Off Duty: The Best of On Patrol With Peter Raffel (Week III)

On Patrol With Peter Raffel is celebrating its seventh anniversary with the release of Off Duty: The Best of On Patrol With Peter Raffel, a compilation of the show’s greatest moments from its four-year run. Each Wednesday for the next seven weeks featured clips will be shared that best emphasize the show’s unusual hilarity.

For the uninitiated: On Patrol With Peter Raffel was a two-hour college radio show that aired from 2011 to 2015, featuring music, comedy, and guests – some real, some fictitious – all streaming live from WLFM Studios at Lawrence University. For over one-hundred episodes, Raffel and his band of misfits unleashed chaos on the Appleton airwaves – at times against their will. The show featured Will Fraser as its intern (often referred to as Intern Will), and Morgan Ann Gray as a variety of outlandish characters. The show also hosted annual fundraisers, in partnership with GlobeMed and Health Development Initiative, called Radio for Rwanda: a twelve-hour marathon that raised over $8000 in its three years.

Included with each clip is a bit of commentary from Raffel’s perspective, featuring never-before-shared insight and backstory. Enjoy this bizarre, poignant, and sometimes embarrassing collection!

From On Patrol #71: White Women
September 29^th, 2014 

At the end of our third year, Will told me that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep doing the show. I spent the summer having a panic attack at the thought of him quitting – I knew I couldn’t do it without him. At the time he said it was because he was busy, but I always got the sense that he felt underutilized – which he was, considering at this point he was everyone’s favorite part. Regardless, I hardly slept during our hiatus, fearful that I’d have to go on without him. In a really genius move on my part, I thought up the idea to have him “go on strike,” which would free him up to come and go as he pleased, and involve him more in the written material. It ended up being the best idea I ever had.

One of the biggest comments I got about the show was that I was mean to Will, despite the fact that the role had been created as a ne’er-do-well punching bag for my cynical character. But this bit gave me an opportunity to bring those thoughts to the forefront in a surprisingly therapeutic way. Everything we say here is either based on a comment I received or our past interactions: I really did bother Will with 6:50 PM texts every week, for example. I think being able to do this was a way of laughing at ourselves and whatever had built up over our two years together, even if it was all in good fun. I’d kept this bit a secret, too, so when we started doing it people actually thought it was real – I guess we really sold it by screaming at each other. I also grew a Strike Beard for that term’s arc to really give it authenticity.

I love that this is followed by another really great bit, and that they flow seamlessly into each other. I visited Morgan Ann with Anastasia Skliarova that summer and we watched this movie Cirque du Freakon TV, then kept shouting the name at each other in a southern accent. I had an idea for a guy who was obsessed with Cirque du Freak– I think it was Anastasia who first thought up: “Monday, Cirque du Freak!” etc. The Ruth Bader-Ginsburg thing was a reoccurring gag since freshman year, where I was continually trying to get an interview with her and never could; and the Love Boatreference was because I spent that summer watching it with my dad every Sunday – for some reason I’d written a note in my iPhone that said: “And Sunday, well, that’s Love Boatday.” So I threw it in the bit.

But furthermore, I think one of the reasons these bits work so well, and why the final thirty episodes resonate so much, is because I began writing for a place of honesty, even if it was still comedy. Up until this point, every character and joke had one purpose: to be funny. But from that moment forward, I realized that the most humorous stuff I had to offer was the stuff I was really feeling – thoughts of not wanting to do the show, of not being funny, of no one listening, of being overweight, of the future, etc. Once I began writing from there, and trying to express those feelings through the comedy, I think the show really took off. It’d always been hiding in the material, but it wasn’t until the last year that it really took center stage – and I think it helped me focus in on what I was trying to do, which was to create an honest and open community, even if it came in the form of really dumb jokes.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Will Fraser, and Morgan Ann Gray

From On Patrol #30: 1994
October 1^st, 2012 

The Tom Scharpling interview is one of my proudest moments in the history of the show, and maybe the most nervous I’ve ever been. My girlfriend said it was the only time she heard a quiver in my voice on air, right at the beginning of the call before I launch into it. But the interview was really beyond my wildest dreams – to have someone who is such a hero of mine, and probably the single biggest inspiration I have, call in and talk for such a long time was truly amazing; and then to talk Pink Floyd with him was unbelievable. Honestly, the whole interview is really interesting and funny, and Tom’s readiness to talk and riff was so meaningful to me. Fun Fact: Our discussion of Suicide’s debut album led me to call his show and discuss listening to “Frankie Teardrop” during a power outage, which eventually became one of the Best Show’s signature topics, The Frankie Teardrop Challenge.

Featuring: Peter Raffel and Tom Scharpling

From On Patrol #13: The Introduction of the Heart Condition
January 23^rd, 2012

I remember staying up all night in some conference room writing this bit with Joe Fey and David Lewis – we’d done calls for both of these characters the week before, and from that idea arose the in-studio debate. We must’ve spent hours just making each other laugh, and thinking up more absurd ideas for this thing; at some point past 2 AM we decided to have David yell “Whoop!” at various moments, and that’s really when we lost our minds. I think originally PlumKilogram was supposed to be the more humorous of the two, but listening back now there’s something so disgustingly funny about OrangePound, especially when he says that he made his wife “wail.” The really long soliloquy about him taking the family to Disney World has to be Joe’s writing – that’s totally his humor. Both David and Joe left college after freshman year, and I’ll always remember this bit as the pinnacle of our collaborative writing – three guys who could truly crack each other up.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Joe Fey and David Lewis

From On Patrol #57: Keys
February 3^rd, 2014  

This clip gets included because it’s by far the hardest I ever laughed on the show: Morgan Ann Gray’s Cowabunga Tut joke has resonated through the years. We’d down there for a half-hour riling each other up – myself, Morgan Ann, Isabelle Skoog, and Liz Vidulich – hence the giddiness that’s apparent. They’d been talking about this Dracula television show with Jonathan Rhys Myers that really got me going, and everything after that was nonsense. But when Morgan dropped Cowabunga Tut, I lost control more than I ever had on-air. Still gets me.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Morgan Ann Gray, Isabelle Skoog, and Elizabeth Vidulich

From On Patrol #25: Time Goes Fast In Busy Day Life
May 21^st, 2012

At this point we knew that Joe Fey, who played Jabadiah, was going to be leaving at the end of the year, and the future of Major Grotto was very much up in the air. Joe was serving as the play’s editor, as well as writing a lot of the jokes with me, and this was one of the last things we worked on together. I think it’s also the only time that Joe ever broke character and couldn’t keep from laughing. We’d talked a lot about the ridiculous scene in The Matrix Reloadedwhere Lawrence Fishburne addresses this massive crowd in a cave – something that has stuck with me from childhood – and the decision to have Joe read that script verbatim worked out perfectly. Honestly I’m a little mad at myself for how much I lost it, but Joe holding this annotated paragraph in his hand, having watched the clip a million times, was just too much. Also, Morgan Ann Gray had done that Claudette voice a lot – the old-timey “I’m a woman, I have rights” thing – and so incorporating it into the show was a must. Her and David talking about the Dusty Clam is so hilarious.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Joe Fey, David Lewis, Nico Glennon, Morgan Ann Gray, Mari Ayala, Greta Schmitt, Kanami Fukuda, and Maggie Ward

From On Patrol #74: The 80s or Whenever
October 20^th, 2014

Ridley Tankersley was a recent hire at the station and the new bassist for Will’s band Wild Firth. I had this idea that he’d interview for Will’s intern position as part of the Strike Arc – this was really the beginning of bringing in more people, and expanding the show’s written material and universe. Ridley is a really talented comedian who became a huge part of the show; the section where he and Will go at each other with these non-stop jokes really cemented his role. Maybe the funniest is Will’s final line about Ridley’s godfather’s construction business: “He co-owns it with his wife – don’t lie,” which is just this earnest little throwaway at the end of all the nonsense. This was also the introduction to the bizarre religion I’d conceived of called the Zuluists – it was an extrapolation of this bit from MTV’s The Statewith Thomas Lennon called “Old Fashioned Man” that I thought was one of the funniest things ever. I really liked the idea of having the bit go in a completely different direction in the final moments, and Ridley’s character being way crazier than anyone would originally think. Ridley also really took to the idea of being described as a “computer nerd with a Hot Topic gift-card” – I think after I wrote that he was on board for whatever I wanted to do. I loved that I could insult people so acutely on the show and not get in trouble for it.

Featuring: Peter Raffel, Will Fraser, and Ridley Tankersley

From On Patrol #81: Moving Pictures at the Movies
January 12^th, 2015  

Mitchell Greenberg and I are massive Star Wars fans, and when it was announced that they were making a seventh movie I thought it’d be fun to recast the original – which I can only assume is coming down the pipeline. We’d get so worked up talking about Star Wars that we’d forget we were on air. Mitch and I always had such a natural way of talking and making each other laugh that he could come down with no preparation and I knew it’d be great. Picking an actor to play Obi-Wan led us to a discussion of Richard Dreyfuss, and this argument about how the kid in Mr. Holland’s Opus lost his hearing – I see this as the most notorious On Patrol moment, besides Will’s Keyboard. I still think the fire truck was responsible, although I’ve gone out of my way to not rewatch the movie and find out. We actually ended up making a short film based on this conversation, where Mitch and I had to reenact the argument like five times. I think that forever ruined Richard Dreyfuss and Mr. Holland’s Opusfor us. The moment where we simultaneously question whether or not Richard Dreyfuss is alive was pure genius.

Featuring: Peter Raffel and Mitchell Greenberg

From On Patrol #6: Christmas Is Here
October 24^th, 2011

About halfway through that first term, my dad came up to visit and watch me do the show. This bit was an extension of a call he did in the very first episode, the plot of which involved him renting out my room to this macho-type guy named Chad. There’s something about this bit that just makes me smile: maybe it’s the way my dad plays it, or just the absolute absurdity of the premise. I’d actually been tossing around this idea of Senior Citizen Fake I.D.’s for around ten years, ever since I saw an advertisement for the discount outside a Sara Lee store. It still makes me laugh when he talks about Chad’s friends (“You just got Stooged!”) and when he says, “You can spend three hours putting a guy in a funny hat.”

Featuring: Peter Raffel and Larry Raffel

From Left: Morgan Ann Gray, Liz Vidulich, and Isabelle Skoog (2014)