Garrison Keillor, the baritone-voiced host of A Prairie Home Companion, has for four decades charmed the nation with his gentle, hyper-precise satire, a talent that’s won him praise as the “funniest man in the country” and the “Homer of Middle America.”
Keillor is retiring from Prairie Home Companion next year, so it’s an apt time to extol and inspect the roots of his Midwestern-sophisticate sensibility. Thankfully, said sensibility is the very subject of Blank on Blank’s latest episode, which animates a 1994 interview Keillor did with The Paris Review’s George Plimpton, and in which the humorist notes that “past the age of thirty, there’s no obligation to be clever at all.” Keillor, now 73, has continued regardless.
