Life's Pleasures Quote by Garrison Keillor

Keillor’s line works because it dresses up a gawking impulse in the respectable clothing of “observation.” The simile is comic on impact: a bikini and a loaded pistol share basically nothing, which is why the comparison snaps your attention into place. It’s not just sexual attraction; it’s the mind’s involuntary fixation, framed as a safety hazard. That’s the trick: he turns desire into something like civic anxiety, making the speaker sound less lustful and more beleaguered by human nature.

The subtext is where it gets thornier. “There’s nothing wrong with them” is a preemptive alibi, a rhetorical handwash that claims moral neutrality while still centering the woman’s body as a disruptive object. The bikini-clad girl isn’t granted interiority; she’s recast as an item placed in a domestic scene, “on your coffee table,” like decor that accidentally became a threat. The joke depends on a familiar male viewpoint: the world delivers temptations, and men heroically struggle not to stare. It’s funny because it’s recognizable, but it’s also a neat way of outsourcing responsibility.

Context matters: Keillor’s persona traded in Midwestern propriety and wry, public-radio restraint, often teasing the gap between what polite people say and what they think. Here, that tension is the engine. The line’s comedy comes from presenting libido as both ordinary and embarrassing, then inflating it into mortal danger. The exaggeration is the punchline; the worldview underneath it is the tell.