WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN SEDARIS
Storyteller and humorist David Sedaris began by “walking us through” his outfit: a pair of plaid culottes and a jacket that “looks like I lost a fight with a bear.” It did indeed consist of a lot of strips, like a wearable vertical blind. He then introduced the ASL interpreter Robert G. Lee, and tipped the audience off that he might be especially fun to watch since many of Sedaris’s stories would involve animals. Then he introduced his warm-up act Cindy House, former heroin addict and author of Mother Noise, a memoir of her struggle to tell her young son about her past. Warm us up she did, with a sweet story about texting her son, now a teenager, and barely responsive to her overtures of caring and support. “Texting your teenager is like dating someone who’s not that into you,” she remarked.
Then Sedaris himself returned to the stage and proceeded to offer an evening of laughter — some of it delighted, some of it rueful, some of it shocked — with his signature mix of wry misanthropy, cogent social commentary, and humane acceptance.
He described the online attacks he received after publishing an essay in which he recounted talking a friend into removing her mask in an airport at the point when few people were wearing masks anymore. People accused him of bullying, an accusation he dismissed — it’s not bullying to tease a friend, he said, and then commented, “If people are going to be furious, I might as well be my true self.” And then he announced that he did not like dogs. (I clapped.) But what he really meant (based on the accounts that followed) was that he did not like dog owners. He described people who allow their dogs to defecate in airports (multiple examples), or who bray about the fact that their dog is a rescue dog or claim they must protect their dog from “trauma” (a word that’s gotten out of hand, he said).
He offered stories of his photo safari to Kenya during which he refused to take photos, of a trip to a literary festival in Lahore, Pakistan, where he was startled by the lack of women in public places as well as the remarkably low price of a restaurant meal. That led him to suggest that Pakistan should be promoted as a vacation spot for “thrifty misogynists.” He told of his discovery of how to make small talk with people in his high-rise New York City apartment building by asking how long they had known their dentist.
He amused with his accounts of lessons on the Duolingo app, which he claimed taught would-be speakers of Japanese or German sentences such as “My uncle was a broken man” or “What will become of us if father dies” or “The man with small hands is my friend.”
Sedaris publishes regularly in the New Yorker magazine, and he read an essay that appeared in that magazine a couple of months ago. “How to Eat a Tire in a Year” is a tribute to his friend Dawn, his frequent walking and traveling companion, and suggests that the world’s population could be divided into two groups: those who would be able to eat a tire in a year by dividing it into 365 sections and then dividing each section into pill-sized pellets to be consumed in the course of each day and those who would leave the task until the last minute and be unable to complete it. David and Dawn smugly see themselves as among the first group.
This was followed by his reading of a selection of diary entries, including his advice to a teenager working on a college application essay (say you had a baby at the age of 14 and wrapped her up in a Princeton sweatshirt before you abandoned her) and his rewriting of an anodyne AI-generated essay “in the style of David Sedaris” to include gratuitous sex and violence.
All of this had the audience guffawing with shocked delight. I did notice, however, a handful of people who walked out before the show came to an end. Perhaps they had a train to catch or an early morning appointment. Perhaps they came without knowing what they were in for. Perhaps they didn’t understand that they had come to hear David Sedaris and simply weren’t prepared for the writer’s distinctive and brutally hilarious vision of himself — and all the rest of us.
An Evening with David Sedaris
presented by Celebrity Series of Boston
reviewed April 12, 2024, at Symphony Hall in Boston
for tour dates and cities, visit David Sedaris