(tape rewinding)
(bluegrass music)
- [Garrison] There was a man sitting on his front porch
and the pastor came by and they sat and talked
about theology for a little while.
And the pastor asked the man
if he believed in infant baptism.
And the man said "Believe in it, hell,
"I've seen it done."
(audience laughing)
A humorist has to, has to, has to what?
What was I about to say?
(laughter)
I was distracted, if everyone would just be perfectly still
I'm sure I...
(laughing)
- When did you decide to become a writer, and why?
- I grew up in a fundamentalist Protestant family
that stressed that we were a select people,
and so we were to avoid contact with others
who did not share our faith.
We were isolated.
And, perhaps, growing up in this world,
first of all, one has a reverence for the word,
and for language, God spoke to us through
the word, and in our family this was the King James Bible.
It also, I think, gave books, fiction,
great power, because they were proscribed.
We were not to touch them, and my family was shocked
when I came home with a volume of Hemingway
when I was a boy, and I wanted to read it.
So there was a price to be paid for
being interested in fiction and in writing.
Pushing my family away.
Books and authors became my family.
It's a decision however that continually seems
temporary, that you're never quite sure
you've made it absolutely.
I'm only 52, so I made a sort of tentative chice
that has lasted this long, but, I could still
fall back on retail sales.
(laughing)
- Being considered a humorist, are you constantly aware
that it's time to come up with something
as clever as you've just described,
or to be comic in some way?
- I think that you're only obliged to be a humorist
from maybe the age of 18 until you turn 30.
Past the age of 30, I don't think
there's any obligation to be clever at all.
After that, you, I think, are supposed to
settle down, be a good person,
raise your children, and be good to your friends
which you may not have been when you were very clever.
And try to atone for your cleverness.
Humor has to surprise us,
otherwise it isn't funny, and,
it's a death knell for a writer
to be labeled a humorist, because then of course,
it's not a surprise anymore, it's what's expected of him.
And when you come to expect humor of people,
you will never get it.
Looking for it, demanding it, expecting it,
what you do is to kill off every joke
you ever come across.
Humor in writing needs to come in
under cover of darkness and be disguised.
It has to surprise people.
You don't want to get that sort of
badoing, badoing, badoing sound
in your writing, that boing,
that gives you away.
Humor is not about problems with
airline luggage handlers, it's about our lives in America.
And it's about the ends of our lives,
it's about everything that happens after that
and everything that happened before.
- [George] Well you paint this lovely picture
of the piece going up and then
immediately appearing in the magazine,
I was wondering if sometimes, at the New Yorker they say,
"Well you know this is not quite up to snuff."
Or however they would put it.
- [Garrison] Well, you see though,
when the New Yorker turned down work,
they turned it down in such an elaborately
gentlemanly way, making apologies for their own
shortsightedness, and undoubtedly
it was their fault, but somehow, for some reason,
this fell short of the remarkably high standard
that you, by your own work have set for yourself.
(laughing)
They had a way of rejecting my work that made me
feel sorry for them somehow.
(laughing)
(tape rewinding)
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