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  • (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)

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(tape rewinding)

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加里森-基勒的幽默感|空白的空白|PBS數字工作室。 (Garrison Keillor on Humor | Blank on Blank | PBS Digital Studios)

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