Harry Shearer’s <i>Le Show</i>

This essay introduces the voluminous archives of 40-plus years of Harry Shearer’s Le Show; addresses the historical, cultural, and scholarly value of Le Show; and introduces the concept of the sonic hyperlink to readers of this transdisciplinary journal. If journalism is the first rough draft of history, Le Show is a second, revised through a lens of satire, each week managing not only to teach but somehow to delight—though the delight is sometimes excruciating. Across four decades and dozens of technologies for audio production, recording, and circulation, Le Show has compelled Shearer to create brilliantly produced and delivered topical sonic satire nearly every week. For more than 40 years Le Show has provided listeners with satire, music, and news in different proportions depending on the decade. Le Show has been delivered via terrestrial radio, streaming audio, and podcast. Shearer’s stunning capacity for creating and voicing characters, his facility with audio production and use of “found sound,” and his concern with public memory—the facts of history and what should not be forgotten—make Le Show a massive series of conceptual and sonic hyperlinks to 20th- and early 21st-century news and culture.