The wait is over. Come and get it!
The new CD from Scharpling and Wurster is out!
Nice Article On The Best Show On WFMU!
June 8, 2006
Here's a modified link to the article mentioned below:
The Third Coast International Audio Festival - a division of Chicago Public Radio - did a nice article on The Best Show On WFMU. Check it out!
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/audio_library_2006.asp
Thanks again to Roman and the TCIAF.Tom.
A nice Best Show article!
Hey everyone!
Here's a really cool article on The Best Show On WFMU! Check it out!
http://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/index.asp/
Enjoy! They'll be a test on it this Tuesday!
Scharpling & Wurster Live on 92.3 Free FM Tonight!
That's right!
Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster will be together LIVE in the studio as a guest of the JAKE AND JACKIE show tonight Wednesday the 19th on 92.3 Free FM in NYC! And when I say live, I mean LIVE! As in the W part of S&W actually being in the studio!
What will happen? Who knows!? But tune in to hear it!
You can listen at http://www.923freefm.com/ . Just click on LISTEN - I think it might say LIVE actually - and follow your heart.
The Jake and Jackie Show is on from 11 PM to 3 AM EST. We will be on during that time.
And call in to show some Love for Tom and Jon!
Thanks
-Tom!
The Best Show on WFMU is now podcasting!
January 26, 2006
Hello, comedy fans and enjoyers of Things Involving Me. After getting cajoled and harrassed, The Best Show On WFMU is finally entering the realm of podcasting. You can check out the info over at http://podcast.wfmu.org/!
So subscribe and have fun! You won't regret it!
Tom!
Jim Gaffigan on the show tonight!
January 24, 2006
Hey everybody! We're gonna have the one and only comedian JIM GAFFIGAN on The Best Show tomorow night to talk about his new Comedy Central special! He'll be taking calls and answering your questions! It should be fun! Wheee! (that means fun.)
Tom with Jack and Jackie tonight!
JANUARY 18, 2006
Hey All -
It looks like I'll be swinging by the studios of my friends JAKE AND JACKIE tonight on FREE FM, which used to be 92.3 K-ROCK in NYC.
The show is on from 11 PM til 3 AM. I dont know how long I'll be on/around. We'll see how tired they get of me.
I think you can listen on the computer over at http://www.923freefm.com/.
Tom!
New York Times article!
January 8, 2006
Hey Everybody!
I don't know if you know, but the New York Times wrote an article about The Best Show On WFMU last Sunday. It wasn't put on the NY Times website til today, and you've gotta drop some coin to read it. If you want to see it online, here's the link.
But I've got it here for the reading:
January 1, 2006NJ Section, Page 4
"Gotcha! Stay Tuned"
A World of Dupe Or Be Duped
By TAMMY LA GORCE
JERSEY CITY - For a guy who earns his living by writing comedy, it is pretty easy to put one over on Tom Scharpling. Just a couple of months back, Mr. Scharpling, who is a writer and an executive producer of the hit television show "Monk," was apparently tricked into thinking that a fictitious magazine, Pizza Aficionado, was recruiting him to initiate a Garden State pizza quest.
Mr. Scharpling was to report on the best and worst pizza joints from Fort Lee to Barnegat alongside his fellow correspondent, Bruce Springsteen.
And some months before that, he conducted a 20-minute phone conversation with a car salesman from the made-up New Jersey town of Newbridge, who claimed his dealership, Gene Simmons Toyota, was partly owned by the lead singer of Kiss.
"He's actually on the lot?" a mystified Mr. Scharpling asked the caller who, like the phony PIzza Aficionado editor, had reached him during his regular radio show on WFMU (91.1 FM).
"Absolutely," was the reply. "He's on the lot quite often."
Listeners who set their radios by "The Best Show on WFMU" on Tuesdays from 8 to 11 p.m. generally can tell when Mr. Scharpling, who sounds like Al Franken and looks like John Cusack (if Mr. Cusack were a line-backer), is being had. And truth be told, Mr. Scharpling is just really good at playing the clear-eyed, eternally exasperated dupe.
Conan O'Brien, whose production company bought a still-unnamed television series that Mr. Scharpling is developing--"kind of a funny 'Rockford Files' " is how Mr. Scharpling described it--counts himself a fan. As does the writer Neal Pollack.
"It's great when people you admire like what you're doing," Mr. Scharpling, who grew up in Dunellen, writes for "Monk" in Summit and lives with his wife in Woodbridge, said before a recent "Best Show."
But acknowledging accolades also makes him feel anxious about spreading them around. "Best Show" fans--nobody knows how many there are, but they make their devotion known through a barrage of calls, instant messages and e-mail messages each week--recognize the voice of Jon Wurster, the North Carolina-based drummer for the rock band Superchunk, as Mr. Scharpling's regular foil.
The subtitle "The Best of Scharpling and Wurster on the Best Show on WFMU" stares out from the three most recent CD covers, including "Hippy Justice" (Stereolaffs), which was released late last summer and has the Kiss car dealership call on it.
"He's one of the funniest people ever," said Mr. Scharpling, 35, who met Mr. Wurster while working as a freelance rock journalist in 1992. "It was like two people who should find each other actually finding each other. We're like-minded. We had similar interests, like the old Chris Elliott TV show 'Get a Life.' We became fast friends." The chance to be a writer for "Monk" came five years after, while Mr. Scharpling was still a salesman by day at World of Music in Summit, a job he started when he was 10 and kept until he got the call to contribute a script to "Monk" 20 years later.
If that seems an unlikely career trajectory, it is. Andy Breckman, the creator of the show and a former writer for "Saturday Night Live," also had a show on WFMU and the two men became friends.
"He liked a comedy film script I was co-writing," Mr. Scharpling said, "and it just went from there." "Monk," the half-hour comedy/mystery hybrid that stars Tony Shalhoub, is now in its fourth season on the USA Network, and it has shaped up to be an ideal day job.
"As far as writing for the entertainment industry goes, working on 'Monk' is fantastic," Mr. Scharpling said. "It's a great way to use all the tools in your toolbox, so to speak. There's drama and there's mystery, so it's a good workout. It's a way to become a stronger writer."
That his five fellow East Coast staff members swap ideas around a conference table in Summit rather than Burbank, Calif., or Hollywood makes it that much more appealing for a couple of reasons. One, Mr. Scharpling, who went to Middlesex Community College after Middlesex High School and graduated from Trenton State is a self-professed Jersey guy.
"Sometimes you try to avoid elements of that, like when people think it means you drive all over the place in an IROC listening to Bruce Springsteen," he said. "But yeah, I like having a driveway and having a dog and being half an hour away from the biggest city on the planet and still being able to come home to a house."
He added, "I would suggest that anybody who has a job working for a TV show where you're not the final voice, where you're one of 150 people working on it, should find a creative outlet where you're the boss, where you're not always collaborating and competing."
In other words, if not for "The Best Show"--started in 2000 and so named because "nobody's going to consider it the best show on the station unless you put it out there and get people talking"--Mr. Scharpling's self-possession amid the sea of a giant network might sink.
Irony and sarcasm are strewn around a conversation with him like harmless, often hilarious grenades; the way to sidestep them is ask about the show. "It really is a passion," Mr. Scharpling said during a break from his pre-show ritual of adjusting knobs and combing through CD's, the funnyman lilt draining from his bold voice.
It would have to be a passion, considering the only money he makes from it comes from sales of their Scharpling and Wurster CD's. (All WFMU D.J.'s are volunteers.) "We really put the time in, and people appreciate it," Mr. Scharpling said. "We cut a wide swathe. Age-wise, we get everything from people in their 50's to middle school and high school kids. I also get people listening on the Web from all over the country and from overseas. People in Canada are faithful and enthusiastic, and in England they're totally into it."
But what about that recruiter for Pizza Aficionado? The routine followed a familiar Scharpling and Wurster rhythm. Dave--Mr. Wurster--seemed fully credible at first, describing the magazine's launch and how it had scored Senator John McCain as its first cover subject. A few minutes in, though, after a discussion of how pizza gangs in Chicago were responsible for several recent murders, Mr. Scharpling's pretend patience started to wear, and Mr. Wurster's pretend insistence on Pizza Aficionado's topicality and marketability surged goofily on.
How well it went over was something Mr. Scharpling would later dissect through e-mail messages, but he hung up with his poise intact, which is something he does not always count on. "Once in a while, the silliness of the whole thing hits us during a bit and we lose it," Mr. Scharpling wrote in an e-mail message after the show. "Sometimes Jon has to cover for me by talking while I'm gathering my bearings, and sometimes I have to do the same for him.
"One time that stands out is Jon deliberately thinking the band Husker Du was called Husker Dude. Hearing that line come out of Jon's mouth just killed the both of us. I had to hold it down, playing the outraged straight man while Jon kept laughing silently. Which makes me want to laugh. I usually end up pinching my leg to stay on track."
