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Radio host and producer Ira Glass (pictured), along with comic artist Chris Ware, will perform at

Sometimes it takes very little to reinvigorate a dying art form. At a time when public radio trails even network television in terms of innovation, it may come as a surprise that one of National Public Radio’s most creative programs has risen to the top just by keeping it simple.

Very simple, in fact. Radio host Ira Glass’ “This American Life” engages its audience of 1.4 million with stories too small-scale for mainstream media. Glass can devote a segment of his hour-long show to a story of two cops upending a couple’s house in search of an elusive squirrel, or air an interview with a woman responsible for filling the vending machines on an aircraft carrier. Add the occasional short story or David Sedaris reading, all linked to the particular episode’s unifying theme, and suddenly the lower end of the FM dial isn’t just for latte drinkers and Whole Foods patrons anymore.

With its uniquely charming allure, Glass’ quirky weekly show, which airs on over 400 public radio stations including Los Los Angeles' own KCRW, can only be fully appreciated within the confines of its own medium. It’s this attention to form that may be the motivation behind UCLA Live’s latest commissioned event involving Glass and comic artist Chris Ware. The two friends will present a story at Royce Hall on April 10, with Glass telling the story alongside Ware’s visual accompaniments.

“There’s something about cartooning itself that has a lot in common with radio,” Glass said. “Although it seems to have a leisurely pace – to tell a story on the radio or in a cartoon – you really are parsing out time.”

There’s a lot of truth to that statement – much of the emotional heft behind both “This American Life” and Ware’s comic art depend on impeccable timing, and both of their mediums are especially conducive to communicating these subtleties.

For Glass, the perfect pause or musical interlude may come after a weighty rumination that just needs to sit.

For Ware’s pathetic and grief-stricken characters, like the subject of his acclaimed book “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” the panels that show Jimmy thinking or turning his head are just as important as the panels that feature text. If anything, Glass and Ware have garnered national attention due to their keen awareness of their respective medium’s unique freedoms as well as limitations.

For Glass, who has played the role of a newscast writer, desk assistant, editor and producer at NPR’s Washington, D.C. headquarters since 1978, the concept of “This American Life” elevates his craft to something more creatively liberating than journalism. It may even be fair to say that the stories’ content doesn’t make the show, but their inherent ability to adapt to the radio format does.

“Everything has to be done in very fast, broad strokes, even if it is a very long story, or a very complicated story, which we do a lot of,” he said. “Every gesture has to be cleanly and quickly done.”

Glass still needs some of the traditional journalists’ most valuable assets, like a natural inquisitiveness that lights up when a story fit for the show comes into view. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t need the help. He’s ready and willing to admit that the upcoming UCLA Live collaboration has opened his eyes to the value of an art form that he never quite understood before – architecture.

The story created for the Royce event, which revolves around one boy’s lifelong obsession with old Louis Sullivan buildings around Chicago’s suburban neighborhoods, will be accompanied by Ware’s pristine renderings projected as 40-foot monuments on the Royce Hall stage. The collaboration is just one example of how easily Glass can conjure up a giddy excitement for things even he never thought he could enjoy.

“The way people talk about architecture, they have an air of preciousness and artsyness about them in this way that makes you want to throttle them,” he said.

“(But) I’m actually having a feeling experience now … Some buildings seem perfectly happy to be there and just sit there as buildings. They are for our service, whereas other buildings think they’re a little better than us, actually. I’m noticing all of that now, in exactly the way that the people who made the buildings intended, and appreciate (this feeling) very, very much.”