Harry’s Dead Air

Drawing on the primary example of Harry Shearer’s stylistic vocal pauses during his radio show (now podcast) Le Show, in this essay I argue that such pauses—or “dead air”—enact a resistant politics to state- and corporate-sponsored censorship, which has traditionally been termed “radio silence.” Listening to Shearer’s dead air vis-à-vis the traditional wisdom that silence on air is anathema, we can better discern the labor of hegemony in a number of contexts. The primary contextual example of a politics of dead air is the attempt to censor broadcasters critical of the US government after Nine-eleven. Even in silence the ungrateful dead can speak.