I haven’t yet been invited to give a commencement address this spring and I’m okay with that. I am 81, an age that’s gotten a bad rap recently, and I’m not famous anymore, but nonetheless I do have things to say to the Class of ’24 and I come cheap and have my own gown if you’re unable to provide one.

I did a radio show for years whose name, if you rearrange the letters, spells “Pie Aroma in Microphone,” a show of wholesome humor and uplifting music, nothing satanic or hallucinatory and only gently satiric, and yet it did well in New York City, and New Yorkers curbed their irony when they came in the door and listened politely.

The show was inspired by an article I wrote for The New Yorker about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, and being published there rather than in Popular Mechanics or Good Housekeeping gave me a patina of sophistication that appealed to the elitists of public radio and they opened the temple doors to me and on many stations, “Pie Aroma in Microphone” followed the Metropolitan Opera broadcast, sort of like the tail wagging the Wagner. And my hero John Updike, back in the days of White Male Authorship, got me into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, one of only three humorists in the club, which looks darned good on my résumé. People from my hometown of Anoka, Minnesota, look at that and think, “Him? He didn’t even make National Honor Society in high school. He got a B minus in English and even that was generous.”