Happy to Be Here

This collection has some passages that can be used for audition monologues. As most actors know, funny audition material is hard to come by.

These classic routines are now being milked ad infinitum each week. Keillor has given up trying to resist a cloying public and has decided to pander to them. Even tall radio comedians need love. The comedy overflows with familiar icons of childhood and small-town American life - daydreams and disappointments, baseball and Boy Scouts, lawn ornaments and storm windows, Main Street and Founder's Square. But Keillor works his local-color material so that it debunks the same sentimentality and nostalgia that it evokes. In the final analysis the narrator's praise for small-town America is about as trustworthy as a prepuescent boy's booming baritone. Such a complex fella. Keillor left Lake Wobegone for a clear and understandable reason: he was stultified by the environment and the atmosphere where "artsy" types were viewed with deep suspicion and contempt. However, this was the ground he stood on, unlike so many others, and it became his lifelong meal ticket...

I've only thus far read 3 GK books (Lake Wob./H2BH/Leaving Home), but this is definitely a neck-in-neck rival with Lake Wobegon Days. If there's any doubt as to whether or not this is a good buy, then just check it out of the library and read "The Tip-Top Club". You'll have to buy it, because you'll want to read it more than once!