'Humorist' Sedaris OK with label, and cardigan

David Sedaris will regale a Little Rock audience with excerpts from his books and diaries Friday at Robinson Center Performance Hall.
David Sedaris will regale a Little Rock audience with excerpts from his books and diaries Friday at Robinson Center Performance Hall.

It's definitely safe to describe David Sedaris as a best-selling author. His books include Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice and several collections of essays, including Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames and Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.

But does he also consider himself a humorist, a satirist or a social commentator?

David Sedaris

8 p.m. Friday, Robinson Center Performance Hall, 426 W. Markham St. at Broadway, Little Rock. A book signing will follow.

Presenters: Celebrity Attractions, MagicSpace Entertainment

Sponsor: KUAR-FM, 89.1

Tickets: $28-$53

(501) 244-8800

ticketmaster.com; magicspace.net/litt…

"I used to reject the term humorist because I thought it was somebody who was old and wore a cardigan sweater," he says. "But now I'm old and I have a cardigan sweater. So I grew into the term. I'll accept it as a label. My hair is gray. So, yeah, I'm a humorist now."

Sedaris will regale an audience with readings from his books and diaries on a lecture tour stop at 8 p.m. Friday at Little Rock's Robinson Center Performance Hall.

He's on a lecture tour that started in late March, and precedes a book tour that starts in June for Theft by Finding, the first print collection of excerpts from four decades of his diaries that are the source of his autobiographical essays and much of his stage material. It's due out May 30.

"I go on two lecture tours a year, every fall and every spring, no matter what," he says. "So it's going to be a little bit weird, because I'm going on a lecture tour and then the book comes out a few weeks after the lecture tour ends."

His Little Rock audience will hear almost entirely new material. "I look at what I read the last time I was in Little Rock; I don't want to repeat myself," he says. "But even if it's something I wrote six months after I was [there], it's probably something I've probably read a hundred times and I'm really sick of it. So generally I read new things.

"Also I look at a map -- I look at towns that are nearby" where he has appeared in recent years. That includes recent appearances in Conway and Fayetteville.

"I always take all that into consideration," he adds. "I really cannot remember the last time I've gone to a city and read something that I've already read there. I think a lot of times the audience doesn't mind, but I think they look at me and say, 'Hasn't he done anything since he was last here?'"

And yes, as with most humorists, he gets requests -- Crumpet the Macy's Christmas Elf from The SantaLand Diaries, for example. Fulfilling such requests, though, is "always so weird, because I do it at the end of the evening. An hour and 20 minutes has already gone by; I'm not going to read something it takes 45 minutes to read."

Sedaris doesn't often get a lot of "off time." Between lecture and book tours, he's usually on the road for an extended period. After his U.S. book tour, for example, "I go on a German book tour, a Dutch book tour, a British book tour; Australia, I'm going there. So when a book comes out, it feels like it's two constant years of activity, because then the paperback comes out." And, of course, he says, by that time he has written another book.

Sedaris' pieces appear regularly in The New Yorker and he's a frequent contributor to public radio, including This American Life. He's also a playwright, collaborating with his sister, Amy Sedaris, under the name "The Talent Family."

"When my books come out in France, the reviews are along the lines of 'What's this? Why would somebody do this? Why would [anyone] write a story and the character has their name and is doing something that's not important? Where did that come from?'," he says. "And in the United States, you can always look to The New Yorker and can say. 'James Thurber. He wrote about things like that.' He's somebody who I think of."

Sedaris doesn't really think of having a place in the pantheon of humor writers. Comparisons to, say, Erma Bombeck don't really register. Or Dave Barry. "I don't get that much, either," he says. "But really, I never read much about myself. Maybe I get compared to those people all the time."

He tries out his material in smaller venues before springing it on bigger audiences.

"In Seattle and L.A., I was trying out things for the book, and reading things out loud in small 200-300-seat theaters. So I had the same size audience for a week. When you're on tour, some nights you have 700, some nights you have 3,200.

"I would read something out loud, and if there's [consistently] no response, it's just as likely I'd get rid of something if the response was, 'Oh my God, I feel so ashamed I just read that,' or if I seemed too desperate.

"A lot of times on the page I don't quite notice that. [But] hearing myself saying that out loud, before an audience, I turn different colors. If I turn red and hot, then that's usually a sign that it's probably good to get rid of that, or if it seems super dated.

"But I'm often surprised, too, at what people will laugh at. It's just OK, but if they really laugh at it, I'll think, hmmm. That doesn't mean I'll keep it. Sometimes I always wonder about them."

Style on 04/16/2017

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