Guy Noir

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Guy Noir is a fictional private detective regularly featured on the public radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Played by Garrison Keillor, the character parodies the conventions of the pulp fiction novel and the film noir genre. Guy Noir works on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building in a city that "knows how to keep its secrets", presumably St. Paul, Minnesota.

[edit] Noir's Exploits

In early episodes of the series, Guy and his "friend" Pete (Walter Bobbie) would often get into fights and end up shooting each other. Both died many times. However, Pete appears to have died off for good.

Nowadays, Noir is a down-on-his-luck detective, who ends up taking odd jobs to get by, such as finding missing poodles. Thrown in with these plots tend to be references to current events. For example, in Nov. 2006, while waiting for a case, Noir contents himself by listening to parts of George W. Bush's post-mid-term election speech. Occasionally, political agents use him for hatchet work.

For the portion of A Prairie Home Companion's season that is performed outside of St. Paul, the setting of Noir's case usually involves the city in which the program is visiting during the week. In the same skit as the George W. Bush reference, Noir is flown to Hawaii to look for a missing Minnesotan. That week, the show was in Hawaii as well.

Recurring characters in the skits include Guy Noir; Sugar (Sue Scott), a romantic interest; Jimmy (Tim Russell), a bartender; and Wendell (Tom Keith), the boy that works at the deli around the corner. Wendell's nasally pubescent voice and BLT sandwiches are always there for Noir, though his character is minor.

Noir always seems to run into a beautiful, mysterious woman during the skits, part of the play on film noir movies. Jazzy saxophone music is played as Noir describes the beauty, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example:

She was tall, blonde, in jeans that looked sprayed on and a T-shirt so tight I could study her bone structure. I could see she wasn't from Duluth. There were no chinstrap marks on her neck, her hair hadn't been deformed by stocking caps, she didn't have that roll of fat around her middle—her midriff was as tight as the cap on a pickle jar.[1]

and

She was tall and long-legged and her blonde hair hung down sort of like what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote the Moonlight sonata. She wore a knit sweater and jeans so tight it looked as if she'd been poured into them and forgot to say When. When she moved, she seemed to undulate under her clothes in ways that took a man's mind off the state of the economy.[2]

[edit] Noir in Popular Culture

A 2006 Guy Noir skit in which a couple of characters had a fictitious variation of Tourette syndrome called "Broadway Tourette's", prompted a press release from the Tourette Syndrome Association. TSA on PHC

Noir is played in the 2006 film A Prairie Home Companion by Kevin Kline. In the film, Guy's detective career is faltering, and to pay the bills Guy is working security at the radio show which is the center of the film.