For thirty-five years, Garrison Keillor has brought listeners into the village of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, the “town that time forgot, that the decades cannot improve.” Home to a flock of colorful Lutherans and Catholics, it has served as a “fabricated community” for millions of public radio listeners. An idealized setting for Keillor’s storytelling, it has, until recently, been innocent of overt prejudice.
Last Wednesday, Keillor ruined all that in an anti-Semitic column, “Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone.” Telling his readers, “if you’re not in the club, then buzz off,” he lashed out at a staple of American popular culture. Criticizing “all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year,” he asks, “Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t.”
Reactions to the column have been overwhelmingly negative. Writing in the Tablet, Marissa Brostoff recounted Keillor’s “mildly xenophobic rant,” dubbing him the “self-appointed cultural representative of regular old Americans.” Telling Keillor to “go away,” Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic wrote, “I was pretty sure I didn’t enjoy listening to Garrison Keillor even before I read what he had to say about Christmas music.” Calling it a “bigoted screed against those who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus,” Talking Points Memo’s M.J. Rosenberg said Keillor’s column “creeped me out.”
So unlike the gentle tone of his Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor’s column is actually a better fit for the Minnesota of the 1940s. Writing in the Nation, Carey McWilliams called Minneapolis “the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.” Back in those days, Jewish Minnesotans were barred from many community organizations. Now Keillor wants to ban Jewish-American songs from holiday observances.
It’s sad Garrison Keillor had to lash out at songs like Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.” Composed by a Russian Jewish immigrant, crooned by an Irish Catholic pop star, and consumed by millions of Protestants, it is “the best-selling record of all.” It embodies the diversity of the American experiment.
I am no fan of Garrison Keillor. The reasons for that do not matter. But this reads like pure satire. Perhaps the telling of it- the inflection and pauses- betrayed a real bitterness toward Jewish ppeople. But from what I read I see a pretty good use of hyperble and feigned sensibility to make a point: that superficial Christians are over reacting in absurd ways to the supposed usurption of ‘their’ holiday.
This sounds like it was crafted to embarrass Bill O’Reilly more than it was to insult Irving Berlin.
It is worth discussing whether and in what senses Garrison Keillor’s remarks were anti-Semitic, but it can only be done reasonably with some reference to the fact that this was comedy. The functions of ethnic humor, and the way ethnic humor depends on crossing boundaries and on challenging sensibilities just has to be taken into account. There is no way in the world Keillor’s comments can plausibly be construed as making a serious request for a “ban” on Jewish-American Christmas/holiday songs. One might begin by asking how the humor in these remarks works. It does not work in a simple and straightforward manner. It is grounded in truth-telling–or it would not be genuinely funny at all. But, as Weber remarks, it exaggerates and feigns injury. It also makes a humorous reciprocity argument which is again both telling and absurd. Mr. Schmalzbauer needs to get out and watch more stand-up. Or is he pulling our leg? Once we get the comedy right, we can ask the anti-Semitism question in a clearer way. There is plenty of what one might call racist and anti-Christian and Islamophobic and anti-Semitic comedy, but those are gross categories, and they need clarification. It does real damage to sling them around carelessly, and it obscures the fact that some forms of this humor really are execrable.
David Weber and Nathan Zebrowski make excellent points. They remind me of Jeffrey Weiss’ comments over at Politics Daily, “A Christmas Eve Defense of Garrison Keillor–and Satire.”
I must admit that my own reaction to Keillor was conditioned by reading the reactions of people in the Jewish press, including the piece at the Tablet that I cited. As a Protestant with roots in Minnesota, I erred on the side of criticizing Keillor. I am all too aware of the very real anti-Semitism of my home state and did not want to cut its most famous radio personality (who has similar religious roots) any slack. I apologize for any damage I caused to Keillor or to the discussion of anti-Semitism.
Perhaps I went overboard when I accused him of wanting to ban Christmas songs penned by Jewish-American composers. At the same time, I don’t read it as a satire of O’Reilly or the Christmas wars. I think that its troubling ambiguity does not lead to humor, but to confusion and, in many cases, hurt. Enough people misread it to suggest that he needs to tweak this routine next time he uses it.
As for getting out to see some stand-up comedy, I have tickets to see Jeff Dunham when he visits my city.
I write to challenge the defense of satire. Keillor may have set out to commit satire. Having no privileged access to his mental state, I can’t argue the contrary. But I can argue that he failed.
Satire is all about the use of exaggeration for comic and rhetorical effect. Swift took a genteel willingness to allow Irish people to starve in the interests of British commerce and exaggerated it. If there had been a serious bill in Parliament to use Irish infants as a food source, it wouldn’t have worked as satire.
Is there enough exaggeration in the piece? No, in my opinion. Sadly, the views expressed can be found, at about the same rhetorical temperature, all over the place. As a result, it read to me as a more or less straight statement of opinion. He comes across as a bigoted humorist, not a scourge of bigots.
There’s an additional level of confusion here: are we talking about the views of Garrison Keillor, or of ‘Garrison Keillor’? The man has made a literary career of blurring the boundaries of fiction and self-revelation. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is a dangerous platform from which to make jokes about serious subjects.
Almost everything he does is done in the first person. Sometimes with a fictional mutation of his name, and sometimes without. As a result, the man has created a fuzzy cloud of narrative voices. He leads us all to believe that’s he’s in there somewhere, but it’s never quite clear where. Am I supposed to read this piece as as funny because the fictional character is a ridiculous, grumpy, curmudgeon? Slamming Larry Summers is not all that ridiculous, nor Ralph Waldo Emerson. That could be just wit.
Yes, I’m aware that stand-up comics make an industry of leading you down the garden path of progressive escalation from reasonable to outrageous and offensive. I don’t have to like it, or grant it legitimacy. Some things just are offensive, however artfully someone may build a bridge to them.
There is one final aspect of this that I find worthy of note. To a certain died-in-the-wool secularist perspective, all expressions of faith are ipso facto ridiculous. I have this sinking feeling that much of the ‘of course it was all in good fun’ response expresses that point of view. (I do not include the above comments in this remark.)
Update from the year 2017. Several days after a vicious terrorist attack by Nazis in Charlottesville, Va. Keillor wrote an article for the Washington Post saying the country shouldn’t take white supremacist violence seriously.
Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-take-lunacy-too-seriously/2017/08/15/9080843e-81b7-11e7-ab27-1a21a8e006ab_story.html