Happy-Go-Lucky, David Sedaris, author and narrator
David Sedaris can talk about anything and make it funny. Nothing is off limits. Sometimes, it might take the listener a few moments to catch his meaning, but soon a smile will appear, and as his message sinks in, the more profound meaning of each essay will, as well.
Regardless of the topic, regardless of his language, regardless of his approach, regardless of the sexual innuendos, he never disappoints. His anecdotal stories, reminiscing about his life and family, will simply touch the heart of every reader. He has the capacity to speak about the unspeakable, and he makes it tolerable and funny. He allows the reader to laugh at ideas that are not funny at first, homelessness, the pandemic, dying and lying, and as he explores those topics, he allows the reader to laugh at their own faults and their own problems. He makes even the most difficult ideas to discuss, palatable. He reminds us that we are all human, and encourages us to once again talk about ideas openly, as he defies a world that has become fraught with divisive issues and “wokeness”. Even his simplest stories have secondary subtle inferences that take us deeper into ideas about the way we live and interact.
With his deadpan presentation, he even laughs at himself. He examines his relationship with Hugh, his partner of decades, with his sisters and his friends, and then with his father and mother, and the reader can’t help but be reminded of their own similar moments of joy or despair with their friends and family. As he reduces each story to its basic meaning, he makes all of us laugh at our own frailties and our own need to sometimes make things larger than life, to exaggerate our pain or our success to make ourselves feel better or to assuage our guilt. He allows us to laugh at our own shortcomings as we laugh at his, as he reveals his experiences.
Sedaris puts everything into perspective. He examines funerals, homelessness, bathrooms and crime. He examines rudeness, politics, disease, drug addiction and suicide. He seems to understand our innermost feelings, and he lays them bare for us to examine as well. We can suddenly easily laugh at our own faults, at our own memories, good and bad, at our pain and our joy, even when bittersweet or excruciating experiences. He gives everything he talks about the same weight so that the wearing of a required mask on a plane, or getting a Covid vaccine, or traveling with Patsy through Eastern Europe on vacation, or performing for an audience, after the hiatus of the pandemic, are equally important as stories about his own fears of life threatening illness or revealing his feelings about his mother and father’s passing. The mundane and the tragic are equally reduced to lightness. We go in one end of the tunnel with him, fearful and then come out the other end, laughing.
From guns to aging, from medical problems to nursing homes, from marriage and homosexuality to politics and education, Sedaris manages each subject equally well. Even when he injects his personal politics into the narrative, it is never offensive. David Sedaris takes us on a merry ride and forces us to laugh at life’s inequities and to examine our warts and foibles without shame and without guilt. He is a true comedian, an art that seemed to die with “wokeness”, but he has resurrected it, once again, and enables us to laugh.