April’s featured radio show is Funny Girls, hosted by juniors Megan McKiernan and Isabel Schwartzberg. We talked about their mutual love of musical theater and how they bring something different to the KOXY table. Interview by Mariana Martinez.
KOXY: Tell me a little about your show, how the idea came about, what your show is about?
Megan McKiernan: Our show is about Broadway musicals, and we play Broadway musicals.
Isabel Schwartzberg: Well it’s musical theater, really. We don’t limit it to just Broadway. We just limit it to musicals we’re obsessed with.
MM: We do have off-Broadway and movie musicals.
IS: True.
MM: The idea came about because we’re both big musical theater nerds –
IS: Giant.
MM: and we wanted to have a place to talk about that, and we started talking about it and people said they would listen, and so we just wanted to listen to our favorite music and have a conversation about it every week.
IS: And the name Funny Girls comes from – we were going through all of these Broadway musicals thinking “we need a good pun” and we were like “Oh! What about Funny Girls?” “Funny Girl” is a Barbra Streisand musical with such classics as “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and we thought “let’s make it about us.”
MM: It also links back to the song “Pretty Funny” from “Dogfight,” which we’re also obsessed with. It’s about dorky girls who are kind of doing their best.
IS: We also both said in the beginning – I don’t know if you remember talking about this – that we’re not taken seriously about being funny.
MM: Yeah, but we’re both funny.
IS: We think we’re hysterical.
KOXY: Funny girls.
IS: Heck yeah.
KOXY: Now that you’ve been doing your show for the semester, what has it been like? What are your reflections on the semester of Funny Girls?
IS: What we do every week is we’re like “let’s come up with a theme.” Then we immediately break that theme. It’s fun coming up with a theme, and we’ll make a playlist of songs where we think “oh, this fits.” Once we’re in the booth, first of all, we forget about half of the songs. Then we’re like “what about this one or this one or this one?” There are just too many songs that we like. Also, I feel like we keep coming back to the same few musicals or the same few songs where we’re like “this works for everything.”
MM: I figured out over the course of the show how much we each actually know about musical theater. We each know a ton of really weird trivia and analyze things on the spot because we spend all of our time researching it without understanding that we are doing research.
KOXY: This is fun stuff. One last question – what does the KOXY community mean to you? Or what does it mean to be a part of KOXY and have this space for your show?
IS: It’s so cool to have the space to do whatever we want. The cool thing about KOXY is that it’s not a specific style, it’s whatever your style is. You can be like “this is what I like” and you can put that out into the world. We always kind of joke that we mess up the KOXY Spotify account whenever we have our show because it’s all just show tunes and everyone else plays cool music.
MM: We’re just way less cool than everyone else there.
IS: But it’s cool to have a space where we can talk about this, and people might listen, they might not, but it’s still there!
MM: It’s been fun to have a place to talk about what we really love, and I feel like that space has become important to me as a chance to unwind and chill out.
IS: I always look forward to our Wednesdays at 10:00 AM.
MM: It’s also funny for us to go to KOXY events because we like being there because we like the people and we’re also a little of a contrast from everyone there being incredibly cool and then there’s us just being absolute nerds.
IS: I’m wearing a shirt that says “I Speak Fluent Show Tunes” right now.
Tune in to the last weekly show of Funny Girls this Wednesday, May 2nd at 10:00 AM. KOXY’s final day of programming for the semester is Sunday, May 6th. We hope you’re ready a lovely summer, but even more ready for what we have in store next year!