‘The Worst Person in the World’

Keith Olbermann Anchor, 'Countdown' • Profile

From tongue-in-cheek observations to truly horrific accounts, Keith Olbermann skewers both the mighty and the meek, the well-known and the anonymous for their misdeeds in his new book, "The Worst Person in the World."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann discussed his book on the "Today" show. Below is an excerpt:

They aren’t really the worst persons in the world, of course.

Somewhere somebody’s ending freedom, or sticking a shiv into a witness, or defrauding an orphan, or bombing a home. And there’s almost nobody in this book who—in any kind of empirical analysis of the worst person in the world at a given moment—could truly hold a candle to any of them.

But my guys and gals have all, in their own ways, tried.

Orphans may have nothing to fear, and freedom is more likely to hurt itself laughing at them than to be hurt by their Rube Goldbergian machinations. But these Worsts (if you’ll permit the term) are the mortal enemies of honesty and dignity, of selflessness and class.

In short—they’ll do.

The epithet tracks directly to three of the great influences of my late childhood: George Carlin, Bob Elliott, and Ray Goulding. They were classified as comedians, yet each—Carlin in his remarkable solo career and Bob & Ray in their nonpareil tandem work—was a social commentator.

It was Carlin who startled me decades ago by the simple but irrefutable argument—the astonishing observation hidden inside the safety of a joke—that by the process of ranking, there truly had to be, somewhere, the worst doctor in the world. More terrifying still, he noted, “somebody has an appointment to see him tomorrow!”

Bob & Ray proclaimed themselves political neutrals (while allowing me a visit to their New York radio studios in 1974, Ray told me they didn’t do political humor because “how could we top Watergate?”). Yet twenty years before, they had wrung Joe McCarthy’s neck every morning by mocking the Army-McCarthy hearings. Ray could do a perfect imitation of McCarthy’s manic tone of “I’m just about to go crazy so better put some newspaper on the floor,” and Bob captured the artificial self-deprecation of attorney Joseph Welch, giving him the priceless catchphrase “I’m just a simple showbiz lawyer.”

They made McCarthy into a building commissioner in the fictional town of Skunkhaven, Long Island, and inserted him seamlessly into their unending and ad-libbed mock soap opera, “Mary Backstayge, Noble Wife.” They utterly erased the politics of the equation and left only the absurdity. Morning after morning—when this was still dangerous stuff—their McCarthy and their Welch battled it out on one of New York’s most-listened-to radio stations, over a plan to build a 30-story-tall private home.

When I heard them two decades later, “Mary Backstayge” was still running. The McCarthy and Welch vocal doppelgangers were long gone, but in their place was an ominous character, the W.P.I.T.W.—the Worst Person in the World—who made no comments, but was limited to a series of crunching and slurping sound effects. He invariably turned up while the other characters were dining. “Look at him,” Ray would say in the gummy voice of Calvin Hoogevin. “He’s eating the sandwich right through the wax paper.” Soon after the W.P.I.T.W.’s appearance, his true identity was revealed, on the air. He was John Simon, the venerable reviewer of New York magazine—who had given Bob & Ray’s Broadway show the only bad review it ever got.

So there are the primogenitors of my “Worst” lists—complete with Carlin’s touch of amazed terror, the Bob & Ray conviction that no weapon succeeds like satire, and that little extra soupcon of revenge, personal and egotistical, and somehow cleansed of both characteristics by the stark admission that it is revenge.

For many months, I had contemplated introducing a segment to my nightly MSNBC newscast, Countdown, that somehow combined all these elements with which I was inculcated as a boy.  I had tentatively thought of “The S List”—but that seemed way too generic. And then one day late in June 2005, two things happened within hours of each other. First, I heard a tape of one of those Bob & Ray soap operas with the W.P.I.T.W. eating not just the wax paper but also the brown bag in which his lunch sat. Then, I read Alessandra Stanley’s review in the New York Times suggesting that our network needed to cancel Tucker Carlson’s new show. This rang as the quintessence of unfairness. MSNBC had been blasted, for years, for never giving new programs any time to develop. Tucker had been on the air less than two weeks.

Suddenly the two names merged. “Worst Person in the World . . . Alessandra Stanley.” We premiered the segment that night, and setting the standards for a certain kind of fairness, Stanley proved only a runner-up. I have never placed my prejudice ahead of somebody else’s superior mendaciousness. Here is that first segment:

A new feature debuting tonight: Countdown’s list of today’s top three nominees for “The Worst Person in the World.” Number three: Alessandra Stanley, TV writer or critic or something—it’s hard to tell what—of the New York Times. As her latest article suggests, if she keeps passing off that many dubious opinions as anonymous facts, she may soon lose her . . . situation.

Number two: Saddam Hussein. This is separate from the whole dictator thing. He has now threatened to sue the newspaper that first ran the photo of him in his underwear.

As its headline today ran: “You and what army?”

And number one: Robert Novak.

We still know what you did last summer! Well, summer before last summer.

The Worst Person in the World.

And from there we were rolling, devoting about 90 seconds of each news hour to this odd little list.

The mighty and the anonymous alike have made the nightly “The Worst Persons in the World” trifecta—from Robert Novak to Scott Peterson to the Ronald McDonald who held up a Wendy’s.  And there have really been only a handful of complaints.

The foremost of them came from John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News. Evidently they don’t like being considered among the Worst Persons in the World—even though they clearly are.

O’Reilly first, because he was funnier.

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