Everything Under The Pun

“We weren’t planning on a third show,” said Sher from his suburban Boston in-home studio. “But the first two shows sold out quickly, and Matt Seubert {WRVO assistant general manager for development} mentioned that they had 90 requests backed up, and so we decided to add a third show.”

Airing on WRVO Saturdays at noon and Sundays at 11 a.m., Says You! touts itself as “a game of words and whimsy, bluff and bluster.” An example of the type of questions the panelists field is trying to figure out what is wrong with the grammar, syntax and usage posed in certain phrases, like “rather unique.” Panelist Carolyn Faye Fox, a writer for lifestyle magazine The Improper Bostonian, correctly chimed in that unique is a word that cannot be qualified.

Sher marveled that Fox has been with his program since the beginning, 11 years ago. “In the life of every media effort there is a moment when something happened that really made it work, and that was when Carolyn joined the show,” he said. “That was the luckiest break we got. At first I didn’t know who would be sitting in the first seat, which is really the hardest seat to sit in because you have no idea what I’m going to ask.”

A former optician, Sher created the show around 1996 and pitched a 24-minute pilot to WGBH, Boston’s version of WCNY, with both public radio and television stations. “It was the last thing I was going to do in broadcasting before I became an optician again,” he said. “The premise of Says You! is that it’s not important to know the answers, but it’s important to like the answers. That way it doesn’t matter how hard it is: Nobody knows the answers, but we guarantee you you will like the answers.”

While Sher didn’t sign on with WGBH, NPR picked up his show 11 years ago. Now he distributes the show himself, to NPR stations. “There are those that love us and those that hate us, and the great uninformed in the middle,” Sher noted. “They don’t get us, for whatever reason. We think it’s good-hearted entertainment.”

Seubert enjoys the program himself. “I think what makes Says You! popular, at least with our listeners, is the interplay between the panelists and Richard. You can tell they’re really enjoying themselves. It’s a lot of fun to listen to,” he said.

Going on the road actually codifies for the staff that they aren’t broadcasting into a giant void every week. “We travel six times a year,” Sher said, “and the thing that’s great about it is. . . the problem with radio is you have an idea of what the audience is, but you don’t know for sure. When you go on the road, you know for sure.”

Seubert echoed that. “Each spring for the last three years we’ve held an event to thank our listeners and bring them together,” he said. “Unlike other arts and cultural organizations in the area, we don’t have that opportunity to bring our patrons together, and our patrons are radio listeners.”

If you are part of that great unknown that captures WRVO’s radio waves in your house, and you want to check out Says You!, you’d better hurry. The third show, which will be taped for later broadcast, is slated for 1 p.m. Sunday, May 18, at the Palace Theatre, 2384 James St., and is nearly sold out. Tickets cost $15 for balcony seating, $25 for general admission. Purchase them by calling (800) 341-3690 or online at www.wrvo.fm.

—Molly English-Bowers