Maura Tierney & Michael Kupperman

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.5 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2018

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

First up this week: Maura Tierney! You know her from her time on the hit drama ER - she played Abby. She's currently on the Showtime series The Affair, as well. And, here's a personal favorite of ours: She also starred on the sitcom Newsradio as Lisa, the ambitious reporter and producer. Her latest role is in the film Beautiful Boy, where she stars alongside Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet. Then, Michael Kupperman. He's a comics artist and writer whose work usually comes off as surreal, silly and always hilarious. Not so much with his latest work, though. He made a touching, fascinating graphic memoir about his father. It's called "All The Answers." Michael's dad is Joel Kupperman - who, for a brief period in the 40s and 50s, was one of the most famous people in the nation. Joel spent almost his entire childhood and adolescence on TV as a "quiz kid," answering trivia questions for prizes. Finally, for the outshot: Jesse tells you about the last great album Sly Stone ever recorded.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:12.8	I'm Jesse Thorn. For the longest time Michael Cuperman didn't know that much about his
0:16.8	dad. I mean he knew his dad. He was around his old childhood. He knew his dad went to
0:22.4	Cambridge then Harvard. He knew that at one point his dad was kind of famous. He was
0:27.8	a quiz kid, a regular game show contestant in the early days of TV. But beyond the basics
0:33.9	his dad didn't really talk about that. So one day Michael's in college starting to figure
0:40.8	out who he is. He falls in love with comedy and with one comedy act in particular the
0:47.4	Marx brothers. And I was reading a book about the Marx brothers and I turned the page
0:51.8	and there was my father with Chico. And that was intense shock because he was not a person
1:00.4	who was very into comedy. And he certainly I think partly discouraged me from having
1:07.6	a career that was closer to comedy because he considered it frivolous to so to realize
1:12.9	that he had performed with some of the greatest comedians of all time was kind of a hard
1:19.4	pill to swallow. It's Bullseye.
1:29.2	Coming up artist and writer Michael Cuperman talks about the fascinating sometimes painful
1:33.9	journey of discovery that went into his new graphic memoir all the answers. He spent
1:39.5	years digging through archives learning stuff about his father that he'd never imagined.
1:44.8	So I was aware that he had been famous but I don't think I really understood until I
1:49.5	started to work on this book the quality of his fame just exactly how he had been famous
1:54.7	and how emotional it was both for the people who were fascinated by him and for him personally.
2:02.3	But before Michael Cuperman more a tear knit star of ER news radio the affair and the new
2:09.0	film Beautiful Boy. She'll talk about all those projects plus why she starred alongside
2:14.8	Jerry Orbok in the 1991 smash hit dead women in lingerie.
	...

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