The week we drifted down the Niagara River

The Column: 07.08.24

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In church Sunday we sang “All people who on earth do dwell” with the beautiful line about serving God with mirth, the only hymn that calls us to comedy, and it made me feel good after this dreadful past week in which mirth has been hard to find.

Suddenly I miss Jonathan Winters, the comic who worked in fragments — I wish he were here, he’d handle today’s news to perfection. Elderly dither was his specialty so he’d have done the Debate in 25 seconds: Biden’s breathless tremolo, the stricken eyes, the dazed solemnity, and Trump in nonsense Deutsch, the pump of a shotgun, baritone chortling, a sidelong snarl, the snap of a whip. Today’s comics are writers and they work in whole sentences and paragraphs but Winters was all phrases and feeling, lunacy, terror, smug confidence, profound stupidity. You can find an abundance of him on YouTube and while you’re there you can check out other varnished geniuses, the dignity of Buster Keaton in his triumphant defeats, the sweetness of Laurel & Hardy — once in a while when I feel gloomy, I google their three-minute dance in “Way Out West,” the fatso and the man-child doing an innocent buck-and-wing to the Avalon Boys singing “At the Ball, That’s All” on a busy street, oblivious to and ignored by the busy world around them.

Here we all are, adrift on the Niagara River hearing the roar of a Trump second term a few miles ahead, the Democratic Party in its usual confusion as the American Midwest looks forward to the election of a cruel tyrant such that Mark Twain could never have imagined and perhaps the demolition of civil society and here we are on the raft and nobody on shore is throwing us a rope so what can we do? We just hold hands and sing.

I am grateful, at 82, to have seen a great period of American history, of advances in science and technology and the idea of equality under the law, a heroic age when “all men are created equal” came to include Black people and women and when public compassion grew to accept categories of people formerly shoved aside such as drunks and people we used to call “morons” and “imbeciles.” And now we await the return of a president who never in his public utterance has shown an ounce of compassion except sympathy for himself, a man bent on revenge with a plan for making government of the people by angry people for wealthy people, a government bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, which denies the warming of the oceans, the poisoning of the environment.

And that’s why I’m on the road this summer doing comedy in little theaters in the Midwest and the Northeast. I do jokes about aging and tell stories about my hometown and maybe toss out a limerick —

And if they go for that, there’s the young man from Madras, the young fellow from Pocatello, the woman who lived in Vancouver who drank two quarts of varnish remover and didn’t get ill or vomit but still it didn’t do much to improve her. Or Henry David Thoreau who lived in the woods long ago and wrote lovely prose while his mom washed his clothes and fixed him hot lunches to go. Not many limericists are wandering around loose these days so I feel a duty to stand up for the genre. I have amazed people by reciting the 87 counties of Minnesota in alphabetical order in less than one minute. I can reel off some fine sonnets and an excellent long poem about sperm. But one part of the act that people enjoy is the audience singing a cappella “My country, ’tis of thee” into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”into “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and maybe “In My Life” or “Going to the Chapel.” It’s very sweet. A mature audience and they haven’t done this since the sixth grade but they sing about the glory of the coming of the Lord and the trampling of the vintage of the grapes of wrath. It’s a great Republican hymn but nobody who has read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps can vote for the dictator, I can tell you that.

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Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion return home to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, MN.

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