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PODCAST

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Funny, poignant, sentimental, and sometimes controversial thoughts of the day.garrisonkeillor.substack.com

comedy improv

All Episodes

7:52

Hard-earned wisdom passed on at no charge

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/08/10

Mostly I live in a comfortable bubble, enjoying my morning coffee, avoiding bad news that’s beyond my power to affect, bloody wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, brutal civil wars in Myanmar and Africa, waves of migrants trying to escape violence and poverty — I am mostly oblivious. The Christian missionaries who set out to save souls in Africa and South America saw the world much more clearly than I do. The Ecuadorean moms selling candy bars in subway stations know more about real life than I do. A

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7:04

Man walks out on stage as storm rolls in

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/08/03

I loved that audience dearly and gave them a good ninety minutes and afterward a distinguished man stopped by to shake hands. Back when, he’d heard me on the radio. I said, “I detect an air of authority about you. You’re the president of something.” He said he was a retired Army major; he’d commanded a tank battalion. “Where?” I said. “Vietnam,” he said. I said I’d never heard of tanks used in Vietnam. He said, “That’s because they would’ve sunk four feet down in the Delta and so they were useless

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7:28

The meaning of the freestanding life

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/07/27

Aging is a beautiful natural process, the wisdom gained, the growing sense of gratitude, the amusement of seeing young people make your same dumb mistakes, but one thing that bothers me is the difficulty of putting on underpants while standing and not leaning against a doorpost. It’s a graceful moment, left leg held high and poked through the hole, then the right, freestanding, no wobbling, which I’ve done since I was a kid, and now at 81 I can sometimes still perform the trick, but then comes a bad

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6:43

A Letter from Greenville, S.C.

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/07/20

I spent last week gadding about the Carolinas doing shows and enjoying the South, eating eggs and grits and hearing the waitress say, “Can I get you more coffee, darling?” and encountering Republicans, a tribe rarer than Mohicans on the West Side of Manhattan where I live. I miss them. My uncles tended Republican, believing in personal responsibility and fiscal reality, and at church on Palm Sunday, at coffee hour, I heard the word “taxes” uttered contemptuously and a gentleman in his sixties was

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7:27

A morning walk along Columbus Avenue

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/07/13

Now I’m an old man, in no rush, keeping an eye out for curbs and crevices and treacherous slabs of sidewalk, hoping not to make a spectacle of myself, knowing that in New York I am surrounded by writers, real or imagined, who would find the crash of a tall elderly author rather satisfying. Once I was swift afoot and long astride, and now I amble along, accepting distractions, my barber Tommy, a sculptor of hair, at work in his shop, and the newsstand, a historic relic, in the Online Age, and the

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7:30

A lucky man admits to happiness, and why not?

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/07/06

Ask a Midwesterner, “How are you?” and we tend to say, “Not bad” or “It could be worse,” feeling it’d sound glib or boastful to say, “Delighted,” and we men in particular tend to adopt an easygoing grumpiness as suitable for all occasions, but I think it’s bad luck not to acknowledge that I am very fortunate to have added my tongue to the other 999 at church, to lift my voice with the two women’s in trio to an audience in Vermont, to see that ecstatic little boy finding the joy in pablum that the

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7:48

Spring is here, time to get to know each other

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/06/29

Myself, I have a bias in favor of public education because that was my experience. I came from very exclusive fundamentalist evangelicals who looked down on Methodists and Lutherans as Scripturally off-base, so when I left home and walked into public school, I found myself among — O my gosh! — Catholic kids, boys who took the Lord’s name in vain and told dirty jokes, girls who hung out with those boys. A nice Christian boy felt rather lonely at times. This is a public episode. If you’d like to

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7:02

The beauty of falls that you walk away from

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/06/22

I fell twice crossing 89th Street, once in the middle of the street, once at the curb. I misjudged the step, crashed down on my hands and knees and chin, and once I walked into a tree branch on the path around the Central Park Reservoir and got plonked on my keister, and each time strangers rushed to my side to ask if I was okay and I said I was and jumped up but now I see these falls were a turning point in my life. Once you come crashing down, there is no longer a need to have a smart opinion

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6:45

On the road again, meeting folks again

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/06/15

It’s an age of dread, the news perpetually discouraging, TV and media merchandising ugliness, and either you join the Greek chorus of gloom or you go with the American choir of cheerful resolve, and I choose cheerfulness. I am capable of dismay: I’m dismayed by the Working From Home syndrome that is leaving our big office buildings half empty. I call up an office to get answers to difficult questions and I hear Death Chute singing “Vanilla Windows” and a guy says, “Yeah?” and a dog barks and a woman

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8:01

The critic who lit up my week and more

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/06/08

I’m still writing books but haven’t been reviewed by anybody in ages, maybe because I’m an Old White Male and our time is up, or maybe I’ve written too many books, and I’m okay with unreviewing — going way back to Veronica Geng’s caramel custard review of Lake Wobegon Days in the New York Times in 1985, the reviews have been warm and sweet, which is nice for the publisher but for me, the hardworking writer, are unremarkable, like a friend’s cat climbing into my lap: not the equivalent of good

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7:18

Let's talk about honesty, grrrr, rrrfff, rrrfff

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/06/01

The fact is that when I was a kid in Minnesota, struggling my way through six-foot snowdrifts to school, long before lightweight down coats were invented — I was an 82-pound fourth-grader wearing 42 pounds of heavy woolens and corduroy, and one day I was caught by a pack of coyotes who carried me away to their den where I remained for several years and learned their language of growling, snuffling, snorting. I, being prehensile, was sent into the henhouse to snatch chickens, while the others

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7:04

THEY WERE SO YOUNG

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/27

Monday is Memorial Day, a day that got lost when it was turned into a weekend, and someday we’ll turn it back into a day, which it was for a hundred years. Decoration Day. After the bloody Civil War, flowers were placed on the graves of the war dead. One of those times when the country is united. This is our observance of Memorial Day, a poem entitled “They Were So Young.” This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit

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6:24

All of me loves olive oil and this is why

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/25

No, it’s been a hard life and I didn’t mention the time I was kidnapped by coyotes. But I’m grateful. I tell myself, “It could be worse. I could get old and lose my mind.” The other day, I forgot the word “cognitive” for hours, I thought, “Alert? Informed? Awake? Attentive? Cerebral? Incognito?” The very word for the skills I’m scared of losing. And then I made a salad with olive oil and vinegar dressing and the word came back. It wasn’t the vinegar. It was the olive oil. I read that somewhere

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7:23

Epictetus on Fifth Avenue, a week ago

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/18

The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a glacial rate from 86th to 43rd Street where I had an important lunch appointment. Had I taken the B train I would’ve been there in a few minutes but that mistake had been made and now I watched pedestrians on the sidewalk passing us.So what can you do? No need to

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8:13

My personal journey towards self-minimalization

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/11

These days we’re in the era of the Personal Position Statement as we saw in the recent National Book Awards ceremony in New York. There is no NBA for humor because the event is all about Taking Ourselves Very Seriously As Compensation For Slights We Have Suffered From The Uncomprehending World. The winner of the poetry prize, a man from Guam, accepted it on behalf of the poets of the Pacific islands. The translation award was accepted on behalf of gay men, the nonfiction award on behalf of

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7:11

Singing to the Lord to save Herschel

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/04

So what happened to joke-telling?For one thing, some of the best jokes are about death. The old Republican is dying and tells his wife, “I’m going to switch parties because I’d rather it happen to a Democrat than to one of us.” These are maybe less funny when you get to be my age. For another thing, a politician came along in 2015 who isn’t funny. This was a first. There were dozens of George Bush jokes and Bill Clinton jokes but with this guy, late-night comics deliver very clever insults but

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0:59

Tim Russell's selection from BRISK VERSE

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/05/01

Dear Brisk Verse Buyers,Garrison Keillor’s latest book, Brisk Verse, is (as he says) “good for reading aloud to friends and associates, neighbors, colleagues bartenders, passersby, even strangers in libraries or on airplanes.”Let’s put that to the test — and spread the fun. When you receive your book, if you are so inclined, pick a favorite poem. Then share it by videotaping yourself reading it out loud. Send your video (one poem only) to admin@garrisonkeillor.com. We will select a few to use on our

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2:30

Launching Garrison's newest book, BRISK VERSE. Send...

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/04/27

Dear Brisk Verse Buyers,Garrison Keillor’s latest book, Brisk Verse, is (as he says) “good for reading aloud to friends and associates, neighbors, colleagues bartenders, passersby, even strangers in libraries or on airplanes.”Let’s put that to the test — and spread the fun. When you receive your book, if you are so inclined, pick a favorite poem. Then share it by videotaping yourself reading it out loud. Send your video (one poem only) to admin@garrisonkeillor.com. We will select a few to use on our

en

7:34

Missing Sandra O'Connor, the pragmatic voice

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/04/27

It’s wonderful hearing her at age 78 talking cheerfully about her life. As a young woman, she was hired by the Arizona attorney general, who assigned her to work at the state mental hospital. “To do what?” she said. “Whatever they need,” he said. So she went about organizing a legal aid clinic for the mentally ill, a simple necessary good. Big law firms weren’t hiring women lawyers for fear of what clients might think, so she started her own. As Chief Justice Roberts said, “She broke down barriers

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7:14

A small life has its own distinct moments

Garrison Keillor"s Podcast ·

2024/04/20

In my parents’ home, waffles took time so they were saved for Saturday morning; you had to locate our waffle iron, a big clunky appliance kept on a high shelf in the laundry room, and we washed the griddle while someone else mixed the batter, and we put Mazola oil or margarine on it for a lubricant, and someone said, “Not too much,” so not enough was put on, so as the waffle baked, it stuck to the griddle, and we had to pry it loose with a fork and it tore into chunks and slivers, which we slathered

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107 results

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