News from Lake Wobegon

Rating:
Summary: Stories generally good, but rarely funny
Review: I love Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days" book, but found listening to these original NPR monologues strangely unappetizing. His book treatments of many of these stories succeed better as humor because on paper he strives more for gentle laughs than to force something "tender" into the mix. This may also reflect the problems of writing and delivering a monologue on live radio every week. Consider the hilarious "Giant Decoys" story. On paper, and for most of the audio monologue, it's about the Sons of Knute lodge and their love of duck hunting, which includes the creation of enormous decoys big enough for ducks to clearly spot them from cruising altitude. In the original monologue, however, Keillor exits with a pointless talk about how writers and hunters both do crazy things and how the hunters need to keep their guns on safety when they're out in the woods whooping it up. It's telling that Keillor omitted this from the book version, and could probably have been safely edited out of the CD. Ditto to his "Christmas Story Re-Told," which seems unfocused, especially for a man whose books usually brilliantly send-up the Catholic and Lutheran faiths; his "Royal Family" bit is clever but overly long and too sentimental. That said, several of Keillor's more "serious" stories are remarkable; he seems at his most effective when he doesn't consciously pull at too many heart strings. His "Hog Slaughter" evokes a lot of ghosts from my summers spent on my relatives' rural farm, where an inner-barn room still bore red-painted walls from that (thankfully long-since-gone) ritual. The same track includes his haunting tale of the unfortunate Elizabeth June, a disabled woman so lonely she invented friends. Keillor uses a light touch with these, and it's hard not to laugh at the moment in church when poor Elizabeth loudly announces to her invisible friend that, yes, she will buy that car. Of his "straight" humor, Keillor seems at his best in shorter bursts like his "brought to you by the Lake Wobegon Chamber of Commerce" bit, in which he introduces us to Fr. Emil's summer replacement at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility -- a priest whose rambling sermons feature lessons learned while playing golf, and which include experiences gleaned during parish work in the Las Vegas diocese. His "Living Flag" monologue here is cute, but was better handled in book form. That tells me that while Keillor is America's sole live-radio entertainment stalwart, his humor is most focused and polished on paper.

Rating:
Summary: Some of the Best Lake Wobegon monologues - all right here!
Review: The 4 cassettes are titled "Summer", "Fall", "Winter" and "Spring". All have very funny stories on them and are worth the listen many times over. But the absolute best of the 4 tapes, and the biggest reason anyone should buy this collection, is the "Fall" stories. "Fall" (which I also found listed separately, and have left a review there as well) contains the single funniest Lake Wobegon monologue, "Bruno the Fishing Dog." It also contains a funny take on Minnesota Thanksigivings, and a devastating 24-minute epic called The Royal Family, which I found to be well worth the trip.

To me, Keillor-on-paper vs. Keillor-live is apples and oranges - they should be judged separately. If you do want to hear him, buy this collection--and the collection called "Gospel Birds", also a classic--and you'll be set for some time.