Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right.

Learn more at RWJF.org.

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne.

This whole month, we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bullseye.

And I want to kick off today's show with a story.

25 years ago, I was a sophomore in college at UC Santa Cruz. Go banana slugs. Division

3 hacky sack juggernaut. Me and two buddies had a good idea. What if we hosted a show on the local

student run radio station? Not to like play, you know, rusted root songs,

but what of our show was jokes and funny stuff and talking?

We applied for, and we got a time slot at 7.30 on Thursday mornings,

which meant that we had to get up at the crack of dawn. In fact, sometimes

in the dark. And because the campus shuttle wasn't running yet, walk through the forest and

up a bunch of hills and then step inside a cold radio station to tell jokes. KZSC, the heavyweight

88. Those friends were Jordan Morris, who is still my comedy partner and the co-host of my other show, Jordan Jesse Go, and Eugene O'Neill.

And I know that you're a public radio listener, and you're saying, Udine O'Neill, different Udine O'Neal.

These days, Gene is a writer and producer in television here in Los Angeles.

Anyway, we called the show The Sound of Young America.

I thought it was kind of a funny joke because, obviously, we weren't The Sound of Young

America. We were on a college radio show, and no one was listening to us. It also was,

of course, the slogan of Motown Records. The Sound of Young America is the very same show that I have been doing every single week for the last 25 years.

...