Shep Gets PO'd
Airdate:
Tuesday - October 23, 1962
WOR Show Original Airing
(NOTE ABOUT TIME REFERENCES: Since there are many different copies of shows out there from different sources, all time references are from the beginning of one single recorded copy, since various copies, depending on when the recordee started recording, had news at the beginning or shortened themes. The times would vary from copy to copy.)
First Spoken Line After Theme Ends
Did you hear - what is this here, what's going on. . .
Show Description
[ Courtesy: - - ]
Shep gets PO'd, Cuban Crisis, GI bill of rights, 5220 club, working under assumed name, Quiz-Patrons of Chicago Radio just after war, caller calls him FLIPPANT and Shep gets PO'd, mysterious people, neighbors, Rabbit Fever & Hunting Rabbits, catch them in sack, Old coffin dug up removed 35 years, old body (early gruesomely)
[ Courtesy: GROK Summary - - ]
This monologue (WOR, October 23, 1962), delivered amid the Cuban Missile Crisis, is an irritated, digressive defense of humor and observation against accusations of being "flip," combined with reflections on public ignorance, guilt, concern, and neighborhood suspicion.
Reactions to the Cuban crisis
Shepherd comments on street interviews about the crisis and identifies three common types: those whose deep guilt makes them feel America deserves whatever happens; those who say "we should have blown them up long ago"; and those who claim they "know nothing" because they are "just a visitor." He argues that the vast majority of people know almost nothing about events more than a few feet away from them.
The man-on-the-street Axis-powers story
He recalls a post-WWII job (done under another name while on the GI Bill) doing man-on-the-street interviews in a Chicago theater lobby. The question was deliberately easy: "What was one of the Axis powers shaped like a boot?" A pleasant housewife from Harvey, Illinois (Mrs. Snodgrass) guesses Australia, then the Philippines, then Indiana. The moment is excruciatingly embarrassing; the gathered crowd shifts from annoyance to a kind of compassion for her total disconnection from the recent war. Shepherd uses it to illustrate the abysmal ignorance he regularly encountered in mass media.
Defending laughter against "solemnity"
Callers and critics accuse him of being flip. He rejects the charge: laughter is one of the most serious human reactions, while people readily cry over contrived movies or minor misfortunes and call themselves serious. Solemnity and seriousness are often divergent. He insists he is fully involved in the human condition and will share the same fate as everyone else. (He also plugs the Mandarin House restaurant and an 'Esquire' piece on Puerto Rico.)
"We're all in the same boat"
On Fifty-Seventh Street a drunk messenger bumps into him and mutters that "we're all in the same boat… if the boat sinks we all go down." Shepherd wonders whether the well-dressed lunch crowd streaming past would consider themselves more "concerned" about the world than this man.
Suspicion and the mysterious neighbor
He reads a clipping about a New Jersey doctor (Stanley Epstein) whose high backyard fence and occasional visitors sparked rumors of a "tannery," Buddhist camps, or illegal business. Officials shut down whatever it was; neighbors later said he was nice and almost nothing had happened. Shepherd then tells a childhood story of "Mr. Golambus," the neighborhood's odd man: he lived alone in a set-back house with sand dunes and uncut trees instead of a sod lawn, went out at night, and - most suspiciously - caught rabbits in a gunny sack and kept them alive in a hutch rather than shooting them for food. When someone digs up a coffin and steals a skull from the local graveyard, the neighborhood instantly decides Golambus is the culprit (macabre interests + rabbits + absence). In fact, seven high-school boys wanted a skull as a club mascot and prepared it in a basement. Golambus returns later; no one says a word.
Overall tone and point: Shepherd is genuinely PO'd at the easy moralizing, the confusion of solemn posturing with real concern, and the human readiness to project guilt, ignorance, or villainy onto others. The monologue treats these as endemic conditions - suspicion of the "different" neighbor, public ignorance, and the preference for crying over laughing - while defending observational humor as a legitimate, involved response to the human situation. Classic Shepherd: sensory, digressive, Midwestern-rooted, and philosophically pointed.
This Show
