The following is the text of the very last Unger Report from NPR's "Day to Day." In the coming weeks, Brian's commentaries will continue with a podcast on iTunes and updates on this blog. So stay tuned. And to make sure you don't miss anything, sign up for the Unger Report feed on the right.
The idea was to take a former correspondent from The Daily Show, and give him a few minutes each week to poke fun at the political and cultural goings-on in America.
…To allow on Mondays a tier-3 basic cable TV clown a few moments to amuse the dedicated, serious, intelligent listeners of public radio on its newest program Day to Day.
What a disaster that experiment turned out to be.
Despite the letters demanding NPR pull me off the air, and listener emails with comments like:
Drive off a cliff
Stick needles in my ears
In spite of the guy who wrote “I fucking hate the Unger Report," I persevered - mainly because no other contributor wanted to wake up at 4:30 every Monday morning.
And so began a 6-year odyssey of trying to perform comedy alone in a soundproof room. My dream had finally come true.
No story would be off limits. I was given free reign to poke fun at anything, any topic, any person as long as it didn’t insult listeners who donated money to public radio, members of congress who controlled funding to public radio, the FCC, Republicans, Republican listeners who donated money to public radio, Republican members of Congress who controlled funding to public radio, Republican FCC commissioners... and Nina Totenberg.
But I realized quickly that satirizing people, stories and events that had already been satirized all week long by Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, the entire cast of Saturday Night Live, Bill Maher, Conan O’Brien, Harry Shearer, Garrison Keiler, Peter Sagel, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, 9000 columnists, 2.6 million bloggers, and my drinking buddy Neal –- it was going to be difficult.
Yet I stuck with it. Mainly for the money. And NPR, and most of all – senior producer Steve Proffitt -- stuck with me. I will always be grateful to Steve for making me better.
I want to thank NPR for allowing me these few minutes each week, and despite calling me “slightly confused” and never giving me a raise in 6 years, gave me something no one can put a price on – meeting Noah Adams and seeing Alex Chadwick in biking shorts.
To Madeleine Brand and Alex Cohen who were forced to introduce me each week despite their better journalistic instincts, and to the staff of Day to Day, thank you.
But most of all, thank you to the listeners of National Public Radio. It has been an honor.
And now it’s time for me to drive away from NPR West, and in my rearview mirror as the NPR sign fades in the distance, I’ll think to myself, thank you God for letting me sleep in on Mondays.
Most importantly –- I hope that listeners who didn’t drive off a cliff or stick needles in their ears will follow me here in the coming weeks to UngerReport.com for more.
And that was the Unger Report -- for now. I’m Brian Unger.
