[undocumented]
TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I am Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. On behalf of David McKean, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and welcome those watching this program on C-SPAN. Let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation, our media partners the Boston Globe, WBUR, and NECN, and today‘s special sponsors, Powdermilk Biscuits and Be-bop-a-rop-bop rhubarb pie. [Laughter]
There is a reason that the Kennedy Library would organize a forum on the role of humor in American life. Let‘s take a look:
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REPORTER: There‘s a feeling in some quarters, sir, that big business is using the stock market slump as a means of forcing you to come to terms with business. One reputable columnist, after talking to businessmen obviously, reported this week their attitude is, ―now we have you where they want you.
THE PRESIDENT: I can't believe I‘m where big business wants me.
QUESTION: You have said, and I think more than once, that heads of government should not go to the summit to negotiate agreements but only to approve agreements negotiated at a lower level. Now it‘s being said and written that you‘re going to eat those words and go to a summit without any agreement at a lower level. Has your position changed, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I‘m going to have a dinner for all the people who‘ve written it, and we‘ll see who eats what.
QUESTION: Mr. President, your brother Ted, recently on television said that after seeing the cares of office on you, that he wasn‘t sure he would ever be interested in being the President. I wonder if you could tell us whether if you had to do over again, you would work for the presidency and whether you could recommend the job to others?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, the answer is—The first is Yes, and the second is No, I don‘t recommend it to others –at least for a while.
In 1952, when I was thinking about running for the United States Senate, I went to then Senator Smathers and said, ―George, what do you think?‖ He said, ―Don‘t do it. Can‘t win. Bad year.‖ In 1956, I was at the Democratic Convention and I said I didn‘t know whether I would run for Vice President or not, so I said, ―George, what do you think?
This is it. They need a young man.‖ ―It‘s your chance.‖ So I ran and lost. And in 1960, I was wondering whether I ought to run in the West Virginia primary. ―Don‘t do it. That state you can't possibly carry.‖ And actually, the only time I really got nervous about the whole matter at Los Angeles was just before the balloting, and George came up and he said, ―I think it looks pretty good for you.‖
TOM PUTNAM: Garrison Keillor writes of attending a rally as a college freshman, featuring John F. Kennedy in Minneapolis 50 years ago this fall during the 1960 campaign. His girlfriend, at the time, had supported Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey in the spring primaries. But, as Mr. Keillor notes, ―The local folks got a kick out of Hubert. He just didn‘t travel well. In Minnesota he seemed lively and effusive. But, on the road, he sounded shrill, slightly hysterical, compared to Kennedy who,‖ according to Mr. Keillor, ―was the coolest politician ever, a man who not only quoted Dante, but who looked great just saying ―Good morning.‖
A short word on our slightly altered format: Mr. Keillor will speak to us unfiltered, and when the spirit moves, we will transition to the portion of our program described in a recent New Yorker cartoon as featuring long speeches from the audience disguised as questions. [laughter] And I will return to the podium to close the session for us.
Although many of us may be meeting Garrison Keillor in person for the first time, it may seem more like catching up with an old friend whose familiar voice we have invited into our living rooms, kitchens and cars, and whose stories, poems and songs have often touched chords in our hearts. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Garrison Keillor to the Kennedy Library. [applause]
GARRISON KEILLOR: Thank you so very much. I don‘t remember the President having that pronounced an accent when I heard him back in Minneapolis in the fall of 1960. He sounded more like one of us. But memory can be deceiving.
I come here -- and I can't help but think of a talk I gave in Detroit for a fundraiser for the United Fund. This was a couple of years ago, and it was at the Henry Ford Museum.
There were about 50 enormously wealthy people sitting at round tables, and we were out there on the museum floor, and they were circulating around and having drinks. And I walked around and got the lay of the land. Here behind me was the bus from Montgomery, Alabama that Rosa Parks had ridden on, which led to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the bus boycott in Montgomery, which led to so much else in the south. And here were all these various cars.
And I realized when I stood up in front of these people, that that black Lincoln Limousine back there -- that long limousine -- was the car that Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were riding in, in Dallas, on November 22nd, 1963. And indeed it was. I knew it somehow. And it was sitting there, just beyond this group of people having drinks and waiting for me to talk about Lake Wobegon, Minnesota. It was an enormous disconnect to stand there and attempt to be a humorist and look out at this monster, this monster of history, and this dragon, this car which you and I have seen how many hundreds and maybe thousand times in newsreel footage, over and over, making that turn in Dealey Plaza, and coming up under the elm trees. I just couldn‘t get it out of my mind. And yet, I was not there totalk about this, you see. I was there to tell stories. But it was there, this car, which was the scene of a great change in the history of our country.
We can talk about that for years to come, but it was. Out of that moment, people started to feel a disconnect from their own government. Conspiracy theories abounded, that the government itself had killed the President. So much darkness followed from that very moment. And how many times have we gone back and rewound that film, wanting it to come out a different way? It seemed to be monstrous that we were sitting here around tables and having drinks. And there that car was parked, just beyond us. And yet, this is the challenge of humor that, somehow, it must comprehend darkness and death. It must take this into cognizance.
And I stood up in front of them and I sort of switched directions. And I started to tell stories about death. [laughter] Not what the United Fund people were hoping for. [laughter] But you feel this disconnect and your mind is going one direction, and your voice is trying to take you someplace else. And, in the end, you have to follow your head.
So I told them a story about Mr. Colupson of the grain elevator, who had an affair with the English teacher, though each of them were married to other people. And he went down to visit her in her classroom and to recite love poems to her. He worked up in the grain elevator. He was an unprepossessing man. He was wiry, and his hair stuck up. And he was dealing with hair loss. And he wore black horn-rimmed glasses repaired with masking tape. [laughter] And he had soybean dust on him and cornmeal in the cuffs of his jeans. But he went up there to recite a poem to her, ―Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.‖ And before long, they went down to the Moonlight Bay Supper Club, and they sat in the back booth around a little red cut glass decanter with a candle inside. And they ordered bombardiers, a drink that is powerful, that you would not order if you meant to keep your good judgment. [laughter] And they went off and they parked in his little pickup truck, just on the gravel road, just over the hill from where the state highway curves off to the west toward the Dakotas. They parked just over the hill, and they steamed up the windows for a while, never imagining that that lumber truck would take that turn too fast and miss it and then go over that rise and go fishtailing down the gravel and sideswipe the pickup truck and roll it over, eight-nine times.
And she, who had fastened her seatbelt -- which ordinarily you would not do while you were steaming up the windows [laughter] -- she suffered cuts and contusions. And his naked body [laughter] -- because a man who is steaming up the windows has to retain some element of mobility [laughter] -- his naked body was thrown out onto the gravel, where it lay there. And the sheriff‘s headlights, when he came, he inspected the body. And he saw what they had been doing, now, inside the pickup truck. That‘s what that was on his body. The man had put that on himself for safety. And, in his case, it had not worked. [laughter] And they brought the body up to the mortuary, and put him in his suit, and he was taken into the Lutheran Church for the funeral, at which Pastor Tomerdall preached a very stiff sermon on [laughter] the verse, ―Be sure your sin will find you out.‖ God sees, and the rest of us will find out about it, inevitably. And, ―Be sure your sin will find you out. Men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil. But your sin will be found out.‖ Whereupon Pastor Tomerdall‘s old church secretary, Jean, in the third row, burst into tears and sat there sobbing, her bosom heaving. And so that story came out. [laughter]
And Pastor Tomerdall had to be dismissed [laughter], and the chairman of the church council, who voted for dismissal, Eugene, was involved with a woman in Minneapolis named Maureen. But he destroyed her letters to him, to cover his tracks. But there was one that he could not bear to lose. It was a letter from Maureen telling him what a wonderful lover he was and how strong, and how imaginative, and how generous and enduring. This letter of recommendation, he [laughter] held onto and put it for safekeeping in a book in the library, which was a book nobody would ever read, a book of statistics of American agriculture in 1929-1930, the chapter on flax, which [laughter] we don‘t grow around there. And it was safe for years until the librarian, Grace, was weeding out unread books and pulled this out. And the letter came fluttering down to the floor, and she read it and she thought, ―Surely this cannot be my brother-in-law Eugene. He is the chairman of the church council.‖ She showed the letter to her sister who read it and thought nothing of it. The person described in the letter bore no resemblance to her husband. [laughter] But she asked him about it and he dropped a whole armload of china. [laughter] And so he had to be sent off to think about his sins.
He was sent off to live with his brother Roger who, himself, three weeks later was caught in the same way. Had gone into town to play pinochle with his friends, he said, and then came back at one in the morning, which is much too late for pinochle. It‘s a game of old men, and it always ends up at ten. Here he was, at one o‘clock in the morning with a big gash over his left eyebrow. And because he just couldn‘t think of a good story, he was forced to fall back on the truth, which was not to his advantage. [laughter] He had been struck by a mirror that fell off the ceiling of a motel room [laughter] where he and a young woman named Amber -- who he had met at the cocktail lounge -- were lying in the Jacuzzi admiring each other in the mirror on the ceiling. And he opened a bottle of cheap French champagne and the cork bounced off the mirror [laughter] and suddenly their reflections started to get bigger and bigger and bigger. [laughter]
I told this story to the United Fund people. [laughter] I think they were expecting something else, [laughter] something about neighborliness and something about generosity and coming to the aid of those less fortunate. But who can be less fortunate than those who have been struck by a mirror falling off a ceiling? [laughter]
My Uncle Jack was a less fortunate man. He was a man who endured his marriage to my Aunt Evelyn for a number of years, and then he took to Jim Beam bourbon for solace, and he developed alcoholism as a major hobby [laughter], and had to be sent away. He was sent off to live in a hunting shack on the other side of the lake. And there he lived. I loved him. He was a dear man. He loved songs. Not the right kind of songs, but he loved songs. He knew Annabelle Lee by heart. He knew all kinds of poems by heart. He died, he died. They all die, you know. [laughter]
I don‘t kill them off deliberately in my stories, but my uncle did die. He died there in Lake Wobegon. He‘d come into the Sidetrack Tap to medicate himself, and he was on his way. It was a bitterly cold January day in Minnesota. It was 40 below zero and may have been colder than that. Our outdoor thermometers only go down to 40 below. We don‘t want to know about anything colder. [laughter] And he was on his way towards the Sidetrack Tap, this heavyset man with a little fringe of red hair and a brushy red mustache, making his way.
And he ran into his nemesis, Mr. Burgey, who was walking towards him and with whom he had had a lifelong argument about the authenticity of the Kensington Rune Stone, which is a stone that was found in a cornfield in Western Minnesota in the late 1870s, and with Runic writings, old Norse Runic writings on this stone, which, translated, said something like, ―Fourteen of us have come down with the Red Disease and are on our way back to the boats to sail back to Vinland.‖ Which some people, Mr. Burgey being one, felt was authentic and proof that the Vikings were amazing navigators to be able to find their way to the middle of North America just by the stars. [laughter]. And other people, including my Uncle Jack, felt was such an obvious hoax that anybody with the IQ of a potted plant would know that this was the work of some soybean farmer with time on his hands. If you were sick and dying, why would you take a week to carve into a stone [laughter] a meaningless message in a language that nobody around here understands?
And they had an argument about this and an argument about this in the streets. And they were shrieking at each other in Norwegian, which is a language which is rich and invective. And then my uncle felt the elephant step on his chest, and he reached for the parking meter. There‘s only one in my town. They just put up one as an experiment back in the early ‗50s. They got one for cheap, and it just never worked out. And so they didn‘t put up any more. He grabbed hold of it for support. And his last words on this earth, though he couldn‘t have intended this, were, ―You‘ve got shit for brains.‖ [laughter] And then he fell. Mr. Burgey said, ―You go to hell.‖ And then he saw this might be the case. [laughter] And he went in and he called up the constables, and they called the sheriff. The sheriff called the ambulance. The ambulance called the coroner. Fire department got involved somehow. And so before long, you had this scene of an emergency and walkie talkies going off and red and blue flashing lights and yellow tape around the man lying there. And this whole scene of crisis and emergency, which my uncle loved more than anything else in this world, and such a shame that he should miss it. [laughter] And to miss it by just ten minutes. [laughter]
Humor has to include all of these things and comprehend them. We can't close it off. Humor is not silliness. Humor embraces our life. And there‘s a connection between humor and politics, more than just politicians telling jokes. When we talk about humor we mean, first of all, we mean good humor, a sort of amiability, a kind of a general good humor among people, a bias toward trusting each other, a sort of communal spirit, such as we feel around Christmas. Even if you don‘t believe in any of it, you still cannot be impervious to this feeling of amiability, which is at the heart of Christmas.
Christmas doesn‘t require a big outlay of cash, especially as you get older; greed is less and less a part of it. Christmas requires cookies and Christmas carols and candles you need. It‘s good if it‘s cold. I can't imagine Christmas in Florida. I guess other people can, but I can't. You just require a few simple things and some lights and candles and cookies. Saffron cookies are the best. Bayberry candles, but your choice, really. [laughter] And this feeling of amiability, of goodwill, which is everywhere you look around you at Christmastime. Some people are offended by the manger scene. Some people feel marginalized by it. We live in an age of complaint. I say to them, ―Get over it.‖ [laughter]
―Get a grip. You're in America. That‘s where you are. If you were in France, you wouldn‘t expect buttermilk pancakes for breakfast. I mean, you‘d be in France. You're with the French now. You're in a Catholic country, and it‘s France. Don‘t expect that Lemans is going to publish box scores in their morning; they're not going to. If you want those, you have to go elsewhere for it.
There‘s this feeling of amiability even among people who do not believe that Jesus was the son of God and who appeared in human form in a cradle on December the 24th back in Bethlehem. There‘s this feeling of amiability, of people coming together, good humor. This is crucial. And if we lose this, if we lose this in our society, we‘ve also lost something in politics. We are living in this intensely partisan era. It‘s not the first time in our country‘s history, God knows, but still it‘s worrisome when you read a Harris Poll that says that 57% of Republicans in our country believe that Barack Obama is Muslim, that 48% believe that he was not born in this country, when 38% believe that he is doing many of the same things that Adolf Hitler did, that 24% believe that he may be the Antichrist.
We‘re talking about a kid from Hawaii who is the son of a single mother and who strove in classic American style, going to the best schools he could get into, winning the prizes, and moving off and replanting himself on the south side of Chicago and going through the swamp of Chicago politics somehow unscathed—how did that happen?—and marrying the first woman that he was really in love with, and making his way up the ladder in a sort of a classic Dickensian story. This striver, this earnest striver, to have him so misread by such a large minority of people -- pure racism, pure racism, in my opinion. But still disquieting if you believe that the bedrock of politics is some sort of common goodwill among the American people, it is very disquieting.
When we talk about humor, we‘re also talking about jokes which are a crucial part of American culture and American literature. We pride ourselves on this, on being a people who appreciate jokes. This is an age of celebrities, and celebrity doesn‘t go with jokes.
Celebrities are precarious, fragile people who are properties and who are brands, and they must defend their brands against humor, against satire. And they must be very, very, very, very careful not to be caught off guard. It‘s a very precarious thing, especially in this day and age, when there are so many celebrities. There used to be 45. [laughter] And now there are about 47,300 famous people in America, which means that most famous people in America are people who most Americans have never heard of. [laughter] But they are, nonetheless, celebrities. And they travel around in celebrity cars. And they get beyond the velvet rope very easily. And they enjoy great privilege. Until one day humor comes after them, and people start to make fun of them. And then it starts to fall apart. It can happen in so many ways.
You get out of your black car and your publicist Jennifer leads you on toward the book signing. And there you are. And people pass by the velvet rope. And hours go by. And you go for an interview on TV. And then, you stop in the men‘s room on the way back. And you look and there‘s this enormous greenish thing coming out of your left nostril, [laughter] that is moving in and out as you breathe. And you look at this in horror. You are a famous person, admired by literally thousands of people for your cable TV show. But nobody, not one person walked up to you and said, ―Hey bud. [laughter] You need a hankie.‖ So you fire your publicist Jennifer. And you go into hiding. And you go to the Betty Ford Center. [laughter] And you hire a new publicist, Vivian. And Vivian puts out the word that you suffer from a rare condition, which creates excess mucus. And you picked this up when you were over in Africa, where you were going to adopt an orphan child. [laughter] And she does her best at damage control, but the damage is done. You have suffered this sharp blow. And your image is forever, forever cracked. And it will never, ever recover, ever recover. And people will always look at you, and they‘ll be looking at your nostril first. [laughter] This is how it is.
So celebrity culture and humor and jokes do not go with each other. I grew up in an era of cruel humor, desperately cruel, the age of the practical joke. People don‘t do this anymore, but they used to do it. And they would send for ads in the back pages of Popular Mechanics. And they would buy itching powder. And they would buy dribble glasses. So at Thanksgiving you would hand Uncle Louie a dribble glass. And he‘d put it to his lips, liquid would run down his tie. And everybody got a big kick out of this. And you put salt in the sugar bowl.
And I can barely remember when a group of boys put sheep in their friend‘s bedroom, put a sheep, led the sheep up the stairs. And there the sheep was. And the sheep was left in there for a long time. So the sheep made a mark on that bedroom. These were country people. But there was a real cruelty behind it.
I‘m the last person in America to remember the era of privy tipping, which was a profound thing. [laughter] People in my childhood did have indoor plumbing, but not at their summer cabins. Their summer cabins still had outhouses. And boys who were near a lake as I was occasionally did this out of extreme boredom. You would hang around in the woods in the evening as the sun went down. And, in particular, you were watching Harold Starr‘s cabin.
He was the publisher of the paper. He was a good Republican, and he made a good target. [laughter] He had an outhouse behind his cabin. And you knew that, inevitably, he would make that walk down that path in the darkness. He knew that we were there. This was not a surprise. He knew that we were waiting out there. And he knew what we had in mind, because he had been young himself. So as he came out the cabin door, he yelled at us, ―I know you're out there.‖ And he brandished a shotgun, thinking it would scare us off. It didn‘t. It was just a challenge, that‘s all. [laughter] He went into the outhouse.
And when he closed the door, we came sneaking down through the tall grass until we were about 30 feet away. And we could hear. And when we heard the unmistakable sounds of him doing what he had come out there to do, we made a rush for the outhouse. You had to do it quickly. [laughter] You couldn‘t discuss this. [laughter] You were there for one purpose, and that was to push this over onto the door as fast as you could.
He yelled, and his kerosene lantern broke. And there was a big poof of flame. He fired the gun, but it went out through the roof of the outhouse towards his own cabin. There were flames in there. We were running hell-bent for leather up the hill. And he came out the only exit that was available to him. He came leaking out. [laughter] And there was the hole right there, waiting for him. He knew it was there, but he slid right down into it. [laughter]
Nobody would ever do this today. [laughter] We could discuss why. It‘s an interesting question. I don‘t know why. People aren‘t any nicer now. But somehow, this … Well, of course, there aren‘t so many outhouses now as there once were. And he would yell at us. And he would threaten us. And he told us he was going to find us if it took him the rest of his life. But, of course, he had a pretty good idea who we were. And he settled down.
And he realized that this was simply part of a game, and that we had come after him because of his high position. And so it was a tribute, in a way. [laughter] You don‘t pull practical jokes on weak or vulnerable people. It‘s not done. It‘s not funny. You go after the powerful and the mighty. And so he was able to accept this.
We don‘t do this anymore. We‘re in an age of political correctness, which I don‘t mind. I just consider it to be a form of good manners. And I did grow up during the 1950s at a time when men, more or less, ritually said deprecating things about their wives to other men. This was guy humor. I don‘t miss it. It wasn‘t funny to me then; it‘s not funny to me now. What has really put the damper on humor is not so much political correctness as a tendency that we have to make any sort of human oddity into a syndrome and into a dysfunction, into a disorder.
We‘ve made life clinical somehow. And we‘ve taken human conditions that we used to just live with and be curious about and we‘ve made them into problems to be solved, possibly with pharmaceuticals. [laughter] So that everybody has some sort of disorder. And we each have a long list of problems which have some sort of clinical or therapeutic solution. This gets in the way of humor. Humor requires a certain sort of fatalism. And this denies us that, so that if you wake up in the morning and you have empty ice cream cartons in bed with you, there is a reason for this. And you discover it.
It comes from taking Ambien sleep tablets. [laughter] And one possible side effect is in the small print, written on the little pamphlet inside the Ambien box, is ―eating disorder, late night excessive eating disorder, nocturnal excess eating disorder, N-E-E-D, NEED.‖ [laughter] So you go to work solving this. Instead of making a joke out of it, you go to solve this. And you Google ―nocturnal eating,‖ and in one half second you come up with 36,749,000 hits and websites and most of which have to do with owls. [laughter] But here is one that identifies your problem and shows you the way to a group that is meeting every week, always in the basement of a Unitarian church [laughter] and always on Tuesday nights. And they're meeting. And you sit there in a room, in a circle of folding chairs with people with Styrofoam cups of not very good coffee. And you talk. You talk in this circle about your life and about your needs and your disappointments and so forth.
And other people are meeting in other rooms here in the basement. It‘s full of people in one circle or another. And AA is here, and Wounded Daughters of Emotionally Distant Fathers, [laughter] and Men Coming to Terms With Their Own Bodies, Men Whose Mothers Told Them to Eat Everything On Their Plate and They‘d Grow Up Big and Strong But They Just Grew Up Big. [laughter] So they have to talk about mother and their feelings about mother, and that they're disappointing her if they don‘t finish everything on their plate.
And Anger Anonymous, the group of mostly parents, mostly parents of adolescent children who had been so sweet and so sweet-tempered and then fell in among bad company and took a wrong turn. And went to live in little basement rooms in the parents‘ house until they were in their mid-20s. And there they lived like trolls [laughter] in dark, smoky caverns, strange smoke coming out from under doorways and psychotic music playing down there and odd incense. And the parents begging their children to, ―Please. It‘s Christmas. Just come be with us. You don‘t need to eat the same food that we eat.
You don‘t even need to make eye contact. Just be in the same room with us.‖ And the child opens the door and hisses—[laughter]—at the parents, evil spirit.
And children who once were happy and gay—well not gay, but I mean they were happy, [laughter] and who now are dressed all in black, very expensive black clothing that‘s ripped to pieces. And what is that on their neck? A spider web or something. Where did that come from? And metal, metal everywhere, in their eyebrows and their eyelids and their ears and their lips and a little thing in the nose and the tongue as well. And it‘s metal, like, everywhere. It‘s like they fell face-first into the tackle box. [laughter] And it‘s hanging off them.
Parents who shrieked at their children and yelled at them. And the child recorded it all on a cell phone. [laughter] And so they were referred to child services and now you have to go sit in a circle and drink coffee—[laughter]—every week. This is the enemy of humor and the enemy of jokes. I grew up in an era of jokes, where jokes were democratic. I mean small ―d‖ democratic. It didn‘t matter who you were. It didn‘t matter if you had a lot of money, if your life was a mess, if you were all wrong politically, if you belonged to the wrong church. If you could tell a joke, and tell it cleanly, you were okay. This was how you could make your way in America. I saw it over and over in the Chatterbox Café.
If you were the guy who had married the daughter of the farmer, you knew nothing about farming. And so they had very little in common with you. You came from the city. You wore odd clothes. Your hair didn‘t look right. What was that you put on yourself? Why did you want to smell that way? [laughter] Smelled like citrus fruit. They had plenty of reason to dislike you. But if you sat there as people told jokes, you waited your turn, you didn‘t rush. But as the conversation moves, you know, in its odd way, from Lutherans to moose to highways to soybeans to uncles to the Inuit, here is your moment. And you step in and you say, ―Knock, knock.‖ And they say, ―Who‘s there?‖ ―Eskimo.‖ ―Eskimo who?‖ ―Eskimo Christians, I‘ll tell you no lies.‖ [laughter] It‘s not the greatest ―Knock Knock‖ joke. It‘s not as good as Amos. It‘s not as good as Sam and Janet. But it‘s good enough. And you told it. You told it well.
These beautiful little gems. The week after Bill Clinton admitted to having canoodled with the intern, people in Lake Wobegon were telling this joke. ―Yeah, there‘s a Presidents‘ Day sale down at the men‘s clothing store. Men‘s pants, half-off.‖ [laughter] And every word in that joke needs to be exactly where it is. [laughter] You need to tell it with confidence. No hesitation. Nobody in the Chatterbox Café would ever be caught saying, ―You know, I just can't remember jokes. I don‘t know. I just don‘t have the knack for telling them.‖ You would never admit to this. The joke, the key to fitting in anywhere, the door that you can easily open. And even if you're all wrong in all sorts of ways, if you can tell a joke, they‘ll give you a lot of credit.
This is the basis of more in politics than you and I may realize. The same ability to tell a joke may be applicable in all sorts of other situations. I think good humor is the basis of good politics. I truly believe this, that there is a sort of common trust, a feeling about the common good that parlays itself into humor. And when we lose that, then we lose too much. We lose much, much too much.
I‘m going to close and tell a story. And then I‘ll take your questions. I probably don‘t know the answers, but I‘m sure the questions will be interesting. [laughter] It‘s a story about death, [laughter] since I have that on my mind. I don‘t have my cell phone on me, so I don‘t know what time it is. Anyway, never mind. Doesn‘t matter.
My parents live in Lake Wobegon, this little town out there in the middle of nowhere. As we say in Lake Wobegon, it‘s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
[laughter] We‘re out there, and we get this ferocious storms which come down to us from Saskatchewan and from Manitoba, these blizzards come rolling in regularly and starting right about now, starting sometimes as early as Halloween, but always by Thanksgiving. Snow on the ground. And this is our reason for being, somehow. We are stoical people, and winter gives us something to be stoical about. We are not a vacation people. We are not beach people. We do not have a ―mañana‖ philosophy of life. We are strivers to get the job done.
And our job, living there, in the northern tier states, is to defend our country‘s long border against the rapacious Canadians. [laughter] And to keep the highways cleared. Because once these people get in and get across, we‘d have a hard time telling them from each other. [laughter] So there we are.
Winter is part of the basis of our understanding of ourselves in Minnesota. We‘re a little lost and confused during the summer. Summers are a beautiful time, of course. And yet it raises hopes that cannot be satisfied. And it leads people into all sorts of questions of, ―Who am I? And why am I here? What‘s the purpose of my life?‖ In winter, this is all perfectly clear: that we are mammals. That‘s who we are. And we‘re meant to seek shelter and food and keep that food supply coming. And have children and have extra children in case the wolves should carry some away. [laughter] And if you don‘t have children, you should at least practice, practice making children. And this is what we do in the wintertime.
I grew up, of course, at a time when winter was much harder than it is now. We had no lightweight thermal wear back then before the Space Program. We just put on layers of woolens and long woolen underwear and sweaters and sweatshirts and heavy Mackinaws. We kept warm by wearing heavy clothing on our backs. But the exertion of carrying heavy clothing, you see, this little 87 pound Sherpa going out over the frozen tundra and carrying 42 pounds of clothing on your back, you stayed warm. The exertion of it kept you warm.
And off into the storm you marched when you were a child. The school was never, ever cancelled in Minnesota, ever. Not for any reason whatsoever. I mean, once you start cancelling school in Minnesota, where would you stop? [laughter] So you went off and you caught the school bus. Or maybe a sleigh would come for you if the school buses could not get through. And you dove into the sleigh under the buffalo robes and the horses pulled you off across the wind-crusted snow. And if the runners broke through, then he went down onto the ice of the Mississippi River. And on up the river you went, swerving sometimes, suddenly off to one side to avoid these tattered men in gray who came down from behind rocks and trees, running towards us. The last remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia trying to snatch little Yankee children to hold us for ransom and get money to buy gunpowder from the British, so the Confederacy could rise again, which it never did until the renaissance of the Republican party. [laughter] But anyway, another subject.
Dealing with winter is a manly obligation in Minnesota. You are not supposed to be defeated by this or even to complain about it. Everybody else is just as cold as you are, so don‘t tell me how you feel. This is not a personal experience, okay. [laughter] Just keep it to yourself. You're supposed to get out there and shovel snow and throw that snow up onto the bank until, in February or March, you have 30-foot high canyons of snow coming into your little house. You throw that snow way up there. And up there is a cougar, an old cougar, who‘s looking down on you, waiting for you to falter, waiting for you to waiver, to look confused and lost. And you have to not. You have to preserve life. That‘s what we do in the winter.
My father and my mother, long many years ago, lived in a little house in Lake Wobegon with my older brother and my older sister. And my father went out to shovel snow off the roof. It was around twilight. The sun was just going down. He went out there, and he put up a ladder against the house. And he climbed up to shovel off the snow. You have to do this, because you have no idea how heavy the snow is. And if it‘s heavy enough, it could collapse the house. And you‘d all die, which would be embarrassing. [laughter]
So a man has to do this. A man could hire somebody else to do it, but that‘s not a good thing. A man needs to shovel his own roof. And if he hires somebody else, then this is one more step down the path, which leads to people reaching for your elbow when you go down the stairs. [laughter] People saying, ―You look good,‖ which they never said when you did look good. [laughter] It leads to people suggesting that maybe you shouldn‘t drive at night. And then your children taking the car keys away. And then you wind up in the Good Shepherd Home. And you're hanging out with people you‘ve been avoiding all your life. [laughter] And finally, dementia settles down.
And then they shovel you into the box, in the suit that you used to wear to other people‘s funerals. And it‘s much too early. And they haul you into church, past your pew and down front. And somebody who barely knew you gives the eulogy. And it‘s all wrong. It‘s all wrong. And the really distinguished things you did, like privy-tipping, they don‘t touch on those. [laughter] And they put you in this wagon. And you meant to take more car trips, but this was the last one now. And they take you up the hill. And the pallbearers carry you over rough ground. And they set you down on this frame over this hole in the ground. And they sing two verses of Abide With Me, Fast falls the eventide. And that‘s all. And nobody is sobbing, nobody. It‘s cold. [laughter] And nobody is throwing herself onto your coffin and saying that she can't live without you. You just are lowered down into the hole. And the gravediggers stand around, waiting for everybody to leave. And they're talking about drainage problems, which is the last thing you want to know about. [laughter]
And so, to prevent this from happening too soon, you go up and you shovel snow— [laughter]—off your roof. And he did. He was shoveling snow. And he got worn out. It was a heavy snow. And the sun had gone down. And he just was going to rest for a moment. And he laid back against the steep roof, and he braced his heels in the gutters, and he laid there, just taking a deep breath. And then he fell asleep. [laughter] Woke up about half an hour later.
And when he went to sit up, he realized that his shearling jacket had frozen to the roof. [laughter] It had the skin out, the fleece in. And it had frozen to the shingles on this cold night. He tried to move his hips, his legs, and he couldn‘t move anything. It was a long jacket. He could kick with his heels against the roof, but he couldn‘t move his hips. And from the vent over the kitchen, he could smell the tuna noodle casserole that my mother was making for supper. [laughter]
The little children had gone to bed. She was making supper for him. And here he was, trapped on the roof. Cars going by. He couldn‘t wave to them, he could only move a finger. [laughter] They drove by, back and forth. Some honked. He tried—[laughter]—to signal them with his index finger, and he could not. And it dawned on him, ―You could die. You could die up here if nobody comes by.‖ It was very cold, 40 below zero.
And he rolled violently and heard a crunch in his back pocket. And realized, as he felt the liquid going down his leg, that he had busted the bottle of peppermint schnapps that he had brought up here to keep himself warm. He had broken it. And now he could imagine, when he did die on the roof, this is what people would talk about. [laughter] He had a drinking problem. [laughter] They would say he had a drinking problem. He had to go up on the roof to drink. [laughter] That‘s how desperate he was. He drank and then he pissed his pants. [laughter]
So he was almost resigned to this, lying there in a crucifix position—[laughter]—when my mother appeared, standing in the snow down below. She said, ―Are you almost finished?‖ He said, ―Yes, I am.‖ [laughter] She said, ―When are you going to come in?‖ He said, ―I‘m going to come in as soon as I get this jacket loose from this roof.‖ ―Oh mercy,‖ she said. And up the ladder she came, this woman afraid of heights came clambering up, not warmly dressed, just came running up this ladder and up the steep roof. Holding onto his shearling jacket, she pulled herself up until she lay there on top of him. And she grabbed that zipper and she pulled it as hard as she could. And he came leaking out—[laughter]—and he slid down the roof with her, riding straddling. [laughter] And off the roof, and down into a snow bank. And jumped up. Nobody had seen them.
Nobody had seen them. [laughter]
They went into the house. She put away the tuna casserole, and she got two steaks out. She was going to make a feast. They had defeated death. She had a little bit of wine that she used for cooking. And she poured it into a glass for him. And he sat there and drank it as she cooked. She baked a potato with sour cream and butter and bacon bits and scallions and a steak.
And then there was a knock at the door. There was a knock at the door. And they went to open it. Because if you don‘t open it, they‘ll just come in. [laughter] So she opened it.
And there were the constables, Gary and Leroy. They came in. ―How are you? You all right?‖ ―Yeah, yeah, yeah, we‘re all right.‖ ―Everything okay?‖ ―Yeah, we‘re fine.‖ ―We just wondered, because we saw a jacket up on your roof.‖ And he said, ―Well, that is a jacket—I put that up there. That‘s a cougar trap.‖ [laughter] They said, ―What do you use for bait?‖ He said, ―Peppermint schnapps.‖ [laughter] My parents, my parents, they defeated death. And that was about nine months and ten minutes before I was born. [laughter]
So we come through the other side. We survived. They had narrow scrapes, but somehow, here we are. Here we are. A bunch of humorous people. And what is humor about? Well, it‘s about life. It‘s about the small, ordinary things of life. It‘s about what we have in common, which is what politics is about, as well. These are times when we have so much less in common than before. The world is split up into little pieces. The most successful TV shows have rather small audiences, maybe 5, 6, maybe 8 million people out of this whole vast country.
There used to be Elvis and Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. There aren‘t people like that anymore, people who everyone would recognize by their voice. We‘ve become different and estranged from each other. But humor and politics can bring us back together. And if politics can't, then I have my doubts about humor, too.
Thank you. [applause]
GARRISON KEILLOR: Thank you very much. [applause] Thank you so very much. We have a couple of microphones here. And I see people edging that way. A woman has leaped—or leapt to one. Yes, ma‘am.
QUESTONER: I have had the joy of seeing you at Tanglewood the last seven years.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Where were you sitting? [laughter]
QUESTIONER: I notice you all have scripts. But when you do Lake Wobegon, you have no script. And yet,the show always comes out on time. So my question is how do you do that?
GARRISON KEILLOR: When you're telling the truth, you don‘t need a script.
[laughter/applause] You just remember things as best you can. No, it‘s not really required that you have a script. The President has to have one. I understand that and the teleprompter and all of that, because, you know, if a sentence of his skids off into the wrong subordinate clause, you know, the markets in Japan react. [laughter] But the rest of us don‘t. You and I don‘t need a script, right? I mean, you know, we‘re just Americans.
QUESTIONER: But you still make the story conclude.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Pardon?
QUESTIONER: You still manage to conclude the story in a logical, funny way. And the show always ends on time.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Well, I‘m an older person. [laughter] A person ought to develop some skills, you know. You lose a few, and you gain a couple.
QUESTIONER: I‘m curious as to how you got your start in humor. And I‘m sure there was a wealth of characters to base stories on. But how did you develop this ability to go from one to another, something leads you to something else to something else. And then we kind of come back to the beginning again. How does that happen? How did you start?
GARRISON KEILLOR: Well, I had a need to do this as a child. And my mother enjoyed having me around, watching her as she worked. She had six children. And she would wash and clean and cook and iron. She even ironed sheets. And I was her little boy who memorized jokes out of Readers Digest. So I told her jokes. And she was very charmed by this. And then when I was six, she did something I didn‘t understand. She went and she got pregnant by my father. [laughter] And she had twin boys, my younger brothers. And when you are the charming third child in a family, which then adds twins, you disappear. [laughter] You become invisible. People gathered around to watch these infants, you know. It was like the Dion quintuplets, [laughter] on a smaller scale and we didn‘t charge admission. But this was a source of wonder to people.
And there I was, gasping for air because my brothers sucked it out of the room. [laughter] And out of a troubled childhood comes the urge to entertain other people. Your parents may have deprived you by giving you a happy, satisfied, comfortable childhood. And shame on them. And make sure that you give your children the gift they deserve which is a little misery—[laughter]—and neglect. So that‘s the secret there. Yeah, you grow up the middle, invisible child in a family of Calvinists and you need nothing more. You got it all.
QUESTIONER: Thank you so much for your stories, which transport me each week to such a wonderful, civil, luxurious place. My question is President Kennedy had a vision and a story that compelled us, as did President Reagan, and it seems great leaders do. I'm wondering, what‘s the story that President Obama should be saying to us?
GARRISON KEILLOR: President Obama has been given a truckload of trouble, and he came into office on it. I was there in Washington on January 20th along with millions of other people, and it was just one of the great days of my life. It was a lot of trouble to get to Washington, but I and all those millions of other people felt that we had to be there. And when we saw the Obamas walking down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House, I just had a beautiful feeling. It‘s not gone away, but it‘s been put slightly on the shelf. His first two years, I think, have been successful. And if he were anybody else, he might have trumpeted this more than he has. I think that he and the Congress got a great deal done.
I come from northern liberals, however. And these are people who are dark people. And we are fault-finders. And we are dissatisfied with our own. And so I try not to listen to people who believe as I do. They seem to be a poor guide to this administration. I have great hopes for it. And out of trouble—which he has recently experienced a little bit of—I think great things, great things will come. I think that these cables that WikiLeaks released—I haven‘t read them all, and neither have you – but these cables showed the administration, I think, in a pretty good light. And so I have high hopes, high hopes for them. [applause] Not the best answer I could have come up with, but I don‘t have to revise this.
QUESTIONER: It‘s the best presence, though. We like that. My question is you were in a New York state of mind a few times back. And it‘s kind of two-part. The part I'm curious about, what drew you to the Big Apple? And today, now, are there things that linger in it, that are part of you and part of where you're going? So New York City.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Well, what drew me was The New Yorker magazine, which I started reading when I was a kid. My cousin Kate subscribed to The New Yorker. She was two years older than I, so I think she probably showed it to me when I was 13 or so. She was a very adventurous person in our family, a real Bohemian. Growing up in a Fundamentalist Evangelical family, she smoked and she could smoke really well.
[laughter] And she could swear really well. And she understood the cartoons. And the cartoon of the chicken and the egg lying in bed together. And the egg is lighting a cigarette and saying, ―Well, I guess that answers that question.‖ [laughter]
But she loved the writers, and I did too. I loved S.J. Perelman. And I loved A.J. Liebling unreasonably. And I loved John Cheever, John Updike later, who was more my age. And I wanted to be a writer for The New Yorker. So I went off to New York when I was 24 to write a try-out piece for them. I had been writing for them for years. But, you know, they didn‘t know about that. [laughter] So I went. And they were very decent to me. They didn‘t buy my try-out piece. But I sent them a piece a couple of years later, and they bought it. And that was just one of the great events.
I was an English major. How can I say … ? I mean, if you were an English major and you were a writer, The New Yorker was the gold standard. And so I wanted to write for them. And then, I moved to the city years, years later. I decided I didn‘t want to live there and be poor when I was 24. It just involved too much squalor. [laughter] And you could be very poor in Minnesota and live with a certain grandeur. And I preferred grandeur.
You could rent a farmhouse when farms were being consolidated out in Minnesota. And you could rent a farmhouse—and I did—for $80 dollars a month and live there in splendor with a vegetable garden. And that money in New York would have bought you a couch in a studio apartment, sharing it with two other people. There‘s no comparison between the two.
But I moved back there in ‘89, ‘90. And I got to work at The New Yorker and write ―Talk of the Town‖ pieces. I just love the city because it‘s a pedestrian city, and there aren‘t that many of them in America. It‘s a city where everything is out on the street. And you walk down the street and all this humanity brushes by you. And when you come from out on the frozen tundra, this is a wonderful thing. It may not be wonderful if you grew up in Queens, but it‘s wonderful if you grew up on the prairie, where you used to sit and look out across corn stubble and soybean fields. And you could see for miles. And nobody is coming to see you. And nobody ever will. [laughter]
And in New York all this humanity is passing you. And it‘s just amazing, you know. You walk down the street, and here comes somebody on roller skates with no pants. [laughter] And you glance at them, and they say, ―What are you looking at? What are you looking at?‖ [laughter] And it‘s just one sight after another, all of this life. And I grew up in an earlier day, you see, before there were malls. And so when I walk down, when I walk down Upper Broadway, when I walk down Lexington Avenue, past shop after shop after shop after shop, that‘s my childhood street, you see. That‘s how a city is supposed to look, one shop after another. And not just chain stores. And not big box stores, but shop, shop, shop, shop, shop, shop. [applause] Bloomingdales, shop, shop, shop. [applause]
I could go on.
QUESTIONER: My wife Nancy and I lived for three winters in Minnesota in the mid-70s. And every morning we would wake up to your morning radio program, sponsored by Jack‘s Auto Repair and Human Services. So I have two brief questions: What ever happened to Jack‘s Auto Repair and Human Services? But also, what can each of us do to help restore humor and civility to American life?
GARRISON KEILLOR: Well, I mean, it‘s just something we do every day, isn‘t it? And we live in cities that militate against this. They are cities in which we move to and fro in little steel boxes. And we work in cubicles. But, still, they are ways for us to touch other people. And that‘s all—that‘s all we can do. We can only deal with the people that we come in contact with. I‘m not trying to organize a campaign. I‘m only being descriptive.
I think that the world has changed for humor and for comedy. And I regret that. And I believe that it has a parallel in politics. But I‘ll leave it to other people to develop that thesis and to come up with a prescription.
Anonymity is an enemy of civility. I‘m sorry, but it is. And this is shown so, so clearly on the internet. No solution for it, but at least we can be aware of the world that we live in.
All of this formless anger that‘s drifting around in clouds, I wait for it to pass.
QUESTIONER: Thank you for touching us.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Thank you so much. Jack‘s Auto Repair just was one more disgruntled sponsor, that‘s all. [laughter] We didn‘t reach the right audience, I guess. Yes.
QUESTIONER: Hi. I am concerned with the amount of acrimony and partisanship in our legislative branch. And I'm wondering if you think, perhaps, surrounding the buildings by privies and outhouses would help at all. [laughter] I mean, how else do we get back goodwill? It‘s scary to me.
GARRISON KEILLOR: Well, smarter people than I have written about this. But the point is one that that people in politics are not able to make to the voters. And it is the simple point that, for all of the trouble of the Great Recession, high unemployment, this is not that bad. This is the rock-bottom truth. There are people who thrive on dramatizing it, many of them on television, many of them highly paid pundits, who thrive on creating a sense of chaos and suffering and deprivation.
But if you want to see deprivation, go to India, other countries. Go to Somalia, if you want to see real trouble. Go to the North of Africa. You‘ll find a reality that we don‘t have in America. And we‘ve come loose from our sense of reality, and we need to discover it somehow. I don‘t know how that‘s going to happen, but it has to. We have to realize that, in this world among our species, we are among the most fortunate in the history of the world. And if we want to know what true suffering is, what abject suffering is, we don‘t have to look that far.
The people who come to this country illegally are people we have to admire. People who have come into this country illegally are becoming on behalf of their children. They don‘t have that much hope for themselves, but they have hope for their children. And I admire that. There‘s no sacrifice like the sacrifice of immigrants, be they legal or illegal, not much difference. They gave up their country. They gave up their language. They gave up their jokes, their music, their culture, in order to struggle on in an alien country and all on behalf of their children. This is reality, and it‘s around us everywhere, in every city in America, people who know what suffering is and who know what they want. And it‘s here. We have it. And they want it. [applause]
GARRISON KEILLOR: Thank you. [applause]
TOM PUTNAM: Thank you all for coming. And Mr. Keillor has agreed to sign books. There are some on sale in our museum store. If you brought your own, he‘ll sign them outside in the foyer. Thank you.