Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! is an hour-long weekly news quiz (radio game show) produced and distributed by National Public Radio in the United States. The show is hosted by Peter Sagal, with scorekeeper Carl Kasell and a panel of three (drawn from Roy Blount, Jr., Sue Ellicott, Adam Felber, P.J. O'Rourke, Paula Poundstone, Charles Pierce, Roxanne Roberts and Mo Rocca). The program debuted in 1998.
Listeners call or send e-mails to nominate themselves as contestants. The producers select a group of these listeners to be on the show and play games with questions based on the week’s news. These games include:
- Who's Carl This Time? – The contestant must identify the speaker or explain the context of three quotations read by Carl Kassel. Two correct answers constitute a win.
- Bluff the Listener – The contestant hears three stories read by the panelists and must determine the true news story from the fictional ones.
- Listener Limerick Challenge – The contestant must identify the last word or phrase in three news-related limerick (poetry) read by Carl Kassel. Two correct answers constitute a win.
- Not My Job – A celebrity guest takes a three-question multiple-choice quiz on topic unrelated to the celebrity’s field. Two correct answers constitute a win and the prize goes to a randomly selected listener who contacted the show but was not chosen as a contestant.
The prize for winning any game is to have Carl Kassel record the greeting on the contestant’s answering machine.
In between games, Peter Sagal asks the panelists questions from the week’s news and the panelists earn points by giving correct answers. A panelist also earns a point if a contestant chooses his/her story in the Listener Bluff game, whether that story was true or made-up. At the end of the show, the panelists take a Lightning Fill-In-The-Blank quiz. Each panelist is given eight questions and scores 2 points for each correct answer. After the quiz all the points are totaled and the panelist with the highest score is declared the week’s champion.
Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! is produced at the studios of WBEZ in Chicago (Chicago Public Radio). A few times a year the cast travels to various cities in the United States and produces a road show in front of a live audience.