Peter Sagal

Peter Daniel Sagal (born January 31, 1965) is an American humorist, writer, and host of the National Public Radio game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! and the PBS special Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.

Sagal was raised in a Jewish family in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, son of Matthew and Reeva Sagal.

Matthew was a telecommunications executive, and Reeva was a schoolteacher who became a stay-at-home mother.

Sagal is a 1987 graduate of Harvard College, where a college roommate was future Wall Street Journal correspondent Jess M. Bravin.

Together, they entered a competition to write the Hasty Pudding production and were selected to develop their script "Between the Sheiks".

Peter studied English literature at Harvard.

While there he wrote and directed other student theater productions.

He also spent a summer as a journalist for Cycle, a now defunct motorcycle magazine.

After graduating from Harvard, Sagal pursued several different occupations, all connected to the theater or writing.

While living in Los Angeles, he appeared as a contestant on the game show Jeopardy! in April 1988, in which he placed second.

In the early 1990s while he was living in Minneapolis, Sagal was hired to ghostwrite an autobiography of the 1970s pornography director Gail Palmer.

Sagal discovered that Palmer did not direct the pornography movies attributed to her, and that she was a front for her pornographer boyfriend.

Peter wrote the book anyway.

However, Palmer did not approve of the manuscript, and it has not been published.

Sagal has written screenplays, one for a 1996 science fiction / martial arts thriller, Savage, another for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a 2004 sequel to the original Dirty Dancing, adapted from his screenplay Cuba Mine, which Sagal said bears little resemblance to the poorly-received film.

Sagal has also written for television shows including,

The two Wait Wait pilots are based on the weekly NPR/WBEZ Chicago news quiz radio program which Sagal hosts.

Sagal then moved to New York to pursue a theater writing career In 1998, he moved to the Chicago area, when he became the host of NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! news quiz program.

He was literary manager for the now-defunct Los Angeles Theater Center, a stage director, an actor, a playwright and a screenwriter, and an extra in a Michael Jackson video.

He has also been a journalist, an essayist, a humorist,

a travel writer, and an author.

Sagal has written several plays that have been performed across the United States and internationally.

Some have also been performed as radio plays or podcasts.

In October 2007 HarperCollins published Sagal's The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).

In the book Sagal revisits the Gail Palmer incident and indicates that his exposure to the porn industry led to his writing Book of Vice.

Publishers Weekly called Book of Vice, "a hilarious, harmlessly prurient look at the banality of regular people’s strange and wicked pleasures".

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! was designed as a weekly satirical look at the week's news in a quiz format.

The host of the show was to be a comedian named Dan Coffey who would quiz panelists, celebrity guests and non-celebrity callers.

Sagal has appeared in three television specials based on his radio show: Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! (2008), Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!: A Royal Pain in the News (2011), and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Live! (2013).

Sagal has appeared as himself in documentaries.

These include:

A runner of marathons, Sagal writes the Road Scholar column for Runner's World magazine.

He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and Time magazine.

Sagal and the Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! team contributed a feature called Sandwich Monday to The Salt, NPR's food blog.

For five years, each Monday the Wait Wait team ate a new and different kind of sandwich for lunch.

Then one of the team members would write a tongue-in-cheek blog post describing the food.

Sandwiches included Fritos-topped Papa John's pizza, latke double-down, Passover Sandwich, and Burger King's YUMBO.

Sagal had a brief voice cameo as Clown's Joy in the 2015 animated movie Inside Out.

He appeared as himself in the "Pay Pal" episode of the animated television series The Simpsons.

In that episode characters Lisa and Tumi listened to an episode of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! featuring Sagal and announcer Carl Kasell.