Sedaris gets laughs from ‘burgh crowd

Like the intense spotlight he was standing under, David Sedaris showed no mercy.

On the… Like the intense spotlight he was standing under, David Sedaris showed no mercy.

On the subject of his family, he was relentless.

About his partner, Hugh, he was uncompromising.

And when speaking about himself, he was undeniably harsh.

But when all of these things were delivered with Sedaris’ trademark deadpan face and slightly nasal voice, in the context of the rest of his stories, the result was something that most would call hilarious.

Sedaris spoke Tuesday night to a soldout crowd at the Byham Theatre in a reading sponsored by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Sedaris first attained popularity in the early ’90s with his “Santaland Diaries” monologues that he read on NPR, and the claim that he was an apartment cleaner in New York City.

Since then he has come a long way, being called by the Washington Post “one of America’s most prickly, and most delicious, young comic talents.”

That is not a distinction to sneeze at. And even though he will unabashedly claim that attention is precisely what he is looking for – when asked where his humor came from he replied, simply, that was what he had to do in order to win his mother’s attention when he was a child – he clearly has not let all of the recognition get to his head.

He and his family are the subjects of much of his writing. Sedaris summed up his loved ones in a short, sweet sentence.

“We were the kind of family whose TV was so hot that you needed oven mitts to turn it off,” Sedaris said.

This was from a story titled “Full House,” which told of some of Sedaris’ youthful wonder: the fact that other kids had real bedtimes, the unconscious insanity displayed by the mother of a neighbor, and at the naked bodies of his stripped-down poker-playing peers.

“When you were watching and desiring,” Sedaris said and then paused for half a beat, not looking up, “things came up.”

Sedaris lives in Paris with his partner, Hugh, now, and the subject of one of his short stories was a dinner party where he and Hugh had an argument over a prosthetic hand.

In the story, Sedaris lamented the lack of volunteer jobs in France and then complained about the one he finally found: waiting in a small room with a fake-handed man in the subway to help blind people on and off the trains.

“It wasn’t my fault that no people showed up,” Sedaris said when Hugh downplayed the actual working aspect of his job.

But it was the material the hand was made of that was the real subject of the argument. Hugh claimed it was plastic, and Sedaris claimed it was rubber. Neither moved an inch, and when Hugh asked how Sedaris knew that the hand was rubber, Sedaris was ready with a reply.

“Is everything not held to your nose plastic?” Sedaris asked. “Is that the new rule now?”

In the question and answer session that followed his reading, the two most obvious questions came up. Concerning the date, Sedaris was asked about past April Fools’ Day jokes.

“Normally all my April Fools’ jokes are catastrophe related. Like picking up the phone when Hugh is in the room and saying ‘Omigod … when?” Sedaris said.

Sedaris was also asked about Iraq.

“Ira Glass asked me to write about Iraq and I tried my best to get out of it,” Sedaris said, commenting that he did not feel like he was the best man for the job.

He then discussed the negative perceptions that the French have of America as a result of the war in Iraq.

“This is not just a matter of opinion. If you live in Europe, [George W.] Bush does not come across well. If you live here he might make a certain sense,” Sedaris said. “But the French all say the same thing: They understand the difference between the American president and the American people.”

When asked about his next book, Sedaris presented a few possibilities, including something about India. Even though he said India scares him, Sedaris said he “might take a bus tour across the country with British seniors.”