Wiretap host is going to get Old Testament on your ASS

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This article was published 16/04/2009 (6332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The CBC has little to gain by adopting the American user-pay system of public broadcasting, says a Canadian whose radio program airs on both sides of the border.

"What the CBC has is unique and special," says Jonathan Goldstein, the creator and star of the cult-favourite comedy show Wiretap.

"I used to do pledge drives, and I was never any good at asking people for money."

Goldstein, a Montrealer, will be in Winnipeg on Sunday as part of the CBC Winnipeg Comedy Festival.

His taping of Wiretap will be done before a live audience at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, accompanied by his Winnipeg friends, John K. Samson, frontman of rock band the Weakerthans, and his wife, singer-songwriter Christine Fellows. The show has been sold out for weeks.

"Sitting in a studio is so theoretical," Goldstein says. "I like doing live stuff where I get to meet the people who listen to me."

A surreal blend of the old comedy skits of Woody Allen, Nichols & May and Bob Newhart, Wiretap has engendered a devoted following since it debuted in 2004.

On the show, which Radio One airs at 1 p.m. Sundays and 11:30 p.m. Wednesdays, Goldstein tells whimsical stories and engages in semi-improvised phone conversations with his real-life friends, who appear to regard him with derision and contempt.

"They’re the witty ones," Goldstein, 39, says. "I have to edit out all my giggling."

A writer by inclination, Goldstein is also on the road to peddle his second book, Ladies and Gentleman, the Bible!, a collection of Old Testament parodies published by Penguin in Canada and Riverhead in the U.S.

"The characters in those Old Testament stories, like Sampson and Goliath, were my first action heroes," says Goldstein, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Jew.

"The Bible had the greatest childhood resonance for me, until Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley took over."

Before Wiretap made him a star in select Canadian households, Goldstein spent two years as a producer in Chicago with the celebrated U.S. National Public Radio show This American Life.

There he met fellow Canadian Paul Tough, who went on to edit the now-defunct Saturday Night magazine and bought articles from Goldstein and, among others, Winnipeg novelist Miriam Toews.

A fan of the Weakerthans, Tough (who also has a sister, a United Church minister, in Winnipeg) introduced Goldstein to Samson and Toews.

Also included in this informal club, a kind of Canadian version of the U.S. Believer crowd, is the writer David Rakoff, the graphic novelist Gregor Ehrlich and Goldstein’s ex-wife, the Montreal novelist Heather O’Neill.

Samson won the CBC’s Canada Reads series in 2007 when he defended O’Neill’s breakout bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals. The year before he won with Toews’ A Complicated Kindness.

"I like Winnipeg a lot," says Goldstein, whose Wiretap show also airs in a dozen U.S. markets on NPR.

"Winnipeg has a melancholy quality about it that I associate with the Montreal of my childhood. If you put me in a booth in Rae & Jerry’s, I could live there forever."

 

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca