Year: 2017

Blog Posts

Two Nights and Two Shows in Seattle

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In the past three years, I have had the opportunity to go to three live tapings of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, one in Seattle and two in Portland, my fair city. Since, I can never go to too many Wait Wait live tapings, I knew I had to head back up to Seattle when they announced that they were coming back to do two shows. As I was trying to find a way to make sure that I could queue up to purchase tickets the moment they went on sale to the general public, the awesome gang at Wait Wait said that they would hook me up with tickets to both shows. To say that I was ecstatic would be a significant understatement. At that point, I immediately booked my hotel room and submitted my request for time off from work and started …

Blog Posts

Taking a Look at the Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Panel Gender Mix

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Update: I have updated the tables with data to include data for all of 2017 and 2018; along with, data up through the show that taped on 2019-09-05. Ever since Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! started back in 1998, even when Peter Sagal was a panelist on the show and not the host, the panel consisted of three panelists. There would always be at minimum one female panelist on the panel, sometimes two. It wasn’t until the Wait Wait that aired in September 12, 2015 did the show have an all female panel consisting of Faith Salie, Roxanne Roberts and Paula Poundstone. Roughly one year and nine months later, on the June 10, 2017 show, Wait Wait would have their second all female panel, featuring Paula Poundstone, Faith Salie and Tracy Clayton. After the show aired and I finished collecting notes, I started to …

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Getting a Shout Out From Paula Poundstone on Late Show with Stephen Colbert

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Paula Poundstone was one of the guests on the Friday night edition of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert has been on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! as a guest twice and is a very regular listener to the show, he brought up the topic of Wait Wait with Paula. The Wait Wait talk starts at the 3:29 mark in the video below: Paula said that she didn’t know how many times she has been on the show and Colbert said that his research department noted that she has been on 201 times. Paula then mentioned that I keep stats on everything Wait Wait. She also states that she holds the record for losses on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. Looking at the panelist stats, for the show data that I have recorded, Paula does hold the honor of coming in third place the …

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Lowest Scoring Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Show

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During the Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank segment on the show that aired on April 29, 2017, Amy Dickinson commented that that show was lowest scoring show ever. At the start of the segment, Roy Blount Jr. had two points, Amy Dickinson had one, and Tom Bodett had four. When Amy made the comment, both Amy and Roy had correctly answered four questions each for a combined score of 19. Tom Bodett blitzed through his questions and had answered six correct; thus, bringing the grand total to 35 points. I was curious to see what is the lowest scoring show in Wait Waist… Don’t Tell Me! history; well, shows that included a Lightning Fill-in-the-Blank type round anyway. So, I started querying the database to weed out shows that I do not have panelist scores for, as well as Best Of and repeated shows. Based on the result of the above query, …