The Wake

Stephanie Miller doesn’t have delusions of political grandeur. She really just wants to entertain you. But if she can change your mind while she’s at it, then that’s even better.

Miller, radio’s highest-rated female progressive talk show host, is a comedienne and daughter of former U.S. Representative William Miller, running mate to Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election. A long-time radio host, she launched the nationally-syndicated The Stephanie Miller Show in September 2004 and will be coming to the U on April 6 for a live broadcast.

“We’re really looking forward to it,” she says. “In radio, you’re sitting in a little glass room and you don’t know if everybody’s enjoying what you’re doing, so the live shows are always really fun because there’s just a great energy to be there with people.”

She’s also excited to be on a college campus and hopes to draw a young audience to the broadcast. “I think younger people find our show a little hipper than most talk radio. In general, younger people tend to be more progressive and so progressive radio tends to skew younger,” she says. “Bill O’Reilly’s audience, for instance, is like 65 to dead, but our audience tends to be a little younger.”

The show itself feeds off of the daily stream of sound bite-filled news reports, “talking head” interviews, and controversial blog postings that make up the country’s current political discourse. A large portion of Miller’s show is simply riffing on clips from the previous evening’s right-wing television programs or that morning’s top headlines.

“I work 24 hours a day to come up with 3 hours of show,” she says, “It’s a constant process.” In order to constantly come up with new material, “I’m on the Internet and watching television for political stories all day and night. When you’re doing a topical show, you have to keep up with everything that’s going on,” she adds.

But she emphasizes that “liberal talk radio is not an arm of the Democratic Party—it’s entertainment.” She considers the show to be more of a comedy show than an exclusively political talk show. “We do politics but we also do pop culture and entertainment,” she says.

Initially, her career was also more entertainment-oriented than politically-oriented. “I never intended to do political talk,” she says, “I wasn’t politically active in college at all—I was a theater geek.” Majoring in theater at USC, Miller envisioned herself as the next Carol Burnett and her start in radio “was kind of an accident,” she says. “I was like every kid out of college trying to figure out how to make a living with a theater degree, thinking, ‘Well, this is going to get me a job in any 7-Eleven in the country.’ So I started bits on a station in Buffalo, N.Y., one thing just sort of led to another, and I’ve been doing radio about 20 years.”

Although she’s done stints on television, Miller couldn’t leave the mic for long. “There’s so much creative freedom in radio. It really is my favorite medium,” she says.

Much like the changes in her own career, she thinks that the current political situation in the country has politicized people that haven’t always been political. “Comedy-wise, you can’t write it any better than the stuff that comes out of the Bush administration. It’s always a gift for comedy, but politically I don’t think this country can take three more years with this president,” she says. While her primary goals with her show are to be clever, funny and entertaining, she does want to change some minds and encourage people to become politically engaged. “I don’t think you get anybody by preaching, but if you entertain them and maybe you make them laugh, they might not even realize that you’ve made them think,” she says.

On April 7, Stephanie Miller and voice impersonator Jim Ward will be broadcasting The Stephanie Miller Show live from the Coffman Memorial Union Theater. The free live show will be from 8 to 11 a.m.