Garrison Keillor's been fired from Minnesota Public Radio

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

41. There's a whole lot of sarcasm and irony in those columns.

I remember reading them when they came out, and I interpreted the one about gay marriage as busting on the people who believe the stereotype he described, and not that he actually believes the stereotype. Same about the Christmas column, which I also read at the time and interpreted as a criticism of the commercialization of Christmas with a snark on the right-wing War On Christmas (as well as a little tease at cultural appropriation). If you've read his books you'd know he's not in the least a Christian fanatic; he was raised in a somewhat fundamentalist denomination but is far, far away from that now - I'm not sure he's religious at all. His humor is subtle and it sometimes sounds like he's saying the opposite of what he means; and he has been regularly criticized by the literal-minded. But if you read the whole thing without jumping to the more obvious conclusions you can usually see what he's really getting at. He's a bit like Jonathan Swift in that regard.