When no experts were available, he would not infrequently fake it - most notably in the case of "Sholem Stein", a putative Hebrew musicologist who claimed that calypso music had deep Rabbinical meanings.
[3] Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley started receiving tapes of Music and Folklore not long after the program began, so Bay Area audiences were already familiar with Jacobs when he moved to San Francisco in 1953 and took up the show in person.
He met poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, comedian Lenny Bruce (whose first recording was a Jacobs project, Interviews of Our Times), and percussionist Mongo Santamaría.
Most important among these new social contacts were the friendships he struck up with Ken Nordine, "the father of word jazz", and Alan Watts, a gifted raconteur and former Anglican priest best known for popularizing and interpreting Eastern philosophy for a Western audience.
[6] Jacobs' album, The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein consisted largely of encounters between hipsters and unknowing squares.
When the interviewer protests that pianos aren't blown, but played with the hands, Shorty returns the opaque reply, "Blow is like an instrument."
With the backing of the American Cancer Society, Jacobs, in collaboration with John Korty, put together an animated short film about quitting smoking, Breaking the Habit, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964.
"The Fine Art of Goofing Off" was a sort of philosophical Sesame Street; each program would develop an open-ended theme, like "time" or "work" in an unpredictable collage of brief episodes in a variety of different styles of animation.
Alan Watts, improv troop The Committee, artist Victor Moscoso, musicians Mark Unobsky and Pete Sears, Woody Leafer, and Jordan Belson all contributed to the series.