By Jonathan B. Wight

This is a few days late, but one of the great, authentic comics has died.

Tom Magliozzi (1937-2014) is the older brother to Ray, of the CarTalk duo fame.

I first heard “Click and Clack” up in Boston in the early 1980s when the show was airing locally. Later, it was a joy to find it broadcast nationally on NPR.  It was by far my favorite show: I would arrange my housekeeping duties on Saturday morning to coincide with the show, carrying around my radio while I worked at chores.

Tom and Ray cared about ethics, and they helped steer people to generally do the right thing.

For example, if someone had a car that they knew had a serious fault, Tom and Ray would usually convince the person to let the next buyer know about it.  They had a common-sense decency about the right and wrong way to treat people and it did not require highfalutin’ philosophy to keep straight.

The exception would be when someone was trading-in a car at a dealer.  Then, it was “all’s fair in love and war” mentality. I guess they figured the cards were already stacked in favor of dealerships. The dealership had the ability and the incentive to eliminate problems of asymmetric information, so there was little danger of the dealership getting rooked. But the same was certainly not true of buyers.

Few of us are saints, and Tom Magliozzi is certainly not one. But he sure made us laugh and encouraged us all to become slightly better people.