Wry Slicer

By Walter Kirn

The word suggests cardigan sweaters," says David Sedaris. The word is humorist. He doesn't like it. It's not as bad as funnyman, but it's close. "The humor section," he whines into the phone, speaking long distance from Paris, where he has been living because he's a smoker and so are most Parisians, "is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons."

Sedaris' work deserves better, and it has been getting it. The acclaim began in 1992 when Sedaris read aloud on NPR from The SantaLand Diaries, a prickly extended sketch about working at Macy's as a Christmas elf. A book contract for a collection of essays followed. In Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever and Naked, Sedaris found a persona and a groove as a chain-smoking, movie-obsessed, gay misfit who got dark laughs from his mother's bout with cancer, from a painful sojourn at a nudist colony and from his fumbled sexual awakening at summer camp. "What are you," screams a counselor in I Like Guys, "a bunch of goddamned faggots who can't make your beds?" Sedaris writes, "I giggled out loud at his stupidity. If anyone knew how to make a bed, it was a faggot."

The books became best sellers, and Sedaris (who also writes plays with his sister Amy under a shared nom de plume, The Talent Family) set out on a stop-start, never-ending reading tour that made him comic literature's equivalent of the Rolling Stones. His work continues to be featured on NPR, and this month Me Talk Pretty One Day, the fourth installment in Sedaris' ongoing autobiography, will be awarded the James Thurber Prize, the national book award for humor. Pretty good for a writer whose idea of fun is "sociological problems and medical mishaps."

Sedaris' usual target is himself--vulnerable, vain, afflicted with bad habits and perpetually defending his sacred right to self-destruct in peace. Compared with him, Woody Allen is a rock of psychological stability. In one of his best essays, A Plague of Tics, Sedaris recounts his obsessive-compulsive youth as a ritual footstep counter and doorknob toucher. Unlike the urban neurotics of the Allen school, he's a boy from the suburbs whose pH balance has gone acidic. Sedaris is gloriously bratty. Current events and politics don't interest him; he's a born consumer with no regrets, whose highest concerns are his wardrobe and his weight.

Part of the thrill of reading his tales of family life as one of six children is constantly wondering, Can that possibly be true? Does his father really hoard expired foodstuffs and eat them rotten? Is his brother Paul truly the profane white trash Sedaris describes? Could his mother have actually been that surly? Where other memoir writers, even the funny ones, slink to the sentimental, Sedaris heads the other way. And yet he portrays these characters with unjudging sympathy. He's tender about them.

The humor in Sedaris is transgressive, but it never feels contrived to be so. It's his legitimate, warped view of his legitimate, warped life. There is nothing archetypal about Sedaris, nothing broad. While it's easy to think of Dave Barry as an especially funny version of a guy you might know, it's hard to imagine knowing anyone like David Sedaris.