A joke from last weekend's broadcast prompted a letter from
the Polish consul general in Chicago
accusing the show of xenophobia and prejudice, producer Mike Danforth felt the
need to apologize.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the joke in question came
from the Bluff the Listener segment of the show Saturday, in which an audience
member was asked to identify which of three stories about an old joke coming
true had been taken from that week's headlines.
Peter Grosz, an actor and TV writer who has appeared as a
panelist and guest host on "Wait Wait," offered a supposed news item
referencing a joke asking how many Poles it takes to screw in a light bulb.
Host Peter Sagal revealed the light bulb tale wasn't true,
but instead another item about road-crossing chickens was the real news.
Listeners later called "Wait Wait" and the Polish Consulate to
complain that the joke was in poor taste.
Grosz's segment was meant to poke fun at the well-worn light
bulb joke, not Polish people, Danforth said. "If anything, it was a little
hack," he said. "But some people didn't enjoy that, and we're not
trying to upset people, so we wanted to apologize for that."
In a letter to Danforth, Paulina Kapuscinska, consul general
of the Republic of Poland in Chicago ,
said the joke played up false stereotypes of Poles and Poland . It
presented National Public Radio, which distributes the show, as "promoters
of prejudice," and such jokes "are some of the most unsophisticated
of jokes, which offend the intellect of NPR listeners," Kapuscinska wrote.
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