Here's what I learned while listening to this audio book: I only like Guy Noir in very small doses. The last hour or so I mostly just half-listened and tried to figure out what I'd be listening to next.

I've got [b:Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon|589819|Pontoon A Novel of Lake Wobegon|Garrison Keillor|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327944283s/589819.jpg|1055423] which I grabbed from Audible, too. I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it much more since I'm a fan of Lake Wobegon stories. ( )

This audio production is a mixed bag. The presentation is wonderful, but the content? Not so much. Some parts are really funny, but there are just not enough of them. The plot is thin, but then so is Noir. (That’s an inside joke.) Some of the gross content could have been left out. (You want a tip? Don’t listen to it while you are eating.) The best part by far is the background organ music. Garrison Keillor is always entertaining, but this tale was a bit of a disappointment. ( )

This book is hilarious and I laughed out loud numerous times. It's a great parody of noir and this is a recurring radio character of Garrison Keillor's put in print. If you need a good laugh, read this book.

Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny by Garrison Keillor is silly and ridiculous. I picked it up because my wife and I can't help laughing at the author's Guy Noir stories on the radio show Prairie Home Companion. If you have the same problem, then you'll probably enjoy this book.

It's a caper involving a tape worm diet pill (!) and plenty of gangsters and pretty women and snapshots of our lives from a special bizarre angle lens. "She was tall and blonde, except she'd dyed the roots brunette, an original touch." Another's sensuous sighing into a phone was a "sussuration, like the wind in the silvery cottonwoods by a burbling brook flowing through the whispering prairie grasses by a long two-track road somewhere in Nebraska, not that I've been there myself but I read Willa Cather once when I was dating an English major named Leslye who was, in fact, from Lincoln, Nebraska, and I believe 'sussuration' was the word Willa used."

Guy's a private eye, of course, and clients often have unusual projects for him, like the one who had "finally finished reading Moby-Dick after ten years and had forgotten what the book was about and could I help?" There are plenty of noir (small n) descriptions, like the bad guy Bogus Brothers whose scarred faces looked like "they'd been pounding fence posts with their foreheads" and who smelled "like old gym socks sprayed with cheap cologne." There are bad puns ("Someday my prints will come"), and Keystone Kops interludes, like the romantic get-together ruined by Guy's overenthusiastic attempts to multitask while piloting a canoe. The author also manages to poke fun at Prairie Home Companion, which has been turned into a Spanish language show to boost the ratings, and himself, as the displaced host that Guy pities. Interspersed throughout are the show's trademark jabs at Minnesota, Minneapolis and St. Paul. It also finds room for many more references to farts and sex than you'd hear on the radio show.

If life seems somber at the moment, you might pick this one up and remind yourself how ridiculous we all are. ( )