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What's strange about Keillor is that he has such a deep vein of anger, resentment, primness, and desire to dominate and order things. It doesn't seem like he was the class clown growing up, and he doesn't have the anarchic, iconoclastic, "libertarian" spirit of so many comics. He was more likely the timid nervous soul doing his little stories in his room, waiting for his moment.

Humor is a weapon for Keillor, as it is for so many professional jokesters, but beneath the smiles, his battles are deadly serious. Garrison threw off his very strict Plymouth Brethren upbringing decades ago, but he retains a lot of the tensions and strains of a puritanical outlook that he's come to hate and despise. Keillor's is a still very sectarian and "fundamentalist" mentality: for him, the Democratic party is the raft and all else is a raging sea of iniquity.

In recent years the NPR cocoon has hurt his work. Mark Twain was as bitter a man as Garrison Keillor -- probably more so and, by the end of his life, with far more reason to be angry. But Twain had to handle and hold a large and diverse audience, so he had to conceal his disappointment and resentment and hide his bitterness beneath the surface of his work, rather than simply rely on partisan jabs. It improved his work and made him a unifying and at times uplifting force in the country.

Keillor has subsidies so he doesn't have to worry about losing listeners whatever he does. Consequently he plays to a small niche audience -- or sometimes, no audience at all. He avoids the danger of being swallowed up by a mass audience, but he doesn't grow as a writer or performer. It's a pity, but past humorists, like Twain or Will Rogers were able to bridge the gap between North and South, East and West, city and country, in a way that Keillor, a very talented man, doesn't and can't.