A Prarie Home Companion

Saturday Evening Rich and I saw A Prarie Home Companion, a movie based on the popular public radio show of the same name. Garrison Keillor, the writer, creater, and host of A Prarie Home Companion, has gathered around him an all start cast (including such luminaries as Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Virginia Madsen, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson, and Tommy Lee Jones) in addition to director Robert Altman. The movie takes place entirely during the fictional last show of the radio program, as a big corporation has bought up and decided to shut down the show.

As with the radio show, the movie is about storytelling, music, midwestern wit, bad puns, and the human condition. Although I am only an occasional listener of the radio show, often turning NPR off just as soon as Car Talk is over, I really enjoyed the movie. Some of the performances are priceless, and the stories combine a wide variety of human emotions and conditions. If there is one single theme it is that there is humor and gravity in all human situations.

In one scene indicative of this, a female angel clad entirely in white returns to ask Keillor why a particular joke was funny. You see she'd been listening to the show in her car one evening when that joke started her laughing uncontrolably and she drove off a cliff. The kicker, of course, is the joke. Here's the dialogue from the film:

Garrison Keillor: The penguin joke? Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, you look like you're wearing a tuxedo. The second penguin says, what makes you think I'm not?

Dangerous Woman: Why is that funny?
Garrison Keillor: I guess because people laugh at it.
Dangerous Woman: I'm not laughing.
Garrison Keillor: Well, you're an angel

The film is also chock full of groan worthy puns. Here's my (groan) favorite: Woody Harrelson's cowboy character says that his horse is awfully smart. He can teach him math and science, but he just can't teach him philosophy. Why not? Because you can't put Descartes before the horse.