Dave Ryan's Morning Dish

I admit: I’m not a typical Dave Ryan listener. And reporting on a radio show is much different than having a long-term relationship with the show. Approaching the show like some dorky cultural studies scholar, poring over full three-and-a-half-hour programs as if they were texts teeming with symbolism, is far different than the way everybody else listens. Most listeners don’t take notes as the show cycles through 10-minute blocs of Rihanna’s new song/news/gossip/traffic/comedy segment . . . to Beyoncé’s new song/news/gossip . . . and repeat. To most listeners, Dave is the disembodied voice in the background while they’re putting on their makeup in the morning. Or they get 20 minutes with Lena and Steve-O on 394 while they drive their Grand Am to the office park in Eden Prairie. Or they catch muffled snatches of such regular segments as War of the Roses or Cheater’s Club from a coworker’s cubicle a row or two away. And these moments recur on a daily basis over the course of many years. To the daily listener, the Morning Show characters are part of the narrative of daily life, and they share a bizarre sort of intimacy—an invisible radio connection that might seem baffling to some people.

Many women don’t just love the Dave Ryan in the Morning Show; they become attached to it. After telling some of the females in my life—my sister, some coworkers at the magazine—that I was doing a story on Dave Ryan, they began to call or text or come over to my desk just to ask me if I’d heard what happened on the show. “Did you hear Christmas Wish this morning?” a coworker would ask. “I couldn’t. Stop. Crying.” Christmas Wish is a segment in which, after Dave and company coax every woeful financial detail from a family struggling to make the holiday ends meet, Crisco will crash through the front door shocking a (usually single) mother and her brood with a windfall of items, from flat-screen televisions to gift certificates for Cub Foods and American Eagle Outfitters.

As soon as another popular segment, War of the Roses, goes to commercial, I’ll get a call from my sister: “Are you listening to this, Steve? Oh. My. God.” War of the Roses is a prank in which Lena, masquerading as a cell-phone provider conducting a one-time-only promotion, calls a might-be cheater and informs him that he’s won a dozen roses and he’s free to send them to whomever he chooses. He’s unaware that his girlfriend is eavesdropping along with KDWB’s listening audience—until Dave butts in either to congratulate or humiliate him.

Before Dave hired her to replace Corey Foley in October 2007, Lena Svenson listened to KDWB every morning. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 2004 with a theater degree, Lena worked as a temp and then as a wire specialist for Wells Fargo. Her coworker at the temp agency would have the show on, and even with the volume turned low, Lena claims Dave’s voice had a soothing quality. “Even when I couldn’t really listen to what was happening on the show,” she says, “I could hear his voice, and it’s very comforting.”

Dave considers his voice an asset, but he doesn’t believe it’s as distinctive as some of his competitors’. “People will recognize me in restaurants, but it’s not like Tom Barnard’s voice,” Dave says. “Tom has an average voice, but it has a lot of character—he sounds like Home Depot. If I try to talk like that, I sound like an asshole.”