THE WIT AND THE HUMID:
AN EVENING WITH DAVID SEDARIS

An expert in turning the mundane into something paramount and inevitably humorous, David Sedaris uplifted an immense audience at Wolf Trap’s cavernous Filene Center on July 19.

Best known for his biting humor and biographical essays, Sedaris – American author, humorist, playwright, and radio contributor – has been tickling audiences’ funny bones for decades after gaining national recognition in 1992 when NPR broadcast his essay, “Santaland Diaries.”

As someone who’s read and/or listened to most of his books and seen him perform twice before, last night’s material was mostly new. One of his essays, he confessed, had been getting last-minute edits only the day before.

Wolf Trap was on what Sedaris quipped as his “lobster tour,” with northern Virginia being the sole departure for not being famous for serving lobster. He had previously been to places like Cape Cod.

His self-effacing demeanor contrasted with his bawdy and oftentimes surprising descriptions of people and his experiences is a recipe for hilarity. Last night was no exception.

Sedaris’ humble persona was in full display when he invited a woman, Kelly Wood, whom he had met briefly on tour, to serve as his opening act. He explained that he meets people from time to time who write and would like to perform, and he invites them to do so as part of his program. Wood’s humor, similar to Sedaris’s, was often self-deprecating, with a positive spin.

Sedaris’s essays meander from one topic to the next, but always run full circle by the end with a common theme woven throughout them. A travel essay he titled “The Land and Its People” described a precarious horseback ride up a volcano in Guatemala with a couple he sometimes travels with, who are much more adventurous than he. On a trip with them to Fiji, he had the opportunity to learn that he hates snorkeling, and would much rather look at colorful fish in his dentist office’s aquarium. On a solo excursion to Panama, for which to cross off another country on his bucket list, he spent a day eating five snow cones to avoid crippling loneliness that crept up on him after a few short hours. When his life partner, Hugh, asked him to describe Panama, besides the snow cones, he answered that it was humid.

In another essay, “We All Fall Down,” he described how he slipped on spilled coffee and fell coming out of an elevator, after a woman on the elevator had insisted he exit first. Had she not been so persistent in letting him out first, she would have been the one flailing on the floor, he told us. 

Within this essay, Sedaris described in detail the days before fame when he worked as a house cleaner in New York City, working for an older gay gentleman called Bart. (Sedaris came out of the closet long ago and often writes about his relationship with his partner, Hugh.) Bart, these days, would be framed as a sexual workplace harasser, but back in the 80s, when he insisted on “tickling” Sedaris and putting a vacuum hose on his organ, it was more like being harassed by a child, he explained.

In another essay, that appeared in The New Yorker in 2024, called “Goodyear,” Sedaris gave us a bird’s-eye glimpse into his longtime friendship with a woman named Dawn. Dawn is a no-nonsense type whom David dated in his early years at Kent State and who subsequently forgave him for being gay. She often accompanies him on his book tours, and they walk so much together that sometimes their toenails fall off, he told us.

Sedaris took off on a tangent to relay the story about how, in Portland, Oregon, on one of his book tour stops, he noticed four drug addicts snorting fentanyl that they were hiding in a baby carriage. One of their two unleashed dogs ran up and bit him in the leg, to which the druggies offered no sympathy. Sedaris then proceeded to try to elicit sympathy from people whose books he was signing later that night, who expressed empathy for the drug users or the dogs, but not for him. Exacerbated, he told us that even watching the scene in The Wizard of Oz, when he was a child, when the town meanie was taking Toto away in her basket “to be destroyed” after Toto bit her, and Dorothy was sobbing, he was always on the side of Miss Gulch.

Sedaris ended the evening with snippets from his diaries and questions from the audience. When asked what other profession he would be in had he not become a famous author, he said he would still be working for Bart.

Before and after the show, Sedaris welcomed fans and signed their newly purchased books – something he is known for reveling in, and from which he gets some of his material.

As ever, Sedaris’s wry, self-lacerating wit and knack for finding absurdity in loneliness, aging, and awkward social encounters made for a hilariously human evening. Whether describing a botched vacation or a bite from a fentanyl fiend’s dog, he reminds us how ridiculous—and oddly beautiful—life can be. Even drenched in D.C. humidity, the crowd left lighter. Whatever comes next for Sedaris, let’s hope it includes another stop in Virginia—lobsters or no.