Guy Noir
Encyclopedia
Guy Noir is a fictional
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

 private detective
Private investigator
A private investigator , private detective or inquiry agent, is a person who can be hired by individuals or groups to undertake investigatory law services. Private detectives/investigators often work for attorneys in civil cases. Many work for insurance companies to investigate suspicious claims...

 regularly featured on the public radio show A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion is a live radio variety show created and hosted by Garrison Keillor. The show runs on Saturdays from 5 to 7 p.m. Central Time, and usually originates from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, although it is frequently taken on the road...

. Played by Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor
Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion Gary Edward "Garrison" Keillor (born August 7, 1942) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, and radio...

, the character parodies the conventions of the pulp fiction
Pulp magazine
Pulp magazines , also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long...

 novel and the film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 genre. Guy Noir works on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building in a city that "knows how to keep its secrets", St. Paul, Minnesota.

Noir's Exploits

The first Guy Noir segments aired in 1995 and were heavy on tongue-twisters and other wordplay. In early episodes of the series, Guy and his "friend" Pete (Walter Bobbie
Walter Bobbie
Walter Bobbie is an American theatre director, choreographer, and occasional actor and dancer. Bobbie has directed both musicals and plays on Broadway and Off-Broadway, and was the Artistic Director of the New York City Center Encores! concert series...

) 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
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

's post-mid-term election speech. Occasionally, political agents use him for hatchet work.

For the portion of A Prairie Home Companions season that is performed outside of St. Paul, the setting of Noir's case usually involves the city that the program is visiting that week. In the same skit as the George W. Bush reference, Noir is flown to Hawaii
Hawaii
Hawaii is the newest of the 50 U.S. states , and is the only U.S. state made up entirely of islands. It is the northernmost island group in Polynesia, occupying most of an archipelago in the central Pacific Ocean, southwest of the continental United States, southeast of Japan, and northeast of...

 to look for a missing Minnesotan. That week, the show was broadcast from Hawaii.

Recurring characters in the skits include: Sugar (Sue Scott), a romantic interest; Jimmy (Tim Russell
Tim Russell
Tim Russell is an American radio announcer and voice actor in Minneapolis – Saint Paul. He is most widely known as one of the actors on the long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion...

), a bartender; and Wendell (Tom Keith
Tom Keith
Thomas Alan Keith was a radio personality who worked for Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was the engineer for Garrison Keillor when he began his early morning radio show from the St. John's University Collegeville studio...

), the boy who 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
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...

 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
Duluth, Minnesota
Duluth is a port city in the U.S. state of Minnesota and is the county seat of Saint Louis County. The fourth largest city in Minnesota, Duluth had a total population of 86,265 in the 2010 census. Duluth is also the second largest city that is located on Lake Superior after Thunder Bay, Ontario,...

. 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.

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.

and
She was tall and dark and so beautiful you wanted to just give her all your money right way and skip the preliminaries.

Noir in Popular Culture

A 2006 Guy Noir skit, in which some characters had a fictitious variation of Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome
Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder with onset in childhood, characterized by multiple physical tics and at least one vocal tic; these tics characteristically wax and wane...

 called "Broadway Tourette's", drew criticism from the Tourette Syndrome Association
Tourette Syndrome Association
The Tourette Syndrome Association , based in Bayside, New York, United States, is a non-profit voluntary organization and the only national health-related organization serving people with Tourette syndrome. It was founded in 1972 by five couples, parents of children with Tourette syndrome...

.

Noir is played in the 2006 film A Prairie Home Companion
A Prairie Home Companion (film)
A Prairie Home Companion is a 2006 ensemble comedy elegy directed by Robert Altman, and was his final film, released just five months before his death...

 by Kevin Kline
Kevin Kline
Kevin Delaney Kline is an American theatre, voice, film actor and comedian. He has won an Academy Award and two Tony Awards, and has been nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards and an Emmy Award.- Early life :...

. In the film, Guy's detective career is faltering, and he works as a security guard at a radio show to pay the bills.

External links

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