![]() ![]() At an autograph session in California, a customer bustles to the front of the long queue, claiming that as a senior citizen she’s entitled to priority. Yet it’s only on the silent page that he defames them: the whore and the hag remain unscathed while Sedaris seethes. He refers to her as “the whore”, while another guest who joins her to coo over the “fur babies” she has left at home is “a jism-soaked hag”. ![]() At breakfast in a Washington hotel, he watches a woman set a plate of bacon and eggs on the carpet to feed her guzzling terrier. Though Sedaris may want his words to hurt, even kill, they often rebound. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of autobiographical sketches, he broods about the cosmic injustice of Covid-19: noting that a million Americans died in the pandemic, he fumes that he didn’t get to choose a single one of them. His recent volume of diaries, A Carnival of Snackery, surveys a panorama of “war and calamity – natural disaster, mass migration, racial strife” and asks whether humour can make these afflictions endurable. All the same, this feisty fellow has undertaken to set the world to rights through comedy. Sedaris presents himself as a damaged specimen, scarred by a cantankerous father and an alcoholic mother, hen-pecked by four domineering sisters, additionally suffering from a lisp, a nervous tic and the usual addictions. Tragedy has no monopoly of mortality comedy may be a better guide to living with the certainty of extinction ![]()
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