Review: "The Best of Me," David Sedaris

 

By Paul Carrier

American humorist David Sedaris has been described as the funniest man alive, a claim that certainly is debatable. If we limit ourselves to male writers, some might bestow that honor upon Calvin Trillin, Garrison Keillor or Andy Borowitz, for example.

Still, Sedaris has to be a finalist for the world's most humorous guy, as The Best of Me, a selection of his work, makes clear. Sedaris has made countless speaking appearances over the years, but he may be best known for his essays, which often purport to be autobiographical but seem to stretch the truth for comic effect.

The tone and subject matter of the pieces in this collection vary widely, alternating between fiction and something resembling nonfiction, but Sedaris’ skills always shine through, partly because he is wickedly judgmental.

Although The Best of Me has more than its share of laugh-out-loud anecdotes and observations, some of Sedaris’ material is more weighty and poignant, as when he writes about his much-loved but dysfunctional family.

Review: "Calypso," David Sedaris

By Paul Carrier

To describe David Sedaris as a funny guy is to belabor the obvious. So it comes as no surprise that his self-deprecating wit and biting sense of humor are on display once again in Calypso, his 11th collection of stories and essays.

Yet an undertone of sober reflection also permeates this slim volume, as Sedaris, now in his 60s, muses on some of the big and small changes that have helped to define his life. They range from the relatively mundane — relocating from France to Britain — to the momentous — the premature deaths of his mother and his sister, Tiffany, and his strained relationship with his elderly father.

Family, aging and mortality are recurring themes in Calypso. Soon, Sedaris writes, he and his sisters will be the same age their mother was “when she got cancer and was killed by it. Then we’ll be even older, which just seems wrong, against nature somehow.” Two pages later, Sedaris finds himself reflecting on Tiffany, who took her own life in 2013, only weeks shy of her 5oth birthday.

But not to worry. There’s more than enough snort-worthy material here to leaven the package. I don’t know if Sedaris would describe himself as a smirking curmudgeon, but that’s how he often comes across. He has a knack for blending the cynical and the movingly introspective, without making the pairing seem incongruous.

Some of the pieces in Calypso even take a comical look at the more absurd aspects of growing older.

When Sedaris first gets a Fitbit, he finds himself at an airport, waiting to catch a flight. Inspired by his new toy, he begins pacing to rack up steps “rather than doing what I normally do, which is to sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what.”

As people age, Sedaris suggests, they go bonkers, either as crazy dog people or as crazy diet people. Sedaris’ younger brother Paul, we are told, falls into the latter category.

Once overweight, the slimmed-down Paul now exercises fanatically and “has all but given up on solid food,” surviving instead on bizarre concoctions whipped up in his juicer by blending “kale, carrots, celery, (and) some kind of powder scraped off the knuckles of bees.” The unappealing result “comes out dung-colored and the texture of applesauce.”

Sedaris is known for his autobiographical essays, which tend to be classified as nonfiction, although they stretch credulity from time to time. Readers, or at least this one, are left with the impression that Sedaris loves to take a factual anecdote or incident and feverishly embellish it to the breaking point, if not beyond, all in the name of making what’s already funny even funnier.

When Sedaris visits Tokyo, for example, he ostensibly purchases countless pieces of funky clothing while binge shopping in bizarre retail outlets. Is Sedaris recounting actual events here? Or is he testing how much he can get away with by giving free rein to his imagination?

The author segues from one topic to the next with remarkable ease, sometimes covering so much turf over the course of a few breezy pages that it’s tempting to go back and dissect how so many seemingly unrelated topics somehow coalesce.

Musing about his Fitbit, as he does periodically in Calypso, Sedaris quickly slides in references to his fear of snakes, his obsession with picking up litter in the English countryside, the sight of a cow “with two feet sticking out of her” as she gives birth, his first kidney stone (New York, 1991) and the fact that he often finds condoms, KFC containers and Handy Wipes “in one of the spots that I patrol” as a litter fighter. “Do they eat fried chicken and then have sex,” he asks, “or is it the other way around?”

This collection even offers up a smattering of truly trivial trivia, such as the most often used words in France (connerie: bullshit) and America (awesome), and the horrendously hilarious insults Europeans have concocted to vex bad drivers and other foes.

Review: "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," David Sedaris

By Paul Carrier

With only one other David Sedaris book under my belt (the hilarious Holidays on Ice), I may not be in the best position to judge Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, a collection of monologues and essays, many of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker and other publications.

That being said, I didn’t enjoy this compilation as much, not because it lacks Sedaris’ delightfully offbeat sense of humor (there's some laugh-out-loud stuff here) but because this is an uneven assemblage. The hits here share space with a few near misses.

Sedaris is known for writing ostensibly autobiographical essays about his life, including his childhood in North Carolina; his time abroad in England, France, and elsewhere; his relationship with partner Hugh Hamrick; and his dyspeptic take on the antics of the boorish and baffling people he encounters in his travels.

In fact, Sedaris is at his best when he turns a jaundiced eye and a sardonic pen on folks who strike him as ill-mannered cretins. He is a peevish — some might say petty —  fellow, but that’s part of his appeal. Many readers are sure to share his take on the irritants that bedevil modern life, such as the slovenly dress code that has become the norm for traveling Americans.

“I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling,” Sedaris writes, “yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!’”

Sedaris doesn’t confine his biting assessments to his fellow Americans. He describes rural Britons as slobs who dump an obscene amount of litter along scenic roadways and in adjacent forests. He finds China to be a land plagued by truly horrendous, and avoidable, sanitation problems. As for Italy, Sedaris laments that the language barrier there had unfortunate consequences when he bought a train ticket to Brindisi.

“The man behind the counter offered me three options, and I guess I said yes to the one that meant “No seat for me, thank you. I would like to be packed as tightly as possible alongside people with no access to soap or running water.’”

Part of Sedaris’ appeal is his knack for finding links among disparate events and ruminations, which he packages so tidily that readers may find themselves wondering, in the end, how they got from A to Z in the course of a single essay. He also conjures up poignant images from time to time, most notably as a son who, even in adulthood, continues to crave the love of a less-than-supportive father.

Still, 13 pages devoted to Sedaris’ one-man anti-litter campaign in West Sussex, a county in the south of England, is at least a few pages too many. Another essay, on Sedaris’ growing frustration while stuck in line behind a boringly chatty customer at a coffee bar in a New Hampshire hotel, is shorter, but only mildly entertaining.

Yet Sedaris packs so much variety into Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls that reading it is something like catching a talented stand-up comedian at work. Some jokes may fall flat, but the audience doesn’t obsess over them because the guy on stage is sharp enough to quickly recover his footing with a better gag or a funnier anecdote.
 
Sedaris tosses in several entertaining and thought-provoking monologues that make no claim to being factual. In one such fictional tale, a homophonic man becomes so unglued when same-sex marriage is legalized in New York that he decides the world has completely gone to hell, so the rules governing acceptable behavior no longer apply to him or anyone else.

The narrator then murders his wife, his daughter and his mother-in-law, none of whom he liked all that much anyway. For good measure, he zips past a stopped school bus while it's unloading students, accidentally killing a kid — “most likely a gay one” —  who was crossing the street. Figuring he’ll be released from prison if the powers that be believe he's gay, he kisses his cell mate and concludes that "it's really not that bad," if you keep your eyes closed.

Over-the-top? Certainly. But how better to skewer senseless hatred and all-consuming phobias?

Review: "Holidays on Ice," David Sedaris

By Paul Carrier

Paging through David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice does not, in any way, call to mind Burl Ives crooning A Holly, Jolly Christmas.

As the title of this slim volume suggests, these darkly comic tales have a (sometimes tenuous) link to the holidays, particularly Christmas. But the black humor to be found in several of these essays bears no resemblance to the saccharine tripe that TV programmers foist upon us during our annual celebration of conspicuous consumption.

(Why, you ask, am I reviewing a collection of holiday-themed essays after the sappy season has come and gone? Holidays on Ice was a Christmas gift. So here we are.)

Holidays on Ice is largely devoid of restraint or gentility. It isn't subtle. But what it has in abundance is a wonderfully wicked mischievousness. These essays, some of which claim to be autobiographical, have an arch tone that leaves the reader laughing out loud - snorting, even - more often than not.

Perhaps the highlight is SantaLand Diaries, in which Sedaris recounts his purported exploits as a Christmas elf at Macy’s department store. Here, as elsewhere in this collection, Sedaris’ take-no-prisoners attitude is on display, along with his disdain for correctness, political or otherwise.

When Sedaris and the other elves learn rudimentary sign language to better communicate with deaf children, for example, one of Sedaris’ sisters, who can sign, decides to help him out with a few lessons of her own. The result? Sedaris can now tell the kiddos: “Santa has a tumor in his head the size of an olive. Maybe it will go away tomorrow but I don’t think so.”

Things come to a suitably bleak head on Christmas Eve, when Sedaris witnesses a fist fight between two mothers. A father labels Santa a faggot for refusing to sing a carol to his kid, a manager calls a customer a fucking bitch, and parents in long lines leave disposable diapers at the door to “Santa’s house.”

Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!! is a hilarious send up of those insufferable family letters that make the rounds at Christmas. Sedaris’ sister Lisa rescues a prostitute and brings her home in Dinah, the Christmas Whore. And a ridiculously pretentious newspaper critic pens scathingly cruel reviews of grade school Christmas pageants in Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol.

Christmas shoppers are sheep, Sedaris tells us in one essay, “stupid animals programmed by nature to mate and graze and bleat out their wishes to the obese, retired school principal who sat on his ass in the mall’s sorry-looking North Pole.”

Sedaris even visits a medical examiner’s office at Halloween and shares a few how-not-to-die tips with his readers: “never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating.”
 

There’s an occasional passage in Holidays on Ice that almost begins to approach something vaguely resembling merriness. But don’t worry. It’s just a passing illusion.

Burl Ives is nowhere in sight.