Beauty isn’t worth thinking about; what’s important is your mind. You don’t want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.

Keillor’s quip contrasts outward grooming with inward cultivation. The first sentence dismisses beauty as a primary object of concern, redirecting attention to intellect and character (“your mind”). The punchline—“a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head”—uses comic exaggeration to argue that expensive polish cannot compensate for a lack of substance. It also satirizes consumer culture’s tendency to treat appearance as a shortcut to status. The underlying moral is not anti-style so much as pro-proportion: invest in education, judgment, and curiosity so that any external refinement has something real to express.