Garrison Keillor on Humor | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios

(tape rewinding)

(bluegrass music)

- [Garrison] There was a man
sitting on his front porch

and the pastor came by
and they sat and talked

about theology for a little while.

And the pastor asked the man

if he believed in infant baptism.

And the man said "Believe in it, hell,

"I've seen it done."

(audience laughing)

A humorist has to, has to, has to what?

What was I about to say?

(laughter)

I was distracted, if everyone
would just be perfectly still

I'm sure I...

(laughing)

- When did you decide to
become a writer, and why?

- I grew up in a fundamentalist
Protestant family

that stressed that we
were a select people,

and so we were to avoid
contact with others

who did not share our faith.

We were isolated.

And, perhaps, growing up in this world,

first of all, one has a
reverence for the word,

and for language, God spoke to us through

the word, and in our family
this was the King James Bible.

It also, I think, gave books, fiction,

great power, because they were proscribed.

We were not to touch them,
and my family was shocked

when I came home with
a volume of Hemingway

when I was a boy, and I wanted to read it.

So there was a price to be paid for

being interested in
fiction and in writing.

Pushing my family away.

Books and authors became my family.

It's a decision however
that continually seems

temporary, that you're never quite sure

you've made it absolutely.

I'm only 52, so I made a
sort of tentative chice

that has lasted this
long, but, I could still

fall back on retail sales.

(laughing)

- Being considered a humorist,
are you constantly aware

that it's time to come up with something

as clever as you've just described,

or to be comic in some way?

- I think that you're only
obliged to be a humorist

from maybe the age of
18 until you turn 30.

Past the age of 30, I don't think

there's any obligation
to be clever at all.

After that, you, I think, are supposed to

settle down, be a good person,

raise your children, and
be good to your friends

which you may not have been
when you were very clever.

And try to atone for your cleverness.

Humor has to surprise us,

otherwise it isn't funny, and,

it's a death knell for a writer

to be labeled a humorist,
because then of course,

it's not a surprise anymore,
it's what's expected of him.

And when you come to
expect humor of people,

you will never get it.

Looking for it, demanding
it, expecting it,

what you do is to kill off every joke

you ever come across.

Humor in writing needs to come in

under cover of darkness and be disguised.

It has to surprise people.

You don't want to get that sort of

badoing, badoing, badoing sound

in your writing, that boing,

that gives you away.

Humor is not about problems with

airline luggage handlers, it's
about our lives in America.

And it's about the ends of our lives,

it's about everything
that happens after that

and everything that happened before.

- [George] Well you
paint this lovely picture

of the piece going up and then

immediately appearing in the magazine,

I was wondering if sometimes,
at the New Yorker they say,

"Well you know this is
not quite up to snuff."

Or however they would put it.

- [Garrison] Well, you see though,

when the New Yorker turned down work,

they turned it down in such an elaborately

gentlemanly way, making
apologies for their own

shortsightedness, and undoubtedly

it was their fault, but
somehow, for some reason,

this fell short of the
remarkably high standard

that you, by your own work
have set for yourself.

(laughing)

They had a way of rejecting
my work that made me

feel sorry for them somehow.

(laughing)

(tape rewinding)