In years to come, I can tell the grandkids I was at the Royal Festival Hall the night Keir Starmer celebrated his landslide election victory there. Will I tell them that I was at a David Sedaris reading, and left hours before the Labour leader arrived? Reader, I may. Unlike other election night entertainments I’ve attended over the years, this audience with the American humorist unfolded without reference to political earthquakes beyond the venue’s doors. The only flicker of topicality found Sedaris reading from recent diary entries, the most up-to-date contending with Joe Biden’s dithering debate performance and the debased language of US political discourse.
Of boilerplate and cliche, Sedaris is a sworn enemy, and nothing could be further from banal public-realm speech than the spry and specific essays he performs for us. By now (Sedaris is 67), his readers and audiences know exactly what to expect of the North Carolina man, and get it in spades: demure slices of life contrasting our host’s fastidiousness and seeming civility with the rudeness and/or eccentricity he finds everywhere about him in his travels through America, the world – and many an airport in between.
If Sedaris’s world barely changes, the world changes around him – for all his imperviousness to the events of the day. I’m used to seeing comedians worry at so-called cancel culture, but hadn’t expected it to be an issue for a literary grandee of Sedaris’s standing. Apparently it is. Tonight he mentions – and makes light of – resistance to his use of the term “witch doctor” in a recent New Yorker essay. And refers repeatedly to the backlash against an incident described in his piece How to Eat a Tire in a Year, when he coerced a friend who was “super-cautious about Covid” to stop masking. (Sample reaction tweet: “This ableist POS … is a f*cking monster.”)
That kind of disproportion – between very mild offence and OTT reaction – would not look out of place in one of Sedaris’s stories, which often trade in his outsized indignation at the affront of his fellow citizens. The cigar smokers in his Monte Carlo hotel, say, or the woman who spills her water all over the gym floor, prompting Sedaris to long for his own electrocution, just to teach her a lesson. Not that the writer recognises any common cause with those miffed at his own conduct. Prompted in the post-show Q&A to consider the current over-sensitive climate, Sedaris concludes a not very reflective response with the words “I just don’t” – pause – “care”. Cue laughter and applause.
Fair enough, perhaps: after all how could Sedaris write, whatever could he say, if he worried about this stuff? His joke tonight about a rape whistle, for example, might not make it past his inner censor – and it’s one of the funniest in the show. Other fine pleasures here include a wistful essay about the now-dead friends still in his address book, ending with a droll story (the joke is on Sedaris’s parsimony) about his sister’s cancer diagnosis; and a choice routine, of which a standup would be envious, responding to a ChatGPT story written in the style of David Sedaris. Palpable loathing of everything ChatGPT stands for (boilerplate and cliche, again) brings out the “monster” in Sedaris here – and he’s all the funnier for it.