Mature Man Available for Speaking, Easy Terms

spokanepublicradio.org

I haven’t yet been invited to give a commencement address this spring and I’m okay with that. I am 81, an age that’s gotten a bad rap recently, and I’m not famous anymore, but nonetheless I do have things to say to the Class of ’24 and I come cheap and have my own gown if you’re unable to provide one.

I did a radio show for years whose name, if you rearrange the letters, spells “Pie Aroma in Microphone,” a show of wholesome humor and uplifting music, nothing satanic or hallucinatory and only gently satiric, and yet it did well in New York City, and New Yorkers curbed their irony when they came in the door and listened politely.

The show was inspired by an article I wrote for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and being published there rather than in Popular Mechanics or Good Housekeeping gave me a patina of sophistication that appealed to the elitists of public radio and they opened the temple doors to me and on many stations, “Pie Aroma in Microphone” followed the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, sort of like the tail wagging the Wagner. And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, “Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.”

Had the article been about the Grand Canal in Venice, the Grand Canyon, Grandma Moses, Ole Bull, or optometry, or had I landed in the American Academy of Incarcerated Debtors, it would be a very different matter.

I am one of America’s few remaining octogenarian stand-up comics, still able to stand for up to two hours, even three, and in the current comedy crop, I am a classicist. I know about the engineer who’s sentenced to death and is laid, blindfolded, in the guillotine but they pull the lanyard and nothing happens, and try again, and again, and decide to commute his sentence to life in prison and they remove the blindfold, and he looks up and says, “Give me a pair of pliers, I see the problem.”

I also know about the man named Scraggs who fed his poodle condoms so she’d poop in plastic bags.

I work clean. I can do sex jokes at an AARP convention but not for the 18–22 age group, they would be horrified by the thought of grandpa sex, more than horrified, sickened, indignant, militantly opposed.

I am quite comfortable speaking at a church school. I am a Christian myself, I do believe that the Son of God came to this planet, the co-Creator of our solar system and infinite more solar systems and constellations billions of light years away, and when you can get your arms around the idea that God Almighty loves you personally, not just in theory, then you’ve achieved something remarkable, like juggling eight balls in the air while gargling “O sole mio.” But I’m not preachy about this. I’ve spoken to Jewish groups, and some of my best friends are Unitarians. I tell them, “If I’m wrong about the afterlife, no problem, I’ll just cease to be, but if you’re wrong and you face God, I’d like to see you talk your way out of that.”

I don’t require luxury accommodations. I’m fine with economy hotels. I prefer not to be put up in the home of a family with small children. A Holiday Inn Express is fine; they serve a nice scrambled-egg breakfast buffet. A coffeemaker in the room would be nice and I’d prefer a shower whose Hot and Cold knobs are not directly under the showerhead so that one must stand naked while figuring out which knob is which, dreading the possibility of being scalded and having to call 911 and moaning in pain as EMTs haul me to their van, and I know that I will now become their anecdote (“You won’t believe the call we got this morning …”) and they will google me and find out that I hosted “Pie Aroma in Microphone” and am in the Academy of Arts and Letters and yet I didn’t know to Stand Outside The Shower While Turning On Water. I don’t want to become a joke, okay?

Garrison Keillor © 03.11.24