca: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ashley Thornberg: And singing here. Very obviously, this is just playful, but I want to give a little sense of what it is to do a portrait of a person and get such a well-rounded creation.
Mobituaries with Mo Rocca, “The Death of Cool”
Peggy Lee: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full.
One for my master, one for my dame, one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
Mo Rocca: Yes, that's Peggy Lee singing on helium.
Peggy Lee: Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
Ashley Thornberg:
What was the first thing that went through your mind when you heard that?
Mo Rocca:
Well, I think she was a little loopy and I think especially as she got older, I think she was kooky. And I love that, and I've known people like that, and it's wonderful to be around. But I keep wondering what it must have been like for Holly, for her granddaughter, to be around that as a little kid…I think we've said she was a genius. And I think she, from what I understand, had a kind of outlandish sense of humor and was kind of zany. There are times I wonder if later stage Peggy Lee was giving off strong Jennifer Coolidge vibes.
Ashley Thornberg:
Who are some of your heroes?
Mo Rocca:
Oh, some of my - boy, who comes to mind? I guess some of the great songwriters, Harold Arlen…I love it because of the line of work I'm in. I love looking at old Mike Wallace interviews…they're kind of great. I always loved Gene Wilder. I love Streisand. And now I love Peggy Lee.
Ashley Thornberg:
What a great combination of heroes. I wonder, Mo, in the arc of your career, you were writing for television and on kids shows, and then all of a sudden you're in front of the camera on a little show most of us have heard of called The Daily Show. Talk a little about the transition from being behind the camera to on the camera.
Mo Rocca:
When I was on The Daily Show, it was just breaking out, which was a really exciting time to be on the show because it felt a little bit underground. And that was particularly exciting to go up to New Hampshire during the primaries in the year 2000. It's so long ago now: It's crazy how time goes by. It was an experience of growth because, I know it sounds awfully precious to say, but everyone, whether you're in the arts or not, is trying to find their voice over the course of their lives and hone that. And doing it on camera was an interesting experience. It had stops and starts, but it was also thrilling. It was thrilling to be on a cool show. And the host of it then was Jon Stewart. I know I'm speaking like this is like a history class, but it's been so long since Jon's hosted the show. And he was somebody with a real vision. I think he had been a successful standup comic, but I think his real talent wasn't so much in telling jokes, but in having a vision for what a show…sound like and what, you know, its aim should be…That runs deep…So I really, I learned a lot from that.
…I still have an image from early on. We all had to go on a trip to California for some press event and I remember…they put us in a really nice hotel in Pasadena in California. Most of us were out by the pool and Jon - this is so classic East Coast - was in sweats and coming in and out from his hotel room to consult with the other executive producer about jokes he was working on. He was so focused on making the show as good as it could be, and polishing and honing and honing and polishing the jokes. And that's sort of what I do with the podcast now…with the small team of producers I work with. We just keep going back. And I remember seeing that in Jon Stewart. I had also seen it earlier in a mentor of mine who developed the show Wishbone for PBS that I got my start on as a writer - a woman named Stephanie Simpson…These are people - and my boss at CBS Sunday Morning is that way, Rand Morrison - people who keep going back to something until they get it right. I think it's just - it's so important because there's a world of difference between something that's 95% done and 100% done…When you're at 95% it's still kind of ungainly and not quite there…It's a minority of people who go, no, that last 5%, even though it's going to require 50% of the entire effort of the whole thing…You know what I'm saying? Like it's so much more to get across that finish line. And that's what I, that's what I saw in Jon Stewart, and what I've seen in a few other people in my career.
Ashley Thornberg:
And it's so weird. It seems very counterintuitive that you should apply that sort of workshopping to a joke because jokes seem so of the moment.
Mo Rocca:
Yeah. That's the paradox, right? Of course you want it to seem effortless. You don't want it to be work for the audience. And a badly told joke is work for the audience. And that's why they don't laugh, because their brains are having to figure out what you're trying to tell them. It should go down really easy and that requires a lot of work.
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me It's a very different creative experience because we have every week people who craft the show, Peter Sagal and the producers, and then the panelists, the people who pop in like I do occasionally, we had the easy part because they've created this wonderful vehicle for us. And we just get to take a little ride in that and shoot our mouths off and they keep what works, and so it is truly spontaneous. But it only works because this vehicle - through hard work all week - has been crafted, and we're just dropped in at the last minute and just shoot our mouths off. And if it works and if it doesn't, it's on the cutting room floor.
Ashley Thornberg:
What's your favorite part of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me?
Mo Rocca:
Well, I think it's, it's the only job I've ever had that's both fun and easy, because usually stuff that's fun requires preparation and work - that's when it's fun. I know that sounds counterintuitive. And so when people go, “Oh, just have fun,” sometimes…it's sort of annoying to hear that because sometimes just having fun just results in something really sloppy if you're talking about a creative endeavor. But Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me? is different because…it only works if we really are just shooting from the hip and having fun.
Ashley Thornberg:
Yeah, I have gotten to the point with the, one of these is a real story and two of these are fake stories where I'll sometimes tell the fake story and then go, “Wait a second. Was that the one that was true or not?” Very, very convincing.
Mo Rocca:
Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah. That's a fun game to play.
Ashley Thornberg:
In 2015 you served as a lector during the mass for Pope Francis. A few years earlier, you had come out as gay in the Catholic church, historically not very friendly to the non-heteronormative crowd. Why did you want to work that?
Mo Rocca:
Part of the beauty of life is that people are complicated and can be many different things at once. The reason I was asked to be the lector and deliver a reading from the book of Isaiah is for years I've worked with a group that helps economically disadvantaged families send their kids to the inner city Catholic schools of New York City…These are heroic institutions and have served primarily immigrant populations… for over a hundred years. So in the 1920s, there were Eastern Europeans and Italian immigrants that were coming to New York - and the schools continue just doing amazing work for children of all faith backgrounds. So it's something I feel/believe in very strongly, because it's hard to think of something more fundamental than a kid either getting a good education and having a chance to get out of poverty or getting a lousy education. And unfortunately, a lot of the schools that are otherwise available to them are not good…We all hope they improve. This is an organization, a cause, I believe in very much. And so that's why I was asked to do it and I was happy to do it. And yes, there are contradictions, but we're all complicated works in progress.
Ashley Thornberg:
That is a theme throughout this entire interview, that you do this in order to deepen your connection and your understanding. I suspect you've always been this way.
Mo Rocca:
Well, I think so. I think one of the problems that we have today is that, I don't know, is that I would say that people are put into boxes, or now people are being put into two different columns, all the time. And it makes life less interesting, it makes life more acrimonious, and it also simplifies and dumbs things down. It's interesting this - interviewing Candace Bergen and learning about her life with her father. And they really loved each other. but it was a father/daughter relationship with tensions that come with any parent/child relationship. She was an activist and was more liberal certainly than her father, who was a real Republican coming up. But then when her father died, Reagan came and spoke at the funeral for which she was really grateful. And it's just moments like that when you hear people talking about it, it's a good reminder for everyone to just calm down and realize that people are complicated. They have friends that believe things different from what they believe, and this insistence on this, I don't know, rigid “which column are you in” is really hurting the country.
Ashley Thornberg:
Mo Rocca, what a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Mo Rocca:
Ashley, thank you so much. I love this. This has been great.
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