A Prairie Home Companion vs Waiting For Guffman

I listen to A Prairie Home Companion once in a while. It’s the sort of thing that I picture other people listening to on porches while drinking lemonade, but I listen in my car. I don’t find much of it particularly funny, and the music is only good in the way that music is good say, around a campfire. It’s more the spirit of the song and the community singing it that moves you, rather than any great notes or runs or harmonies. The people sound like friends, like they genuinely like each other, like you like your friends. This is pretty much how the show is described in the movie version of A Prairie Home Companion. The character making the description is listed as Dangerous Woman, but you’ll figure out her real identity fairly quickly.

The movie version of A Prairie Home companion isn’t a bringing to life of the radio show, but rather a fictionalized representation of what it might be like to attend the taping of the radio show. I’d call it old-fashioned, but I’m not sure you’d find anything else like it, no matter how far back you looked. A Prairie Home Companion is a quicker-witted Hee-Haw, or a day at the Grand Ole Opry hosted by, well, Garrison Keilor. GK, as he’s known in the movie, hosts the show, tells stories, performs live advertisements, and sings a few songs. He had a brief fling with Yolanda (Meryl Streep) half of a quartet of sisters (two sisters are no longer with them), who performs in the show with Rhonda (Lily Tomlin). Yolanda and Rhonda are the heart of the movie. They come in to prepare before the show; their dressing room is a testament both to the loyalty of the radio show, and the longevity of their careers. In other words, it’s a mess, and it looks like they keep it as sort of a home base. Yolanda and Rhonda aren’t being booked many other places these days, I suspect. It’s not that they aren’t good. They’re charming, and have a rambling, layered way of telling a story that makes you wonder how they’ll ever get a song introduced before the actual song is over (if you saw Tomlin and Streep on the Oscars, you get the drill. It was impressive then, but with characters entering and exiting, a band playing, and two-part harmony throughout, it becomes something a little more. If David Blaine tried it for his next special, I’d watch. Instead, I hear he’s going to hold the same spoon, all day. Magic!) Yolanda and Rhonda—like everyone else on A Prairie Home Companion—draw us in with their warmth, rather than their talents. The first few notes, you might wonder how Yolanda and Rhonda ever became one of the main attractions of the show, but then those harmonies settle in. They’re like Mitch and Mickey from A Mighty Wind: we’d laugh more if it weren’t so darn pretty. Yolanda and Rhonda are joined for the day by Yolanda’s daughter Lola (Lindsey Lohan), who writes poetry about suicide and has one of those magic-marker Chris Martin Free Trade things on her hand. She’s a little out of place, but they all are, in a way, and before it’s over she’s on stage too.

And the show goes on. We see pretty much the entire production, with bluegrass musical interludes, commercials, and a series of corny, dirty jokes by Lefty and Dusty, two bickering cowboys played by John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson. I can’t tell you how much I liked these characters. I’d watch a whole movie about Lefty and Dusty, with their tit puns and overly sensitive emotional states. And just when I thought I’d never buy a Woody Harrelson song on iTunes. Worth every penny.

A Prairie Home Companion was directed by Robert Altman (and if I understand correctly, P.T. Anderson), so the first thing you probably expect is for it to be long. Nope. You could watch A Prairie Home Companion twice in the time it takes to watch Short Cuts, even though it boasts about a dozen principal players, a death, a love affair, the smoothest transition to film for a SNL cast member ever (Maya Rudolph as the pregnant stage manager), and the two stupidest characters ever played by Kevin Kline and/or Virginia Madsen (both are just as fine as can be, but seriously. Stupid.) I’m not saying it’s the greatest movie, but I am saying that the actors are warm, and they seem to be having so much fun, and seem to like each other ever so much, so much so that even Death herself might need to sit backstage once in a while and just listen to Rhonda and Yolanda harmonize, or maybe to hear just one more dirty joke before driving off into the night.

There’s something about a characters who don’t realize how their coming off that appeals to me. The characters in A Prairie Home Companion just aren’t all that self-aware, and it endeared them to me even more. Yolanda and Rhonda sing a sweet song about their dead mother, and parts of it are maybe just a bit unintentionally funny, which made it all the sweeter to me. It also reminded me of my favorite actors back in Blaine, Missouri.

Waiting For Guffman is probably my favorite of the Christopher Guest mockumentaries.

Like Prairie Home Companion, the show within the show carries the bulk of the plot. Corky St. Clair (Christopher Guest) is directing a play celebrating the anniversary of Blaine, Missouri. Corky has experience as an actor in New York, and is considered a pro in Blaine. He gathers his cast and begins working on Red White and Blaine, his tribute to the footstool capital of the country. His cast is dedicated, in awe of Corky, and not really all that talented. But they persevere, because Mr. Guffman is coming to decide whether or not their production is worthy of becoming a Broadway show.

It’s not.

I’m sure a lot of people watch Waiting For Guffman and find it hilarious because it makes fun of these small-town hack actors. I think it’s hilarious all right, but I have nothing but affection for them, because the performances are so true. No one is hamming or misusing their adlibs (even Eugene Levy’s crossed eye and two left feet come off as genuine character bits); every one of these improvised, mockumented characters has a soul, and every one of them shines up on that stage. Like the Prairie Home Companion gang, the characters in Waiting for Guffman are working so well together, and are having so much fun, that it reminds you of when you had fun, even if it was in the service of something so utterly stupid as the factory dance, or the “Penny for Your Thoughts” song.

So see A Prairie Home Companion, and then rewatch Waiting for Guffman. The lines between funny, unintentionally funny, and unintentionally funny on purpose are blurry already; might as well ignore the labels and laugh at them all.

A Prairie Home Companion: B+
Waiting for Guffman: A