David Sedaris in June 2008. (Photo Courtesy of WBUR/Wikimedia Commons)
David Sedaris, bestselling author of “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Holidays On Ice” and most recently “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls,” visited Macky Auditorium Saturday for the second stop of his newly launched tour, which will conclude in Nashville this February.
Sedaris, known best for his humorous and provocative essays, attracted a large crowd. While the majority of these were 40-and-overs, there was a strong student showing as well – Sedaris’ appeal reaches across generations, his comedy somewhat more timeless than his wardrobe.
Not one for missing out on a laugh, Sedaris strutted on stage a few minutes after 8 p.m. in a pair of bizarrely wide shorts – think business gauchos – to the delight of his audience. Since Macky was almost completely full, even the timid laughter his gag elicited turned into an appreciable rumble.
He began the evening with a few jokes concerning, of all things, bone marrow donation. He remarked that “I’m on the waiting list to donate bone marrow” was probably a better pickup line than most. This decision would eventually make sense at the end of the night when he encouraged a now-restless crowd to sign up with “the bone marrow people” (the Love Hope Strength Organization), with whom Sedaris and his booksellers shared lobby space after the reading.
From this starting point Sedaris launched into a consistently engaging program of readings and occasional ad-libbed anecdotes. The topics for the evening ranged from classist conflicts at the airport to whether or not straight men ever share desserts with each other. The content he chose to perform reflected well on the tone of most of his essays – Sedaris expertly toes the line between levity and controversy, so that it’s hard to tell whether he’s peppering his commentary with humor or vice-versa.
For a large portion of the program, Sedaris read from an essay called “The Sea Section,” which detailed a few experiences he had with his partner and his family in a recently purchased seaside house in North Carolina. The house, it seems, was only named “The Sea Section” because Sedaris’ relatives turned down “The Conch Sucker.”
The essay concerned itself mostly with anecdotes about time spent in the quaint southern town with his family, baring details about Sedaris’ brother and father that might have seemed like too much information if he didn’t already make a living through writing about his personal experiences. He divulged the strange, painful-sounding condition of his father’s toes and his brother’s journey through weight loss, culminating in a liquid foods diet that led most of the Sedaris family to call him “the Juice-ster.” “The Sea Section” played a near-perfect balance between deep and hilarious, Sedaris’ voice maintaining that characteristic, intentionally underwhelmed deadpan throughout.
Perhaps the funniest part of the evening was when Sedaris transitioned into reading a few “diary entries” ranging from prolonged rants about an unpleasant woman on horseback to various haiku-length jokes. While some read like the jokes you might find on a popsicle stick – “I told Hugh yesterday that when I die I would like to be taken to the ice cream-atorium. There I would like a traditional sundae service” – others were irreverent monstrosities I will likely never repeat. Each flavor threw the audience into equally loud fits of mirth, a testament to Sedaris’ ability to switch effortlessly between registers.
Before taking questions, Sedaris closed out the evening with a book recommendation, a tradition he maintains on every tour. This time around, he suggested “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” by Ann Patchett. It’s available on Amazon but he implored his audience to buy it at a real-live bookstore, instead.
He answered three or four questions, one of which he left unanswered to instead encourage the audience to go and vote. “If you vote – I don’t care who you vote for – you are justified in feeling superior to people who didn’t vote,” he joked. Judging by most audience members’ willingness to wait in line for at least two hours to get their books signed, asking them to wait in line to vote on Tuesday seemed like a reasonable request.
Contact CU Independent Opinion Editor Lauren Thurman at lauren.thurman@colorado.edu.
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