David Slavin

David Slavin and Bruce Kluger began writing satire for NPR’s All Things Considered in 2002, after their initial attempts at collaboration — brokering a Mideast peace accord and mapping the human genome — proved unsuccessful.

Over the years, they’ve force-fed All Things Considered listeners their irreverent takes on everyone from Dick Cheney and Mel Gibson, to such vaunted institutions as the Supreme Court, the United Nations and Ari Fleischer. Their “Brookings Institution for Kids” was replayed at Brookings’ 2003 national convention; and their Presidential primary parody, “Six Democratic Friends” prompted an animated Internet version that was selected by CNN’s Crossfire as its “Picture of the Day” (which, though nice, did nothing to change their opinion of Robert Novak).

Other highlights include “Ted on Ice” (starring the cryogenically frozen baseball slugger, Ted Williams, in a pivotal albeit silent role); “Iraqi II” (a Saddam-meets-Stallone send-up); and an eight-part, fictional Senatorial campaign (sleazy incumbent Chuck Zeffirelli vs. sleazy newcomer Bob Gunderson), which aired during the 2002 mid-term elections.

Their satire has appeared in countless newspapers and journals across the country, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and dozens of publications on the L.A. Times wire syndicate. On the Internet, numerous websites and blogs continue to cut-and-paste their work with no remuneration to the authors whatsoever.

Kluger and Slavin also created and wrote the popular “Memo to George” column for Salon.com, in which they imagined secret correspondences to President Bush from Chief of Staff Andrew Card. The series was hailed by the media website Cursor.org as “pitch-perfect satire” (which might have been a feather in their caps had anyone known what cursor.org was).

Prior to their collaboration, Bruce Kluger was an editor of Playboy Magazine for 13 years, and is currently a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors, a columnist for Parenting magazine and a regular contributor to Alternet.org and Time.com.

David Slavin has worked for the past decade as a voice-over artist, providing narration for hundreds of national and regional TV and radio commercials, as well as The Late Show with David Letterman, and documentaries produced by National Geographic and PBS.

Bruce Kluger and David Slavin live one block from each other in New York City, a geographical imperative since neither would go much further than that to work. Their pet peeves include traffic jams and negative people, and they adore long walks on the beach.

Both are married, and both have two daughters.