Sam Anderson on Slate, June 16, 2006
"Keillor's flagship franchise is still A Prairie Home Companion, a weekly two-hour radio variety show that debuted in 1974 to a live audience of 12 people and now draws more than 4 million listeners a week across 600 stations. For a variety show, Prairie Home is remarkably invariable—its elements (skits, songs, humorous poems, catchphrases) cycle in and out of the program as predictably as the seasons. The highlight of every show is Keillor's career-making innovation: the so-called "News From Lake Wobegon," a pointedly unthrilling 20-minute monologue full of childhood tomato fights, drunk preachers, Norwegian bachelor farmers, Minnesota weather (God designed the month of March "to show people who don't drink what a hangover feels like"), and sentimental rhapsodies about the precious things in life. Keillor delivers the news in a kind of whispery trance. When he speaks, blood pressures drop across the country, wild horses accept the saddle, family dogs that have been hanging on at the end of chronic illnesses close their eyes and drift away. The segment always ends with the achingly familiar line, "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average." And then a storm of rapturous applause."
GK and Howard Stern in the same sentence? GK the Shock Jock? Stay tuned to hear how GK answers Sam Anderson.
The replies to Sam Anderson below are worth your time:
Remarks from the Fray:
Having escaped the midwest for the big city at one stage, I feel a wary affection tinged with regret for all those qualities Keillor performs and Anderson so adequately describes in his article: the wistful nostalgia that barely masks a core of disposessed resentment; the determination to keep peasant culture alive in the face of modernity's relentless and merciless advance; the darkness bordering on cynicism that underlies and undermines the "can-do" optimism of people with few real economic prospects. If I avoid spending time with the denizens of Lake Wobegone, it's more because I already feel I know it's horizons too well than because it isn't clever enough.
The older I get, in fact, the more I recognize these traces of Lutheran fatalism in myself. The glibness and forced, de rigeur, labored "ironies" of so much social intercourse, the seemingly perpetually increasing tendency of smart urban folks to "act" as if they were guests on a mediocre chat show, ruled over by an unctuous host with no discernible talent except for the arch tone, the squinty eye and lots of fake laughter, make me ever more prone to look back fondly on the midwesterners' self-abnegating, deliberate awkwardness.
--MarkEHaag
The dualism of his onstage persona and his writer persona is, occasionally, played out for us when Prarie features the "Carson Weillor: Collage Artist" sketches, revealing the ultimate clever irony: "onstage Garrison" making fun of "writer Garrison" making fun of "artists" in general. I'm serious, but you have to pay really close attention.
One of my favorite anecdotes is when Garrison was on This Week With David Brinkley, and David asked him if Midwesterners are inherently funny. And without missing a beat, Garrison responded, "Only when we go elsewhere." Being from the Midwest, I can vouch for that.
--switters
Perhaps part of the appeal of Keillor and PHC is simply that it is one of the very few places in the US where you can hear the medium of radio being used in a creative way: live music, sketches and monolouges. Look at the rest of radio, it is much more a vast wasteland than television has ever been: computer programmed recorded music, blowhards saying outrageous things about politics (Limbaugh et. al.) or sex (Stern et. al.) or nauseatingly repeated news headlines.
--Nemo
GK is only relentlessly inoffensive in the way the typical NPR listeners believe themselves to be inoffensive. In the same way they believe in diversity, but can't stand anyone to challenge their own limitations on diversity. Free speech they love, but only if you say what agrees with them.
--20yearsfromnow
He's a 21st century Mark Twain. What the hell is Mark Twain doing in the 21st century? The whole folksy down-home thing is a fabrication and he ladles it on by the gallon.
He's like 21st century cowboys or "bikers". They're completely fake. There are no cowboys anymore except the people who play at being cowboys. The same goes for bikers only not so much. There are probably a few real bikers left. But the vast majority are CFO's and fat attorneys with custom built bikes that put on their biker costume Saturday morning.
Mark Twain died long, long ago. Garrison just dresses up like him for money. He's more clever than he gives himself credit for.
--Lou_Buttgoiter
Minnesotan humor tends to be low-key. It's sometimes hard to tell in Sinclair Lewis's novels what is meant to be satirical and what is simply a realistic description of small town life. The punch line in a Peanuts cartoon is often no more than a sigh from Charlie Brown.
Nobody embodies this gentle strain of Minnesotan humor better than Garrison Keillor. Those looking for belly laughs are bound to be disappointed. He isn't the tummler in the Catskills serving up rim shots at a mile a minute, he's the storyteller around the campfire. He smiles at the absurdity of life, and loves the foibles of his characters as much as he mocks them.
--Utek1
"You're not from around here, are you?" That sums up Keillor's grass roots introduction to the area he dubbed Lake Wobegon. Rural people don't mind eccentrics at all: in fact, they welcome them with a simple index finger lifted off the steering wheel while passing on a country road.
You gain acceptance by not leaving and by simply becoming involved in a church or community event. The locals are accustomed to people leaving: the greatest export of rural America has always been its young people. You stay, you fit.
--Pheasant
For those of us who appreciate subtlety, wit, and the deft use of the English language, turns of phrase, humor, and intelligence, Garrison Keillor is a light. [...] He has been described as a modern day Mark Twain, and this is apt. His monologues about Lake Wobegon often talk about subtle feelings, hidden thoughts and desires that many of us have, long to express, and don't know how to. In other words, he is able to access things within us and share them in a way that doesn't belittle or downgrade the listener, but simply says, "I've felt this way, too, at times."
--WomanStrong
Keillor unites sarcasm and earnestness and was a pioneer in getting rid of the useless stereotypes about "country and city folk" that had many beleiving that any New Yorker would mug you as soon as look at you ... and any Midwesterner would give you a good meal and put you up for the night without even asking for ID or payment. Fact is that the zany population of Lake Woebegone represents the anyperson ... which is why he is so popular.
--Joan
39 minutes ago
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