American humorists often make a Faustian bargain with their personal lives. After “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Philip Roth became the punch line to a thousand and one masturbation jokes. After “Saturday Night Live,” Steve Martin could scarcely walk the streets without being told he is a wild-and-crazy guy.
David Sedaris isn’t nearly as lewd as Roth, or as silly as Martin, but when he gets on stage, chances are people think they know him too. And for good reason. Over the past 10 years, Sedaris has spun one amusing tale after another about growing up gay in North Carolina, the son of a chain-smoking mother and a father who loved the idea of an honest day’s work.
Not surprisingly, the Sedaris clan forms the vivid, aching center of his most recent collection of essays, “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” a former No. 1 New York Times best seller just released in paperback.
I recently spoke to Sedaris over the phone from Paris, where he spends time when not making people split a gut laughing. As it turns out, there’s a great deal of craft to being funny. And one of his greatest achievements is keeping that hidden from us.
Q: I just noticed you’ll be on the road in a different city for almost two months. Is that par for the course?
A: I tend to be on the road about five months out the year, yes.
Q: Do you notice any difference culturally between what people expect out of a reading between, say, America and other countries?
A: Well, the first time I went to Germany I went with the guy who translated my book. We would show up somewhere, and I would say, “How long would this take? And he’d say “a bottle.” And he then drank an entire fifth of whiskey during the reading. He read for 3 1/2 hours.
Q: When you go on tour, I understand you sometimes read new material, often diaries. Does this help you revise?
A: Yes, of course. On the tour I just returned from, I started with nine stories – and I’d read them out loud, and a couple of them I thought, “I’ll just throw those away.” Others I was able to improve. It helps when the editor asks me to cut something, if I can say, “Well, for a fact, that gets my biggest laugh.”
Q: A lot of your stories come out of memory or your family life. Do you ever worry you will run out of material?
A: No, often Ira Glass (at “This American Life”) will have a show and it will be about a particular theme, and he’ll ask me, do you have something about this or that? And I will recall something. Initially, the obvious things of my life jumped out: hitchhiking with a quadriplegic, that was one of the first things, just because it was so hard to believe, and then there are smaller things. Oftentimes, I just need an assignment.
Q: Are you working on anything right now?
A: Right now I have to write something about libraries, for the ALA (American Library Association). So I’m writing about how my mom used to take us and drop us off at the local branch. On one of these days, I went into the bathroom and I walked in on two men having sex. And that’s something I had never seen before in life. There were no books about homosexuals at the time, remember. So every time I felt alone with this feeling, I’d think, “Oh, but there are those two guys from the library, too.” It was probably the best thing I ever learned at the library.
Q: I guess we’ll have to see if the ALA shares that feeling. Does your family ever get embarrassed by anything you write?
A: Well, it’s not like they don’t know I’m going to publish it. I often show them. But one thing no one in my family ever banked on was being so widely known. My older sister goes to a party now, and people say, “I know all about you.” And they don’t know her. … It doesn’t bother me, I signed up for this. But my brothers and sisters. …
Q: The way you tell stories about your family seems so casual, but judging by the selections you put in your recent anthology (“Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules”), your influences are pretty literary.
A: I think some people read humorists and they don’t assume you made a decision – that you chose one word over another for a specific reason. But the way I look at it, if people come out to hear me, I don’t really care. If I am looking for a book to read, though, I’ll probably choose something like these stories by Flannery O’Connor or Patricia Highsmith or Francine Prose. I’d rather read something that leaves me creepy and shaken up – rather than laughing.
Q: It’s interesting, because aside from Prose, both of these writers were writing at times when certain things couldn’t be said. Are there things you don’t write about?
A: Well, I don’t write about sex – that would be embarrassing to me, the rest of it I can do. Something I’ve discovered is that if something really embarrassing happened to you, the same thing happened to 70 percent of the world.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
