For more than 30 years Bruce McCall has been designing illustrations and covers for The New Yorker magazine. There’s his “First-Ever Guided Tour of The New Yorker,” which gives you McCall’s X-ray vision of a weird Victorian mansion inside of which you can see everything from his fourth-floor “Future Article Selection” Department, with a bunch of crazy “editors” spinning two huge wheels of fortune—to his ground-floor “Filing Department of Unsolicited Manuscripts Division,” with two hulking Neanderthal-types shoveling paper typescripts down a chute into what appears to be a bottomless open-grated hole in the sidewalk.

Or else there’s McCall’s three-part foldout cover, “The Ascent of Man,” for the May 14, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, starting with an ape groping up a log, turning into an ancient Egyptian, a medieval plowsman and a bow-tied Edwardian gent rising atop a steam engine—to a twenty-first century man who has reached the top of things, only to slip off a broken escalator, losing his briefcase and plummeting God knows where.

McCall has also enriched us with his satirical sketches in the “Shouts and Murmurs” section of The New Yorker, as well as having written six zany, inimitable books.

As far as I know, Allan Wolper’s piece is the first radio interview of McCall ever. Thanks to Wolper’s street smarts and his camaraderie with McCall, partly because they’re neighbors living in the same building on New York City’s Upper West Side, this piece is priceless. I’d call it the best of Wolper’s nearly two dozen half-hour productions—which is saying a lot, giving the high quality of the series.

Wolper and McCall click. You’ll hear McCall, who flunked out of high school in Toronto, say that the “biggest myth in the world is that college is a good thing”—in this he agrees with his fellow Canadian, the best-selling New Yorker author Malcolm Gladwell. You’ll hear McCall say that there’s “more damned squabbling and backbiting and ugly rancor in the talk show people like Glenn Beck. . . a new low in the discourse of the republic." While he denies that he’s a liberal, McCall hasn’t much good to say about Sarah Palin, John Edwards and Tiger Woods; he contends that parents, not teachers, should teach kids NOT to be like these ostensible role models.

Whether you agree that Ralph Nader is a “twerp,” that “Scotland has more intellectuals per capita than any other country in the world,” or that religion is “a waste of time,” you’ll come away from this piece with the kind of respect for McCall that I hold for a man like Mark Twain.

Bruce McCall is one cool dude. Listen up and hear for yourself.