2023-08-31 03:12:41
“Oh, lewd jokes… when, if ever, will your time come again?” asks David Sedaris, in Little Bites, one of his two new books. In the case of the US best-selling author, you can still find them among humorous observations of life that can certainly have thought-provoking backgrounds. The 66-year-old will be reading in a double conference with Frank Goosen in Vienna’s Gartenbaukino on September 11 and will also be bringing along the second new release, “Please smile!”.
Sedaris, born in New York, living in England and France in between, writer, essayist, gifted reader, radio employee and voluntary street garbage collector shows once again that humor can sometimes cross the line that actually represents the dividing line to political correctness. He would have liked to have immortalized all the jokes he was told while traveling in “Kleine Happen”, “but in times like these my publisher would hardly have survived the expected huge flood of hate mail,” writes Sedaris. Fans still get their money’s worth.
“Kleine Happen” is the continuation of the collected diary entries of the master of exaggeration and weird humor. You’ll find people on public transport on the phone loudly disclosing their private lives, rats and mice, a woman who tried to resuscitate her cat, TV shows called 101 Objects Removed from the Body, and a dog who suffers from alcoholism and Alzheimer’s. Sedaris comments on this in his dry, pointed way, and he doesn’t hold back when it comes to impressions in foreign countries.
But far from pure slapstick: Sedaris also reflects on the unpleasant things in life, such as his father’s physical decline or killing sprees in the USA. Politics is not left out either, Donald Trump and Brexit were dominant topics for a long time in the period from 2003 to 2020 (when the entries come from). And of course Covid – “Please Smile!” says: “The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than nine hundred thousand people have died to date and I wasn’t allowed to choose a single one of them.”
If you read both books, you will come across one or the other repetition. While “Kleine Happen” serves up diary entries in – just – small bites, Sedaris processes many an event from it for “Bitte Smile!” to essays. In this narrower volume, the author proves that he can also get to the heart of serious topics. His contribution to his father’s death gets under your skin and makes you think. But he also generally succeeds in the latter, even if you occasionally laugh out loud (and quickly put your hand in front of your mouth so that nobody notices that you find one or the other rudeness funny).
(SERVICE – David Sedaris: “Kleine Happen” and “Please Smile!”, translated by Georg Deggerich, Karl Blessing Verlag, bound, 656 or 288 pages, 27.50 euros or 25.50 euros. www.gartenbaukino.at)
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