Al Franken created one of the funniest bits ever for his radio show, 'Air America'. The 'audio crawl' was the radio version of a technique used on television all the time. A 'crawl' is television jargon for the stream of words you see on the bottom of your screen as the image appears above. The crawl details breaking news, public announcements such as school closings or weather storm warnings. On the financial television channels, the crawl shows the different stocks prices throughout the trading day streaking across the bottom of the screen.In the 'audio crawl' segment on his radio show, Al and his female co host devise a plan to implement an audio version of the crawl for their listeners so that they can deliver the main story and still give additional information to the audience at the same time. The female co host begins to read the news with professional enthusiasm and suddenly we are aware of a low pitched mumbling sound heard along with the lead story; Al has begun reading his prepared text! The funny part is that the 'audio crawl' requires that the listener discern the main story from the subtext at the same time by listening to both at once. What follows is a confusing soup of intonations and animated narrative. Trying to listen to Al's 'crawl' means that we have to focus on the mumbling and ignore the more interesting voice of the main announcer. We have to concentrate to understand the words instead of absorbing the story.
Needless to say, the experiment known as 'audio crawl' was abandoned after about 25 seconds as being both too stupid and too distracting for anyone to follow. But it was very funny.
Cartoon Credit: Lawrence Gilson
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