Garrison Keillor: Bigoted or tone deaf?
What was Garrison Keillor thinking exactly? From his Baltimore Sun column on the secularization of Christmas:
If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. 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.
Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.
My pal Elli Wohlgelernter is outraged, as is Jeffrey Goldberg.
At first I thought they were over-reacting and didn’t appreciate Keillor’s irony. I suspect he was joking, and after listening to Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night for like 20 years, I’m pretty sure he thinks he was joking. That being said, he did a piss-poor job of it, and if you’re not attuned to his sensibility it sounded not amusingly curmudgeonly, but churlish and nasty.
(Keillor, who often books the Klezmatics during his December shows, tends to incorporate gentle religious stereotypes in his humor, ribbing Lutherans, Catholics and Unitarians. I once heard him joke, more successfully: “To my Jewish friends who volunteer to cover our shifts on Christmas and Easter? Butt out — some of us don’t want to be with our families in the first place.”)
Unless the guy is a closet bigot or off his meds, I think his offense here is not anti-Semitism, but awful execution of a joke. It reminds me of Michael Richards’ racist rant at the night club — he was trying for something funny and edgy, but lost control of the joke … and his career. Interesting to see if Keillor gets any blowback.
(For an antidote to Keillor, read Michael Feinstein’s sweet oped on ecumenism and the Jews who penned Christmas carols.)
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JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the 
December 21st, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Andrew, I agree with your overall take on this, and I appreciate your use of an example of his humor from his radio monologues, but you write this: “if you’re not attuned to his sensibility it sounded not amusingly curmudgeonly, but churlish and nasty.”
Actually, it didn’t “sound” like anything. It wasn’t aural, it was written. That may be part of the problem. Tone and inflection would likely have softened the mistaken notion of anti-Semitism.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 am
Agreed. If he said it as part of a monologue at Town Hall, the Jews in the audience would have laughed along. In print, it “sounds” bitter.
December 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Mr. Keiller should have learned something when he did his gay marriage parody some time ago. Another really unfunny joke.
December 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Mr. Silow-Carroll: your analysis may be correct; however, when the column is taken as a whole, it becomes less evident that this was an attempt at edgy humor. Keillor’s targets are too wide-ranging (intellectuals, Jews, the wrong kind of Christians, pagans, secular people), and the bile too cookie-cutter, for me to read this as a long joke. Still, I would almost prefer for Keillor to have been serious, because if the column really was meant as satire, then his sin is far worse, because it’s just not funny.
December 25th, 2009 at 9:04 am
[...] heard Keillor’s column described as “anti-Semitic.” But I think it was just a case of badly done satire rather than an animus against Jewish people (also, when he writes, “did one of our guys write [...]