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It's the best decision you'll make all day live on tape from my house in Los Angeles

I'm Jesse Thorn and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFun.org

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Another news, a bitter cold blast has been sweeping the nation. It is freezing across the United States

Not here, but pretty much everywhere else in the United States. So cold, in fact, the Mercury has dropped down to Jeremy Pivens ankles.

It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn. My guest on the program Spike Ferriston was about a successful television writer as you can be having written for many amazing programs from the late show with David Letterman to Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld. He even wrote a script for the Simpsons. In even some of his failures were quite noble ones like the very funny Dana Carvey show.

Now he's a late night talk show host on Fox and Fox's longest tenured ever late night talk show host at three seasons and his show has just been expanded from a half hour format to an hour format on Saturday nights. It's called talk show with Spike Ferriston.

Spike, welcome to the Sound of Young America. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you and I'm really happy to hear this. What is the sound of Young America?

This is what it sounds like. You're not wearing your headphones. That's why you can't hear it. Is there is it in there? Yeah, you can hear it. If I put these headphones on, I'm going to hear Young America. It's like you can hear the ocean. If you put a shell up to your ear, I hear it. It sounds good. It's like a hiss. It's warm. It's warm and newly politically engaged. Lovely. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I was really happy to hear that you're also a stuffed squirrel enthusiasts. I am or I used to be semi retired stuff squirrel enthusiasts. I had many of them and when I got married, my wife started picking them off. One at a time. It seems like the kind of thing because the comedy writer you collect odd things. I noticed you have a stuffed squirrel. I became a collector of stuffed squirrels of various forms. They were gifts somewhere along the line in my move from New York to LA. I caught stuffed squirrel mites or shouldn't say I.

The squirrels did and the fur started falling off. That was just enough opening for my wife to start going. Get those out of the house, please.

Well, because you don't know whether a stuffed squirrel might, despite its name, might not be specific to the stuffed squirrel.

What I found is a stuffed squirrel starts becoming less funny when it starts losing its hair. It's not as cute when it's got big patches of exposed, dry, froggy skin.

That's where I can't disagree with her. She was right. Get it out of the house. We're going to put the chin out. We want to have dinner parties.

It's wrong with you.

You've always been a comedy writer in your career to this point. Before starting talk show, you'd always been a writer.

When you first imagined a career for yourself in comedy, was it as a writer or as a performer?

Well, you know, before I did anything, I thought I was a musician. I really thought I was Jimmy Hendrix reincarnated.

You went to Berkeley College of Music, which is the place where...

I went to Berkeley College of Music for that, though. I was kind of a kid that was like beat up on in high school and discovered that if you played in the rock band and sang songs, like stone songs, that people were going to think you're cool.

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