Have you ever sat near someone on the subway or on a park bench who was laughing out loud at something he or she was reading? Did you change subway cars or move to a different bench thinking they were crazy? If you have, you don’t know David Sedaris.
Sedaris wields amazing power with his words. He has the potential to bring people to tears or, better yet, make them lose control of their bladders with his unique humor. True-life stories about his family and experiences growing up in Raleigh, N.C. are often interspersed with his views on city life, anecdotes from his numerous off-the-wall jobs and his eventful journeys abroad. His latest collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for nearly six months and continues in the tradition of his already successful Naked and Barrell Fever.
There was no doubt that at least several people left George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium last Friday with wet spots on the fronts of their pants after Sedaris spoke with Sarah Vowell, fellow humorist on NPR’s “This American Life.”
The atmosphere of the evening resembled a cross between a boring policy speech from a middle-level government official and a stand-up comedy routine, with the authors reading from a cadre of papers at a simple podium in the middle of the stage, accompanied by the sound of roaring laughter filling the hall at regular intervals. Yet it felt more as though Sedaris and Vowell were right there on the subway or park bench, talking or reading, relating their funny stories in a way so universal that it seems to touch everyone personally. The universality of their stories has greatly bolstered their popularity.
Both writers exhibited tremendously skilled delivery. Sedaris’ and Vowell’s backgrounds in radio taught them how to incorporate their voices into the artwork that is their writing. Sedaris’ slightly nerdy voice with a hint of a lisp (a topic he discusses in Me Talk Pretty) carried his pieces along lightly, while Vowell’s self-deprecating, biting sarcasm gave gravity to her words.
Although he made few mistakes over the course of the two-hour reading, when Sedaris did slip up he became visibly frustrated, changing his tone briefly, raising his hand and occasionally apologizing. Whether he was apologizing to the audience for interrupting what was supposed to be a seamless presentation, or to his work, for failing to give it the delivery it deserved is unclear. In any case, his concern with perfection in speech further highlighted the quality of his writing.
The highlight of the evening was Sedaris’ essay, “Six to Eight Black Men,” in which he describes the time he learned about Dutch Christmas traditions. He manages to take a situation that is already amusing in and of itself—he is told that the Dutch have a Santa who lives in Spain and takes a boat to the Netherlands on Christmas, accompanied by six to eight black men and who pretends to kick the children who are naughty before kidnapping them—and making it funnier by describing his reactions to it.
“I’m convinced that Santa doesn’t speak Spanish … and he certainly doesn’t eat tapas,” he claimed definitively. He later added, “Dutch parents really have a great bedtime story for their kids on Christmas Eve.”
Vowell, who just released her second collection of essays, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World, still showed some roughness around the edges. She had trouble keeping the audience’s attention with her shorter-form pieces, but her longer essays proved to be more engaging, even though they initially seemed to deal with serious, less than humorous subjects.
“I think of the Civil War every day,” she began in her opener that dealt with a trip to Gettysburg. “I can’t even use a cotton ball to remove my eye make-up without freaking about about slavery’s favorite cash crop.”
Although the pair’s reading could have come off as a contest, one trying to out-humor the other with their alternating stories, it instead turned out to be an evening of contrasting tones and subjects that complemented each other well. Sedaris’ and Vowell’s “performance” made the audience not only an audience to two people in an auditorium in Washington, D.C., but also an audience to their journeys through life and the funny way they see it.
