An older, wryer, possibly wiser David Sedaris
There’s a difference between a humorist and a satirist and it comes down to intent: is the writer out to barb someone else? Punch down? Include themselves in the joke? Is life itself the joke?
David Sedaris has always been a humorist, but he has a fierce devotion to painting the truest picture of his surroundings—at least true to himself. It’s his “code,” if you will. He will depict people’s physical peculiarities or ridiculous beliefs in ways that make you laugh out loud while reading him on elevators, MRTs, or alone in a café. But he also gets around to painting in some other corners of each person, until you see that person as human; all too human.
The essay “Goodyear” from his latest collection, The Land and Its People, for instance, centers around the writer’s book-reading road trip with his old college friend, Dawn, and his relationship with her. They kill time in Colorado one hot afternoon speculating how each of them would go about eating an entire Goodyear rubber tire within a year, if they were forced to—like, if the world depended on it. Dawn says she would cut hers into 365 pieces and make each one pill-sized so she could eat the allotted serving each day; Sedaris concurs. They each have a respect for people who do things methodically to survive, rather than waiting for the deadline day to come. “It’s like ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper,’” Sedaris shrugs, pointing out how some people are worthless procrastinators.
Later, Sedaris fills us in on some Dawn backstory:
During the height of the pandemic, a woman spat on Dawn.
“We were in the grocery store and I hadn’t done anything to her,” she told me. “I guess she didn’t like that I had a mask on.” One of Dawn’s lungs collapsed when she was in her late fifties, so she was super cautious about Covid—kept her face covered long after everyone else had returned to normal. We were in Chicago together, at O’Hare, in the spring of 2022 when I told her she needed to take it off.
“But—” she said.
“Let it go,” I told her. “Everyone else has.”
I felt like a director coercing an actress to unhook her bra for a sex scene. “Come on,” I said. “You can do this. Start by just lowering it to your chin.”
She took off her mask, and then, of course, immediately got Covid—a bad case, too. All my fault, but she’s never held it against me
That’s classic Sedaris. Humans bonding over absurd scenarios, and the writer catching it all as if in an aquarium fish net—then injecting some poignant detail that fills in character a bit more. He deploys those details like tiny recurring motifs in a Chopin prelude again and again in his latest collection, The Land and Its People, and it shows that a sexagenarian David Sedaris is no less sharp, witty, and skillful than the guy whose first digressive road trip essays appeared in Naked 30 years ago. The road is the story, and the people are its narrators.
My wife and I sat down with Sedaris in a Greenbelt café about 20 years back. He was on a book tour at the time, but of course he was also absorbing stories from people, left and right, strangers everywhere, from Wowowee to Bruno’s, where he got a haircut, to Jollibee. (Later he signed my Sedaris book “To Scott – A Champ,” with a scrawled drawing of a towering Jollibee burger.) It’s not quite that Sedaris is a people person; maybe it’s that he needs a constant infusion of oddities, like some people need to take insulin.
His essays cover his ongoing married life with Hugh, and the book opens with a piece on physical frailties, and you wonder at how Sedaris can dart from cruel-seeming barbs to injecting just the slightest butterfly wisps of poignancy, even mortality, into his prose—while never once breaking the comic timing.
Whether he stays in the lane of truth or fiction has never bothered Sedaris the writer. In Manila, he put it this way: “I guess I always thought of things as, like, the truth run through a story mill. You know, like the truth is one thing, but the entertaining truth is another.”
Sedaris has little truck with cellphone technology. Refuses to take a single photo with his phone even while on safari, for God’s sake, and in the essay “My Cousin Melvin,” he confronts ChatGPT. A friend sends him a short essay he’d commanded AI to write “in the funny style of David Sedaris.” The writer Sedaris promptly rewrites this ChatGPT-driven essay into something that no AI could ever conjure up in its wildest imaginings, with increasingly horrible, graphic details. Take that, AI!
There’s a wryer, more reflective tone in The Land and Its People. A reckoning with mortality—his father’s, his mother’s, his own—but also the many people who still exist in his phone contacts even though they’ve passed. Or a childhood friendship he spends an essay exploring (“Friends”) that ends with that former pal dying of cancer, and Sedaris pondering his aging partner asleep in a chair while watching Danish crime dramas—not passing up the opportunity to “eff with him” a little by gently clipping several clothespins to his resting head. Here, Sedaris considers the ways people have entered our lives, changed them, left a mark behind that leaves us diminished when they pass away.
There are those who find Sedaris grouchier, snarkier, possibly even more conservative these days. I’m not so sure he’s changed much. He is himself, reacting to the changes that whip around all of us nowadays. At least his craft hasn’t changed much. And that is a very good thing.
