A Few Words About PHC

If you've explored the "permanent content" parts of this blog (on the right on Typepad, or at the bottom if you still read the hand-rolled version), you'll see I wrote a skit for Prairie Home Companion. I'd always dreamed that the email I'd get from that sketch would be a request for the PHC organization to perform the skit.

Instead, I got a newspaper reporter working on a feature story (probably keyed to the PHC movie). Here's my response:

I came relatively late to Garrison Keillor and PHC. I didn't live in Minnesota, so I didn't hear the early, non-syndicated years. I remember reading an article that said that Tom Brokaw made it a point to be free on Saturday nights so he could listen. I found it very difficult to free up my schedule on Saturday nights, so I taped the program for years.

I was saddened when Keillor left for Denmark, overjoyed when he returned, and have dragged my two daughters to three different tapings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I have, on occasion, pondered the source of my interest. It doesn't rise to the level of obsession, since I am now only an occasional listener. Albeit one who owns all of Keillor's books, most of his CDs and cassettes, many of his magazine articles and can recite the Guy Noir opening announcement by heart.

My interest in Keillor stems, in part, from my own history in public radio; in high school (KBPS) and college (WMBR at MIT) I produced radio plays and a program of skit comedy. I considered moving to Britain and trying to land a job at the BBC after graduation, but the consulate told me I'd have to prove there was no one in Britain who could do the job-a hurdle I did not think I could overcome. I didn't have the voice to be a disk jockey or radio newscaster, so I went into print.

Now that I've cleared my throat, some specifics:

• Keillor has revived a great radio format, of music, story telling and skit comedy that died, to my regret, just before my 10th birthday in 1962. I am one of the young people who wishes they'd been around for the golden age of radio. ·
• Keillor is the inheritor of a great tradition of American writers of narrative humor. I own complete collections of Twain, Robert Benchley, S.J. Perlman and Groucho Marx.
• I admit I am put off by much of what I have read about Keillor as a person (I own all the unauthorized biographies as well as the semi-authorized biography), but, as with Woody Allen, I judge the art, not the man. ·
• I love Keillor's wry style of observation, gentle wit and sweet parody.
• I am absolutely captivated by Keillor's delivery of it; he has mastered the arts of radio and storytelling to an extent unknown outside of the members of the Firesign Theater, of whom I consider him to be a successor (in style, not content).
• I wish I could be Keillor, or even write for him. Since I can't, I listen to his program, write a script based on a recurring dream I had for years, and voraciously attend to his written output. And I still listen when I can, sometimes sitting in the car until the Guy Noir skit, or the news from Lake Woebegone are finished.
• I think some people who dislike him do so because of his real-life personality. Others find him low-brow. Still others just cannot accept his pace, or his non-joke style of humor (parodied in a Simpson's episode in which Keillor is on the television and Homer pounds the top of the set, shouting "Be funny.")
• I love Keillor, Twain, Monty Python, Benchley, Firesign Theater, and Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. Many otherwise intelligent friends of mine loathe all of these groups and authors, including, sometimes, my wife and daughters. There is no accounting for taste, particularly in matters of humor.