Garrison Keillor

I just walked around the city. I think a Midwesterner does not have to walk around New York very long before something springs to mind. If you can’t find something to write about by walking around, then you find it by standing in one place and waiting.

Humor has to surprise us, otherwise it isn’t funny. It’s a death knell for a writer to be labeled a humorist because then it’s not a surprise anymore. It’s what’s demanded of him. And when you demand humor of people you will never get it. I have been working on editing an anthology of humor, a hellish task, and you wind up beating the bushes for humor, looking for it, demanding it, expecting it, and suddenly nothing looks funny to you anymore now that you are a professional humor anthologist. When you were an innocent reader and they sprang up at you out of the weeds, they made you laugh out loud. S. J. Perelman used to make me laugh out loud on planes. We don’t have more humorists because we don’t need them. And nobody wants to live with one. They’re very hard to live with. I’ve been told that. So the fear of loneliness discourages people from going into the field.

When some people sit down to write humor, they adopt a giddy tone of voice, a whooping or comic warble, so that the reader will know it’s funny. It’s the writing equivalent of a clown suit. This does not wear well. Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people. You don’t want to get that gdoing, gdoing, gdoing sound in your writing. It makes the reader feel sorry for you.

It was a wonderful place for a writer. It could be disconcerting, in that editors avoided by word, deed, or nuance ever suggesting what they might like you to write about, for fear of spooking you. I found it weird. But once you got going on something, it was a great place to work. There wasn’t a lot of hanging out at The New Yorker. When you went into your office and closed the door, people didn’t bother you. They had the respect that writers have for each other’s time. When you finished, you would run up to the nineteenth floor and stick it on Chip McGrath’s desk, the managing editor. And you’d walk back to your office, and he would tell you within an hour if they liked it or not. It would go into proof right away if it was a casual or “Talk of the Town” piece, which were what I wrote, and you’d get to see it in galleys that same week. And the next week, you would correct it and a couple days after that it was on a newsstand. So it was a shop that took writing very seriously, and had a great reverence for writers, and it also had the feeling of a country, weekly newspaper, which was where I started to write. When I was fourteen, I wrote for the Anoka Herald. It smelled somewhat like The New Yorker, the ink proofs, the piles of old newspapers, and the people were a little run down at the heels. And you got to see what you’d written right away afterward. That was joyful, to work on a weekly schedule for a magazine that cared about writing.

You learn a great deal about yourself living in a foreign city, that’s for sure. When I had been there for a while, I started to meet some rural people whom you could really learn Danish from because that was the only language they knew. But at first, the only people I met were educated Copenhageners. You go to their homes for dinner, you see volumes of John Updike and Philip Roth and the Yale Shakespeare, and of course they speak perfect English, and it was hard to wrestle them out of English and into Danish so I could practice speaking my childlike, ungrammatical Danish. I’d wrestle them into Danish, and then they’d stay in Danish, and when they talked I couldn’t understand a word they said. I strove valiantly to be as Danish as possible so that when I walked into a bakery and said, Goddag, jeg vil gerne køb tre stykker, and the bakery girl looked at me and said, Oh you want three of those? it was a defeat. Danes don’t care about these exercises, they want to get it done, get it over with. I discovered, speaking Danish, that it was warping me, because the only Danish I knew was about food and love and beauty, and it was cheerful, bright, the language of complimenting people on the food and, Thank you for last time, and, Thank you for the herring, it was delicious. It was like living in a YMCA of the mind. I never found a way in Danish to express my meanness or make cutting remarks. All of my weapons were taken away from me.

I use a laptop computer. There are dangers in using a computer to write; it’s a fluid tool and you lose some of the concentration that a percussive tool like the typewriter gives you. But I’m tired of retyping the third draft. It’s too easy to write on a computer, the writing flows on and on like hot chocolate. So you have to print it out every so often and deal with it as a typescript, mark it up with pencil. As a final check, you force yourself to read it out loud. That is, I think, the surest detector of—I’m trying to think of a term other than horseshit, but I can’t—the clearest horseshit detector is to read it out loud. You can always tell when you’re putting on airs or lying when you hear yourself say it.

- Garrison Keillor, Paris Review

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