I think that there might be a cranky person inside all of us.
Duck’s Breath, now based in San Francisco, has created some memorable characters: Dr. Science, based on the didactic Mr. Science and featured on the Fox Broadcasting Network; Randee of the Redwoods, the consummate hippie, seen on MTV; and the hard-boiled Ian Shoales, who was inspired by New Journalism and tough guys like Philip Marlowe. “There was a Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan that was just crammed full of esoteric information,” Kessler explains. “Talking about the cabala and stuff, really odd, an extremely pretentious approach to pop music. I wanted to get a character that was like, these Esquire and Rolling Stone writers that were always parading their own erudition or experience in the guise of the album [review]–talking about themselves instead of what they were supposed to be talking about. People really responded to it.
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Despite being quite different from Shoales, Kessler isn’t too worried about occasionally feeling trapped in Ian’s body. “It’s a character that allows me to do things that I probably wouldn’t do myself. It’s nice, too, that when I’m done with the show, I can go off and be myself.
When I ask why so much of the humor on National Public Radio is antiurban, Kessler responds with one of Ian Shoales’s most quoted lines: “If the city were a nice place to live, nobody would want to live there. People in the city like to think that their life is harder than it really is. In cities like New York, there’s an element of self-dramatization. They talk about, ‘It took me three months to get my plumbing fixed. It’s a job just to get out of bed in the morning.’ And the rural people like to hear that stuff to convince themselves that they’re better off in the country.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Karen Meyers.
