Garrison Keillor comes to the Avalon and Emails with the Spy

My favorite Garrison Keillor joke:

“Why do horses make lousy philosophers?”
“Because you can’t put Descartes before the horse.”

I can practically see you wince and utter a one-word review of that joke, “Ouch!”

In the professional opinion of this arts critic and aficionado of terrible jokes, it was a highlight of the 2006 movie “Prairie Home Companion.” Which was also, famously, the title of public radio’s most popular prime-time show of all time until its creative-genius host left the FM gig a year before his #MeToo moment of reckoning. It happened when a female colleague accused Keillor of sexual harassment, amplified by subsequent allegations of workplace affairs and inappropriate comments.

On the current series of in-person shows that brings him to the Avalon Theatre on Sunday evening of February 6th, Garrison Keillor makes no mention of what this modest comeback tour is coming back from. Mostly, he plays smaller venues that couldn’t afford him Before the Fall. They are some distance from performing arts centers that once hosted “Prairie Home Companion” road shows. The Hippodrome in Baltimore or Town Hall in Manhattan. Instead, he’s appeared across the Potomac from D.C. in Alexandria, Va., and in Sellersville, Pa., a Philadelphia exurb. And the closest he’s come onstage to hinting at his fall from grace, likely on advice by legal counsel, are such comments as “I have no regrets.”

Keillor’s most recent solo performances open with patriotic, semi-spiritual singalongs (i.e., “My Country ’Tis of Thee”) before weaving in his familiar mélange of limericks, unabashed puns and, drawing applause of recognition at the mention, “the news from Lake Wobegon.”

What’s missing is the full cast of musicians and comic actors – where are you Guy Noir? – that made “Prairie Home Companion” an irresistible ensemble with Kapitan Keillor at the homespun helm. In its place are reminiscences of growing up in Minnesota in the 1940s together with his future as an octogenarian (Keillor turns 80 on Aug. 7.) “I remember Anoka,” the town of his birth, “almost more clearly than anything that’s happened in the last 40 years,” he said at a Twin Cities homecoming show.

Keillor, of course, continues writing. With the possible exception of young Orson Welles, no one could match him as a radio auteur. That, together with his soothing paternal voice, made him the ideal audio companion in any listener’s home.

“It’s always satisfying to see our nation’s capital hit by a good hard snowstorm,” the forever
Minnesotan wrote on Jan. 12, “and imagine powerful men trying to shovel their way out of a snowbank. It’s a parable right out of Scripture; let the powerful have a sense of humor, for each, in turn, shall be made helpless. It was front-page in the papers, and the subhead said that a U.S. senator had been stranded overnight on the interstate.” Then, in a wry political observation, Keillor added: “If the Senate had come to session the next morning, our nation would get moving again, one blockage breaking a logjam. But it was only a Democrat from Virginia giving Mitch McConnell a one-vote edge, and there is no vacancy on the Supreme Court, so he didn’t need it.”

Not surprisingly, bits of his print columns appear in his touring show. “My life is so good at 79; I wonder why I waited this long to get here, so much of what I know would’ve been useful in my 40s. Yes, there’s loneliness and pain, despair, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness, the feeling of ‘Why am I here? What did I come in the kitchen for? A fork? A glass of water? A Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll?’ (Perhaps that condiment promoted by the Catchup Advisory Board?). . . . On the other hand, I’m not on a tight schedule or under close supervision, so I have freedom to look around and think for myself. I look at the front page of the paper and think, ‘Not my problem.’ The world belongs to the young, I am only a tourist, and I love being a foreigner in America.”

And then this: “My life is full of mistakes: When you’re almost 80, what’s the point of denial? An old man is free from other people’s opinion of him.”

Of the folksy charm that once made him America’s best-known monologist. “Please don’t call me a humorist,” Keillor says. “I talk in subjects and verbs and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end. And it ends. Humor has to surprise us; otherwise, it isn’t funny. It’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it’s not a surprise anymore.”

Happily for Garrison Keillor, much of his comeback audience – occasional sidewalk protesters aside – still appreciate him as the gentle host who invisibly sprinkled their Saturday evenings with delight for decades. They still admire how he cultivates exquisitely bad jokes with the same care horticulturalists cultivate exquisite orchids. (“Viagra stolen. It’s in the news. Hardened criminals on the loose.”) And in return, the news from Lake Wobegon welcomes them as invited guests to a place where all the children remain “above average” – though they may be 50-something by now.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer now living in Easton.

Garrison Keillor Tonight: 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 6, Avalon Theatre, Easton; 410-822-7299, avalonfoundation.org. Masks and proof of COVID-19 vaccination required or proof of negative COVID test within 72 hours.