Controllable Laughter

By Breanne Boland July 15, 2004 Issue

There was a legion of David Sedaris fans at my college. In every writing class, it was routine for everyone to share their favorite writers the first time we met. The third or fourth person to speak always mentioned David Sedaris, and his name was always greeted by a hushed ooooh. “I love him,” someone would say. “I read Me Talk Pretty One Day on a flight home once, and I looked like a crazy person, I laughed so much,” another would announce. Much commiseration would follow, and the gist of it would be that David Sedaris essays were dangerous. They could not be read in public, not in a restaurant or on the subway, because you would laugh, loudly and in an uncouth manner, and you would look very, very creepy. And you would look like you were enjoying it.

Alas, with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, it seems that Sedaris has hit that block that many newly successful artists encounter. Struggling through everyday life, normal jobs and pains, they create a great work of art, a great album, a perfect novel, and because of it they become rich and famous. Subsequent works—developed in this new, relatively worry-free fantasyland provided without the bite of normal life—all flop. Musicians write songs about the difficulties of being on tour. Sedaris writes about the problems that come with making a living off of his family’s pain and dirty laundry. His comedy goldmine has always been his family and tales from his bizarre everyday life. Unfortunately, it’s hard to pluck gems from ordinary existence when you’ve become a celebrity among NPR listeners and are being profiled in the New York Times.

Sedaris no longer lives with his family in North Carolina or among eccentrics in New York City; in fact, he no longer lives in the United States. He currently lives in France with his boyfriend, Hugh. Sedaris digs a few anecdotes from his fish out of water experiences, but they produce at most a bemused smile, nothing compared to the stomach-aching full-body laughs that older essays like “You Can’t Kill the Rooster” and “SantaLand Diaries” caused.

It seems that most of the best Sedaris family tales have also been mined, and because of this, in some essays he shifts from striving for absolute hilarity to straining for poignancy. In the past, his strongest essays have straddled both, contrasting vulnerable moments with stinging, acidy conclusions, so when he goes for the tender and touching alone, it’s difficult to appreciate it for the confessional that it is, because you spend the whole time waiting for the punch line. Oh, his mom has to throw him out of the house because they’ve discovered he’s gay. How terrible. How… wait, he just leaves? She doesn’t say something biting that salvages the whole situation? Were they from any other writer, they might be just fine on their own, but Sedaris has a reputation, and the shift is jarring, particularly in a book where both the quotes on both the book flap and the back cover use the word wit repeatedly. We are not here to share his pain; we are here to laugh at it while he laughs too. So laugh, dammit.

His family is also acutely, terribly conscious of his need to glean new material from them. In “Repeat After Me,” he finds himself torn between wanting to comfort his sobbing sister Lisa and wanting to write down the details of it to use in an essay later. “If you ever, ever repeat that story,” she threatens, “I will never talk to you again.” And of course, he has repeated it, to everyone who bought the book, to everyone who will borrow the book. For the first time, reading these intimate accounts of their lives begins to feel wrong. We’re not spying, no, not exactly, but we’re accomplices to Sedaris’s questionable usage of his family. His family is aware that they’re not just talking to him anymore, and there’s a guardedness to them that defuses potentially comic situations. Personal essays can’t exactly be metafiction, but this is uncomfortably close.

If you’ve never read his books before, go get Naked or Me Talk Pretty One Day or Holidays on Ice before you turn to his most recent work. If you’re a Sedaris fan from way back, well, I give you the same advice. Take those well-read paperbacks off your shelf, flip through them, and relive when you first read them, stifling your snickers, turning red with the effort of not looking like an absolute nutcase, because alas, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim will allow you to look like any other respectable person who just happens to be reading in public. Despite all my complaints and warnings, that’s the last thing I ever wanted from a David Sedaris book.

Little, Brown and Company, 257 pages. Available at bookstores and local libraries.

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