Dialogues

Wes "Scoop" Nisker

Cosmic Comic Sage

    Comedian, commentator, author and spiritual teacher. Legendary Bay Area radio newscaster Wes “Scoop” Nisker is a real renaissance man. He’s also a guy with a hilarious identity crisis as he walks the line between growing up Jewish and becoming a Buddhist.

How did spending your youth in a small Midwestern town shape your sense of humor?
    I always felt kind of different, and I was different—I was Jewish. Humor is the Jewish defense mechanism. In college I started finding the existentialists and majored in philosophy. And the beatniks—you know they were my spiritual godfathers. Then I came to San Francisco hoping to be a beatnik, but of course I was 10 years too late, so I got assigned to the hippies instead.
 

How did you get your first radio news gig at KSAN, back in the late ’60s?
    Talk about being in the right place at the right time. I went up to [deejay and program director] Tom Donahue and said, listen, you guys are doing this incredible album-oriented rock—and it was only hippies listening, it was like tribal radio—and I said, you should be doing something fun with the news because you’re not a straight station. He said why don’t you go on the air next week and start doing it?

So it was the perfect place for your brand of irreverent political humor?
    It allowed me to develop both my comedic skills and my political sense of outrage. All of it was there. There was no pretense that I was an objective newscaster. I was a commentator, although we never really made that clear, and it caused some trouble along the way.

This mix of religions you’ve got going—Jewish and Buddhist—it makes for good comic fodder, doesn’t it?
    Opposites attract. You have the detachment and the cool quietude of the Buddhist, and then you have chutzpa and verbosity—they’re a perfect fit. So I’ve come up with the Buddhish people and our mantra is “Om Shalom.” Our wisdom is transmitted through knock-knock jokes, basically.

Is your family as funny as you are?
    My daughter is 31 and lives in Berkeley. She’s very funny, but unlike me, she’s beautiful, so she doesn’t have to be so funny. My wife—she’s my second wife—now that’s a story. For my 40th birthday my first wife had a little party for me and hired this belly dancer. That’s my second wife.

Was it love at first sight?
    It was love at first shimmy.

    Scoop Nisker’s new book, Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again!: Handbook for a Spiritual Revolution, is available on his Web site www.wesnisker.com. His “Occasional Scoops” can be heard, occasionally, on KFOG-FM, 104.5, with his signature sign-off, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.”

—By Ginny Prior

—Photography by Craig Merrill