Garrison Keillor Journal - April 6, 2025

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Some people think it’s remarkable that a man approaching 83 still wants to walk out onstage and fool around with people but it’s really very simple: you have a long lucky career learning your way around, you drew a crowd, you still believe you can do better, and there’s no better way to spend an evening than to be with people having a good time. I did the Hollywood Bowl in 2016 but the Tin Pan Dinner Theater in Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday, March 29, was much more fun. A capacity crowd of 220 and the wait staff hustled around the tables clearing the dishes as I walked around talking about the joys of longevity. I came upon a table of Methodist ministers and their wives and I talked about my Methodist grandma who sang me to sleep with a song about small children dying in a blizzard. It was fun.

I grew up Sanctified Brethren, a strict outfit, and my dad never told a joke in his life though he could laugh at them. My mother loved jokes and that’s how I won her favor. We believed in hell and eternal damnation so I didn’t joke about that. And when I went to college I fell in among Jews and I was honored that they accepted me as a personal friend. Arnie Goldman, Barry Halper, Larry Leventhal, Maury Bernstein, Sam Heins. They prized a sort of wit that Brethren avoided, a playful irony, skeptical of authority. I read A.J. Liebling in The New Yorker and wanted to be like him.

There was one Black family in town, the Copes family, and she was the piano teacher and she was a saint. If my sisters forgot to practice, she was kind to them. In our family only the girls got to take piano. (Boys weren’t considered talented. We were for heavy lifting.) She was my idea of a perfect Christian, so why didn’t they go to our church? “Because they have their own church,” my mother said. It made no sense.

So I was drawn toward comedy. I wanted to play jazz piano but I couldn’t because it would lead to dancing, which would lead to fornication. Fornication like this you’d need a tuxedo and I didn’t have one. So I tried comedy instead, which was the Jewish art form. The Marx brothers. “Don’t wake him up. He’s got insomnia. He’s trying to sleep it off.” The Jews had suffered the worst tragedy of my time, the Holocaust, and you read the Diary of Anne Frank and you fall in love with a girl who’s been dead for several years, it does something to you.

In 1974 I started a live radio show in a St. Paul theater in front of an audience, years after that sort of show had died out, and I kept doing it for forty years. Minnesota Public Radio was a small organization and it didn’t have any vice presidents and the top guy, Bill Kling, was my age and he liked the show and liked the fact that listeners did too.

When you’ve had a long lucky career, you start to think about ending it in the right way, not dwindle away, but go out strong and ambitious and still having fun. Our PHC at Tanglewood on June 21 is a very big deal for us and for a while I thought about making that the end, but no, I don’t think we’re done. I thought it was a tragedy when the WashingtonPost and Viking Penguin dumped me in 2017, but now it seems like magical good luck. The Substack column is much freer and funnier and has 200,000 readers, which is enough for anybody, and the publishing world has migrated away from humor into romance and fantasy, and self-publication turns out to make more sense in every way.

The readership is the grand prize, the old liberals, the Trumpers, the mothers and dads, the witty teenagers, and it’s the thought of those people that makes me happy to sit down at the laptop in the morning and write that column. An old writer feeling lighthearted doing something he’s been chasing down for sixty years or so. To love working even more than you did when you were young and smart and good-looking. That’s the privilege beyond expectation, to still be having fun.