In the summer of 2016, Garrison Keillor gave up his longtime radio program, “A Prairie Home Companion.”

He is currently touring with a live show, “Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Love & Comedy Tour,” that is loosely based on his former radio broadcast. He promises that this tour will be his last. It will stop at the Foellinger Theater on September 5.

Sometime after the release of his 2012 detective spoof, “Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny,” Keillor quit writing fiction. He is currently working on a memoir and a collection of limericks, and after those come out, he said he will quit writing books altogether.

Asked via email if he anticipates feeling a little bereft in the coming years, Keillor responded, “I was born feeling a little bereft. As a Christian, I was taught to shun worldliness and yearn for the Second Coming, to be a pilgrim in an alien country. I’m a reformed Christian now and am guided by a powerful sense of gratitude. One must be aware of blessing, especially the blessing of grace, and try to live up to it.”

Keillor’s career path has been a serendipitous one. He was born in 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota and grew up intending to follow in the footsteps of such great New Yorker writers as E.B. White and A.J. Liebling.

He sold his first story, “”Local Family Keeps Son Happy,” to that magazine in 1970. Regular assignments followed. In 1974, he was sent out on a fateful journalistic mission to the Grand Ole Opry.

A longtime fan of old-time radio, Keillor caught the germ of an idea while immersing himself in the world of the Opry.

He thought of creating a contemporary radio show that owed a debt, not only to the Opry, but also to the National Barn Dance, a long-running country music radio program that originated out of WLS-AM in Chicago in the early 1920s.

Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” – a gallimaufry of homespun songs, skits and advertising spoofs – debuted on public radio in 1974.

Keillor said he’d put enormous pressure on himself at the New Yorker to produce a certain caliber and character of work, so the radio show proved to be immensely freeing.

“I loved the old New Yorker, worked hard to emulate its offhand tone, imitate writers such as Liebling and White and Thurber, but gave up on that when I launched a radio show in 1974,” he said. “I found my own voice there, doing the News from Lake Wobegon. I loved being at the magazine and still have friends there, but my work was imitative and there comes a point when one must give that up and be yourself.”

“A Prairie Home Companion” with Keillor as host lasted 42 years. Musician Chris Thile took over in September 2016. Keillor said he misses the show and hasn’t listened to it since he left because he’s afraid he’d miss it even more.

On the radio and during his summer stage shows, Keillor has surely told several thousand stories about the fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon.

That’s a lot of plot to keep straight in one’s head. Keillor admitted that he never tried to keep it straight in his head.

“I didn’t keep track of things, as any writer should have done, and so there were numerous inconsistencies,” he said. “People aged and then got younger, children came and then disappeared. Sometimes a man had a new wife and then went back to the old one. Thank goodness for short attention spans. A few people wrote in to point out the flaws but always in amusement. I guess nobody takes oral storytelling seriously.”

The longtime residents of Lake Wobegon tended to be flinty-eyed pragmatists who were suspicious of ambition, celebrity and overly inflated self-regard.

Keillor wrote about them with affection, while living a life they might have disapproved of.

But Keillor said he has become more like them in recent years.

“I write about small-town skeptics because they saw through me when I was young and I honor them for that,” he said. “I was good at imitation, at impersonating talent. I had no real talent, just persistence, and that has served me well. I believe that nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever good enough. Artists get way too much credit. Only a handful of them are worth our time: they know it, too. I’ve become that small-town critic, the kind who says ‘my child could do better than that.’”

Keillor’s most recent child, Maia, is 19 and works in a daycare center.

“She has stronger social impulses than I do and I think her life will always be wrapped around friendship and commingling with peers and admiring her heroines,” he said. “That seems to be her calling, to be a friend to all and an admirer of a few.”

As memoirs go, Keillor’s forthcoming autobiography won’t be the usual angst-filled (and prevarication-filled) wallow in the muck.

“The memoir is called ‘Just Passing Through,’ and it’s a light memoir, given that I have skated through 75 years pretty happily, enjoyed my work, avoided depression and addiction, have few regrets, and survived a fundamentalist upbringing with a sunny disposition,” he said. “This sort of life is closer to the lives most people lead than most of the memoirs written today, so I’m obligated to write it. The challenge, of course, is to tell the truth. Most memoirs don’t.”

When Keillor is done writing books, he said he intends to read more of them.

“Time to sit down and start reading them, especially the classics,” he said. “I want to get through Dickens and Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor and Updike and what’s his name before my time is up. The French philosopher. You remember.”

Most celebrity interviewees tell interviewers that they have no regrets, but Keillor admits that he has a few.

“I would’ve worked harder when I was young,” he said. “I wasted acres and acres of time, as if I were immortal. Now I’m 75 and every hour is important to me and I sometimes wish I could buy back some of the tens of thousands of hours I frittered away watching TV, poring over the newspaper, sitting at dinner parties, going on pointless trips. I do not, however, regret a minute I spent at ballgames or playing tennis or trying to impress women.”

Amber Jackson has been the executive director of the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival for about eight months and she is still learning the ropes.

The “ropes” in this instance consist of a classic car festival that has been in existence more than 60 years and sees the influx of hundreds of thousands of global automotive enthusiasts every Labor Day weekend.

Aussies have been known to ship their cars to this thing. It’s a big deal.

People who know Jackson (as I do) will tell you that she’s smart, fearless, gregarious, earthy, approachable and impossible to dislike.

What she is not is an Auburn native.

A couple of things have surprised her about the festival so far.

For one thing, she didn’t expect that the festival would engender such a profound depth of feeling among Auburn residents.

“That’s the big kicker,” she said. “It’s not, ‘Can I do this job?’ or ‘Can I do it well?’ This event means so much to this town. It’s their baby, it’s their son, it’s their daughter, it’s their grandkids it’s their grandparents. It means so much to so many people.

“So I think when I realized that,” Jackson said, “the weight of what this means to the community, it bore an extra responsibility. I thought, ‘I really have to do my best to make this come together and to grow in the right ways.’”

In the early 20th century, Auburn was the home of the Auburn Automobile Company, where Auburn, Cord and Duesenberg automobiles were built.

The Great Depression claimed roughly half of the American automakers that had existed prior to Black Friday, including (eventually) the Auburn Automobile Company.

In 1956, the ACD Club was formed. The ACD Festival grew out of what was, at first, an exceedingly modest parade of club members’ cars.

These days, the Saturday Parade of Classics should feature as many as 300 restored Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs and the Friday Cruise In should feature no fewer than 700 classic cars of myriad makes and models.

When she first started in the job, Jackson said she wondered how she was going to be able to pull everything together.

The answer, as it turned out, is that no one expected her to pull everything together. Not all by herself, anyway. The ACD Fest is nothing if not a group effort. It’s a well-oiled machine that just happens to tout well-oiled machines.

“Honestly, it’s been amazing because this thing is starting to come together like a symphony,” Jackson said. “At first, it’s all jumbled and it’s everywhere and I’m like, ‘I don’t understand how this all pieces together. There are over 50 events in the span of a week.’ You look at that scope and you think, ‘This is chaos.’”

But Jackson said she’s been awestruck watching the graceful convergence of these components and she’s been impressed with the passion and sincerity of the people with whom she has collaborated.

“I am not an Auburn girl,” she said. “Everybody I have had the pleasure of working with thus far has a community-before- capital mentality. It’s just amazing to me.”

A major addition to the festival this year is a headlining musical act: country singer James Otto.

Otto, who will perform September 2, is a member of the MuzikMafia, a collection of like-minded country upstarts that also includes Big & Rich and Gretchen Wilson.

The 2017 edition of the festival will also see the return of Fast & Fabulous in Downtown Auburn, a popular recent innovation that features such modern luxury cars as Ferraris, Lamborghinis and McLarens.

One of more vexing challenges for the ACD Fest (and all long-lived festivals, honestly) is figuring out how to attract young people to the goings-on.

Jackson, whose background is in education, said the kids’ area will be much expanded this year.

“Our board sees a lot of growth with that area,” she said. “How do we get kids to fall in love with classics? Anything that’s loud and fast, they’re naturally going to be drawn to. But that’s not the nature of a classic.”

In the future, she said, the festival’s education program will be significantly beefed up.

NATMUS, the National Automotive & Truck Museum in Auburn, offers classes in car restoration to high school students, she said.

“A bunch of volunteers come and work with the kids on actually restoring cars that have been donated to them,” Jackson said. “The festival is the gate of exposure. But what the town does the rest of the year really opens it up for what that longevity is really going to look like.”

A longtime fan of the festival, Jackson has a theatrical analogy to describe the position in which she finds herself at the moment: “I went from sitting in the balcony of the second show to being backstage, directing,” she said.

Being the rookie in such a scenario would scare a lot of people, but Jackson said she loves it. She thinks it will help her see what needs to be done to attract more young people and women to the festival.

“I would love to go sit in with the high school kids on the car restoration classes,” she said. “I came from an old school mentality where my dad had speckled, gold, ’79 Charger in the driveway and when I tried to help him work on it, he said, ‘You don’t have to worry about this. You’ll have a husband do that for you one day.’”

Jackson said she has succeeded in business up to now because she has gone in with the perspective of an educator, not of an accountant.

“I don’t go in looking at a bottom line,” she said. “I go in looking at it from an education standpoint: Where are the areas for growth? How can this be connected to people? How can we translate this into real-world experiences?”

When singer-songwriter Gavin DeGraw found out that the WB network wanted to use his song “I Don’t Want to Be” as the theme for its show, “One Tree Hill,” he was not immediately overjoyed.

This union of series and song ended up launching DeGraw’s career, but he had to think it over initially.

The reason for this was DeGraw’s old-school attitude about selling himself.

“I was really apprehensive about affiliating myself with that sort of marketing, TV marketing,” he said in a phone interview. “’Cause years ago – during my parents’ generation – that was considered totally selling out.”

But DeGraw came to realize that the music business had changed a lot from the days when Steve Winwood was widely condemned for letting Michelob use his song, “Don’t You Know What the Night Can Do?”

“To put everybody kind of in their place,” DeGraw said, “I just let everybody know right away that the day you sign your record deal is when you sell out.”

“Whatever you do after that is just a result of that,” he added, laughing.

DeGraw will perform at the Honeywell Center in Wabash on August 31.

Whatever you think about DeGraw’s music, the man himself is hard to dislike.

He is earthy, funny, humble, grateful, often profane and utterly free of self-importance or standardized patter.

DeGraw grew up poor in the Catskills region of New York State.

His mother worked as a nurse specializing in addiction treatment and his dad was a prison guard (among many other things).

“He did landscaping, he built picnic tables, he was a chimney sweep and he welded wood stoves in the basement,” DeGraw said. “He did everything. It was hard to make a living doing a little of this and a little of that”

After seeing a Billy Joel concert in his teens, DeGraw announced to the family that he had found his calling in life.

DeGraw’s parents, both amateur musicians who had attended Woodstock together, were nothing but supportive.

“So when I said I wanted to play music,” DeGraw recalled, “they were both all for it. My father in particular said, ‘Don’t do what I do.’

“It was interesting,” he said. “It was the opposite of the usual rock and roll story. To them, it was cool. There was no battle there at the house. We didn’t grow up in a family where everybody had a master’s degree.”

DeGraw said his parents made him feel as if his dreams were achievable.

“Not only possible but expected,” he said. “If you think about it, that’s a crazy type of guidance from your parents. They were rebels. My parents were total rebels.”

Soon, the young DeGraw was obsessed with music. When school administrators and fellow students would encourage him to play sports, his response was succinct.

“I said, ‘(Expletive) that (expletive). I am playing in bars.’”

Years later, DeGraw’s persistence was rewarded in the most unexpected and serendipitous of ways. Joel asked him to be the opening act for one of his concerts.

DeGraw recalled sharing a smoke with Joel and his band behind the venue after he first arrived.

“Billy said, ‘Hey, Gavin. Thanks for coming,’” DeGraw recalled. “And I said, “Well, thanks for having me. You’re my (expletive) idol.’

“I said, ‘Listen. I don’t know if you have anyone else playing during this block. But if you do, (expletive) that guy. I want the gig.’”

Everyone laughed and thus a lifelong friendship and musical partnership between two blue-collar piano men was formed.

DeGraw has since collaborated and palled around with many of his childhood idols: Shania Twain, the Allman Brothers and Garth Brooks, among them.

And when he speaks of this, he still sounds as giddy as a kid.

“I never expected the artists that I look up to to want to say, ‘Hey, I like your stuff,’” DeGraw said. “Music has this fascinating power; that it can reach out to so many different types of people. It’s a phenomenon.

“The guy who I looked up to as a musician invited me out to play,” he said. “Shania Twain was so complimentary to me and I was standing there at first just trying to process the fact that I was talking to her at all.”

DeGraw thinks he appeals to a wide range of artists because he tries to make genre-free music.

“It’s been a goal of mine not to be in a genre,” he said. “I don’t want anyone who hears me to be able to say, ‘Well, I just don’t like that type of music.’”

Asked if there are any downsides to fame, DeGraw cheekily responded with a story he heard actor and musician Kevin Bacon tell in an interview.

Bacon wanted to attend an event incognito so he had a make-up artist alter his look to make him unidentifiable.

“He thought it would be cool if no one recognized him,” DeGraw recalled. “He said, ‘So I walked around, and about 15 minutes into it, I thought, “This sucks”’

DeGraw roared with laughter.

Comedian Doug Stanhope almost always performs drunk, or “well into his cups” as they say in places where alcohol is served in cups, apparently.

That’s because he said he needs to numb himself to an essential fraudulence that he sees in stand-up comedy – the idea that every audience wants to think the evening’s jokes were written specifically for them and that the comedian’s routine is closer to an off-the-cuff conversation than a well-rehearsed speech.

“That’s why, except for very rare occasions, I’ll never do two shows in a row or two shows back to back,” Stanhope said in a phone interview. “Because you’ll have people who will go to both shows, thinking that you’re talking off the top of your head.

“The second time, it’s like they’re underneath the trap door of that magic show,” he said. “‘Oh that’s how you did it.’” The ‘ta-da’ is missing.”

Stanhope will bring his “magic show” to the Tiger Room in Calhoun Street Soups, Salads & Spirits on August 26.

Alcohol isn’t the only consciousness alterer that Stanhope regularly ingests and he isn’t shy about admitting that.

He isn’t shy about much.

Stanhope said touring actually keeps him from drinking more than he otherwise might.

“Stand-up keeps me alive to some extent in that it gives me a time that I can’t start drinking until,” he said. “At home, I’m like, “(Expletive) it. It’s 11 o’clock. I don’t have anything to do. There’s nothing on Netflix.’

“Someone comes over who I really don’t have anything to say to,” Stanhope said. “I have no social skills without alcohol. It’s only the postman, but he chats for a minute or two. So I need a drink.”

Stanhope is known as one of those comedians who “says things other comedians are afraid to say.”

It’s a cliché that doesn’t really cover what Stanhope does and who Stanhope is. Stanhope isn’t a shock comic – he is not some clown who wakes up every morning and complies a list of ways to offend people.

Stanhope is a guy with a genuinely dark and sardonic worldview and a nearly nonexistent sense of decorum.

When his girlfriend, Amy “Bingo” Bingaman, suffered a head injury during a drug binge late last year and slipped into a coma, Stanhope did what any boyfriend would do: he continued to work and posted irreverent comments about the situation on Twitter.

If you know anything about the notorious Bingo, you know she probably wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Stanhope is a product of an exceedingly unconventional and unfiltered upbringing that is detailed in “Digging Up Mother: A Love Story,” his book about helping his grievously ill mother to commit suicide in 2008.

Stanhope’s mom was the biggest influence on his comedic sensibilities and he said he still hasn’t fully accepted that she isn’t still around.

“I still have times where I go, ‘Oh I should call…’ When there’s something where I specifically want to call my mother, I still…I’ve got that beat,” he said. “Or my father, who died in 2001. That quick knee-jerk…I don’t know if that ever goes away.”

Another big influence on Stanhope (and another guy who was known for crafting material designed both to entertain and challenge his audiences) was the late George Carlin.

Carlin once told an interviewer that he had 1,300 separate files on his computer filled with notes and notions.

Asked about his creative habits and rituals for coming up with new material, Stanhope answered, “Panic.”

“It’s literally – when I get to a place when I just did a special and I don’t have material to replace it — it’s like if you were on Gilligan’s Island and you had to build a boat,” he said. “I go through every scrap of old notebook and lines that were funny but didn’t fit in anywhere and that chunk I edited out of the last special.”

Stanhope likens the process to dressing up a skeleton.

The cities Stanhope prefers to visit are ones I must euphemistically refer to here as “crap towns,” places that aren’t widely considered to be entertainment meccas. He said that patrons tend to be more appreciative in these sorts of places.

“(Expletive) Vegas,’ he said. “Walk up and down the street. There, you have 10,000 options, all begging for you to come.”

Crap towns also have the best thrift stores, he said.

Yes, in addition to being dedicated consumers of illicit and fermented substances, Stanhope and Bingo are also thrift store devotees.

Stanhope’s least favorite part of touring is the merch table.

“It becomes longer than the shows sometimes, because everybody wants a (expletive) picture now,” “Who are you going to show it to? Your friends don’t know me or they’d be here right now. I have a very unattractive head. I don’t know how to pose. You don’t know how to use your camera.”

Stanhope said he is perfectly happy with where his career is at the moment: stand-up, podcasting, a few acting gigs.

He has no grand ambitions. He said he has actually been looking at ways to dial back on his touring schedule.

“We’ve talked about making this the last tour for a while and then taking a live podcast out,” Stanhope said. “That way, we could just end this (expletive).”

Stanhope knows that stand-up is the only vocation that could support they way he prefers to live when he’s not doing stand-up.

“It would be a lot more difficult if I had any kind of real responsibilities,” he said, “or a workload that required anything more than me yelling at people. My days are unproductive, let me put it that way.”

Given his wild lifestyle, Stanhope said he has no illusions about his own mortality.

“I consider (death) every morning I wake up,’ he said. “Where is it coming from? There’s a sniper out there somewhere but you don’t know what tree it’s in.

“I could quit smoking but she’s probably up in that drinking tree,” Stanhope said.

When a young C.J. Chenier heard his first zydeco record, he wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“It was French and my mom didn’t speak French even though she was from Louisiana,” he said. “She was from a non-French-speaking part of Louisiana. So, most of the songs were in French and the only one I really understood on there was an instrumental.

“I wasn’t resistant to it,” Chenier said. “I just didn’t understand. A lot of it at that time sounded the same to me.”

There’s nothing unusual about a young person failing initially to fully appreciate a style of music that is new to him.

What makes it sort of intriguing in this case is the identity of the artist who made the record: Chenier’s father, Clifton Chenier.

From those exceedingly humble musical beginnings, C.J. Chenier went on to assume his father’s King of Zydeco mantle.

C.J. Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band perform on August 11 at the Foellinger Freimann Botanical Conservatory as part of the Botanical Roots series.

C.J. Chenier was a saxophonist in a funk band in Texas when his dad sent a zydeco summons.

“I was 20 years old,” he recalled. “I was playing in this funk band and we were playing at a bazaar at a Catholic church. A friend of mine’s mom lived down the street and she sent someone to the bazaar to tell me my mom needed me to call her.

“So I went down and called her,” Chenier said. “And that’s the day she said, ‘You’ve got to come home because your daddy wants you to go on the road with him.’”

Chenier’s initial reaction to this directive from his dad was guarded: “I thought, “Man, I gotta go on the road was all them old dudes?’”

But Chenier said his first tour with his dad turned out to be “the best time I ever had in my whole life.”

The phrase “trial by fire” was coined to describe extreme tests of mettle and worthiness. As Chenier prepared to meet up with his father’s band for the first time, he couldn’t have known that what awaited him was something like a trial by zydeco.

“I came from funk,” he said, “and all of a sudden I am taking the place of the greatest zydeco saxophonist I had ever heard, John Hart. I thought he was going to be there but he wasn’t. It was just me. I didn’t know songs. I didn’t know nothing.”

Thankfully, the other band members were patient with Chenier. “They knew I didn’t know nothing,” he said, laughing.

Chenier assumed he’d feel awkward at first performing with the band, but that proved not to be the case.

“I felt real comfortable up there standing next to my dad,” he said. “The way the crowd acted. I had never seen anything like that before. I had been in gigs where they danced a lot. But when we went to places like California and Oregon, people went crazy. It was a new experience for me.”

As Clifton Chenier’s health declined, he pressured his son to become proficient on his instrument: the accordion.

“When I got in the band, he kept telling me, ‘You know you’re going to have to learn that accordion,’” he said. “‘You’re going to have to take over for me some day.’ I kind of started feeling around with it. Let me tell you, that big accordion had way too many buttons on it.”

So Chenier, who’d had some piano training, acquired a smaller accordion and slowly worked his way up to the larger model.

Nine years after C.J. Chenier joined the band, his dad passed away. But Chenier had started taking a lead role long before that.

“When he got sick, man, he started letting me open the shows for him,” he said. “And sometimes he’d be so ill, I’d have to play almost a whole show. So (when he died), it was just a natural thing for us to continue. There was no other way but to keep going. We were red hot.”

Chenier took over officially in 1987 and he said he’s been on the road ever since.

Here’s something that’s interesting to consider: Having grown up in Texas with his mom, Chenier’s familiarity with Louisiana, birthplace of zydeco, is fairly limited.

He said he performs there regularly but he has never spent a significant amount of time there.

The man that the Boston Globe called “the crown prince of zydeco” is a Texan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Zydeco long ago expanded well beyond the confines of Louisiana, but it wasn’t always thus.

Chenier said that when he first joined his dad’s band, zydeco was a household word…just in an extremely limited number of households.

“He had a massive following in California and Oregon and up in Washington,” he said. “And nobody else was doing the traveling. He was the only one doing it at that time. But if you told people who were weren’t in the mix, ‘I play zydeco music,’ and they’d be like, ‘Zyde-what?’

“Nobody knew,” Chenier said. “Now everybody knows what zydeco is. The musicians went out pounding the pavement and the people got interested and started trying to figure out what it was. It’s the happiest music you can find.”

As C.J. Chenier’s renown grew, musicians like Paul Simon, John Mayall and the Gin Blossoms started asking him to collaborate with them.

“I did a few things,” he said. “It’s all fun.”

Chenier was at the center of some unexpected controversy a few years back when Mike Vital, a distant relative, sued him.

Vital claimed that C.J. Chenier is not Clifton Chenier’s biological son and, therefore, is not entitled to use his last name or to benefit from that last name.

Vital wanted documentation, which Chenier said he provided.

“It was all about greed,” Chenier said. “Somebody trying to be greedy. They tried to accuse me of fraud, basically. When I showed them proof of who I am, I haven’t heard from them for almost three years. In fact, I haven’t heard from them since two months after they filed their suit.

“Some people have ulterior motives,” he said. “They think they can get what you got. They’re just that type of person.”

Chenier said the upcoming concert will be his fourth or fifth performance in Fort Wayne.

“I love coming to Fort Wayne, man,” he said. “I love looking out at the people dancing at the Botanical Gardens and thinking about who is discovering zydeco for the first time.”

 

Emo Philips is what is known as a comic’s comic.

Regardless of his prominence in American pop culture at any given moment, Philips will always be admired by his fellow comedians.

In 2014, Patton Oswalt tweeted this about Philips: “I will NEVER, EVER, write funnier, darker, more disturbing, more inappropriate and 100 percent clean jokes than Emo Philips. Good God.”

Philips is the headliner at this year’s Let’s Fest, a four-day comedy festival happening at seven Fort Wayne venues.

It starts August 3.

Philips was cited on Nerdist founder Chris Hardwick’s list of the top ten living stand-up comedians and on the CineNation website as one of the top comics of all time.

In 2005, Philips was praised by Shipoffools.com for having the created the funniest religious joke of all time (It is a bit too long to be reproduced here).

Philips arrived on the national comedy scene in the mid-1980s with one of the stronger stage personas: a childlike man with a pageboy hairdo and a singsong voice who didn’t seem to be at all aware of how clever he was.

In a 2010 editorial in the British newspaper, The Guardian, Philips was described as a “pith artist.”

“He tells semi-surreal jokes so short and sharp that they make the audience jolt as well as laugh,” the publication opined. “(In the 1980s), Philips was often dubbed an alternative comedian, but his jokes are much cleverer, cleaner and funnier than that term suggests…His jokes are often informed by a sense of cosmic injustice that means all people are cursed with rotten luck. Rather than get angry about it, the Philips way is to coin cheery one-liners.”

Unlike other comics with strong stage personas (Bobcat Goldthwait, for example), Philips tries never to break character in public.

He agreed to an email interview because he likes to take some time crafting answers to questions.

Asked to cite the first joke he ever conceived, Philips responded: ‘I woke up this morning with a bloody nose. I thought, ‘How did this get into bed with me?’”

Philips, a Chicago native, said everyone found him funny as a kid. “It was quite upsetting,” he wrote.

Philips once described his stage character as “the default persona when one has no stage presence.”

He said his joke-crafting process was stubbornly old-fashioned for quite some time.

“Up till the 21st century, I wrote on a 1940’s cast-iron Royal typewriter,” he wrote. “It was not in good condition. If you examine my early gags, you’ll find that few contain the letter ‘j.’”

When on the hunt for new material, Philips said he basically tries to think of things that make him laugh. “Then, once that’s out of the way…” he added.

To young comics seeking advice, Philips recommends a 2009 posting on the Nerdist website by the aforementioned Hardwick about the late Bill Hicks’ Principles of Comedy.

“By referring them to it,” he wrote, “I teach them the most important lesson: to use their time wisely.”

A robust four-decade career in comedy means a lot of touring, of course. Philips compares touring to swimming.

“How fraught with worry and bother beforehand! How pleasurable once one is in!” he wrote.

If he has downtime in the cities he visits, Philips seeks out art museums.

“(I) try to guess what each painting or work of sculpture is about,” he wrote. “I then try to guess the title of the piece. I then look at the title, and read the description, if there is one, and see how close I came. I’m not great at it; I often guess before I have a right to, and miss a crucial detail, and then kick myself afterwards, as one kicks oneself for not correctly guessing the murderer in a whodunnit or the winner in an election.”

One thing Philips is not is a foodie.

“No offense to foodies, but I am the opposite of one,” he wrote. “For me, driving across town to dine at a special restaurant would be like driving across town to wash my hands in a special sink.”

When he’s not on tour, Philips does voiceover work (He has assayed such animated roles as Shannon the Bully on “Home Movies,” Dooper on “Slacker Cats,” Cuber on “Adventure Time,” and Dennis O’Bannon on “Welcome to the Wayne”).

He also pursues one hobby.

“My hobby – which, sadly, I get to indulge only when home in Los Angeles – is leading my own band, Emo & the Emo-Philiacs,” he wrote. “We specialize in tunes from the first half of the twentieth century. I play the recorder and sing, and am very happy to report that, as of our latest show two weeks ago, I have finally gotten the singing out of my system.”

Asked what he thought he’d be doing with his life if he wasn’t performing comedy, Philips responded: “That’d be like asking a butterfly what he’d be if he hadn’t become a butterfly. My childhood caterpillared me into it.”