I’ve used this weekly feature to write extensively about my bygone time at a student broadcaster at WWSP-90FM, the campus station at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point I’ve focused almost entirely on what I played back then: now I discovered the songs, what they meant to me, and how the music impacted my group of friends. I haven’t focused much on what I did, specifically the programming we created. This is in part because radio is a fleeting thing. There may be some deeply disturbed individual out there who has made it his life’s work to preserve each and every utterance Howard Stern spit into a microphone, but generally the material vanishes into the ether as soon as it’s shared.

There is one program, however, that I maintain some audio record of, a show that made its debut almost exactly twenty years ago. On September 16, 1989 at 6:00 p.m. a program called Meatball Radio went on the air.

It was a sketch comedy show, hardly revolutionary. We drew inspiration from the various practitioners of the audio-only form represented by the well-worn comedy albums tucked into a corner of the station, but it was the already institutionalized Saturday Night Live that served as our chief inspiration.

The program was conceived during the preceding summer, initially during a two-person roadtrip down to Milwaukee’s Summerfest that largely consisted of ongoing attempts to see who could be the funniest. Somewhere during the breathless laughter, the question of “Could we do something like this on the radio?” was raised and answered with a resolute “Why not?” The following few weeks were spent recruiting, planning, writing. When we needed to come up with a name for the show, I suggested borrowing from an R. Crumb comic reprinted in Tony Hendra’s book on comedy that I owned, and it stuck.

The show really only lasted one semester, but it was a major endeavor for us. We usually wrote through the first half of the week, desperately trying to find time between classes and other radio station responsibilities to scrawl out a few funny lines, and then pulled the cast together for concentrated recording sessions on Thursday nights. Friday was spent recording whatever extra was needed and starting the editing process. We were often editing (on reel-to-reel tape with a razor blade and little strips of tape, mind you) into Saturday, often completing it with just a few minutes to spare before airtime. I can remember at least one Saturday afternoon that involved us frantically editing separate chunks of the show in different studios, sneakily commandeering the closet-like public radio production room next door to help us meet the deadline.

It was a good show, somewhat sporadic in quality as is the seeming nature of sketch comedy, but also full of energy and low-budget ingenuity (one of my favorite moments from the production of the show involved of our cast members correctly determining that the musical intro to Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” played on the wrong speed would make a good theme for a phony news program). And a couple of the people who worked on the show were genuinely inspired writers, producing clever and intricate scenarios, perhaps best exemplified by an epic half-hour sketch that centered on a deer trying to track down the hunter who winged him.

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of the show’s debut, I present the sketch that won a national award, albeit an not particularly competitive award from a fledgling and floundering college broadcasting association. Thankfully, I don’t appear in it.

The Cast of Meatball Radio, “The Angry Chef”

(Disclaimer: As we always said on the program, the copyright to Meatball Radio belongs to WWSP-90FM, so if anyone currently involved with the radio station asks me to remove this from free distribution on the World Wide Web, I will adhere to the terms we established and do so. Also, if the author and star of the piece in question expresses dismay about the unearthing of his comedic handiwork from two decades ago, I’d be willing to make a similar adjustment.)