And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on Their Craft

by Mike Sacks

  Becoming one of the most beloved humorists of his generation was not always in the cards for Sedaris. In the late eighties and early nineties, he was just another art-school graduate living in Chicago, trying to figure out what to do with his life. On a lark, he read some entries from his diary — which he'd been writing since 1977 — at an underground variety event called Milly's Orchid Show. Ira Glass, host at National Public Radio, happened to be in the audience, and he asked Sedaris if he had any Christmas-themed essays. As it turns out, Sedaris did: the soon-to-be-legendary “SantaLand Diaries.”

  The essay, which chronicles Sedaris's experience as a Christmas elf at Macy's in New York, was so popular when it first aired in 1992 that it almost single-handedly launched his celebrity status as a humor writer and radio personality. Sedaris became a regular on NPR, a relationship that continued when Glass started This American Life, in 1995. Sedaris began contributing to magazines, such as Harper's and Esquire, and not long thereafter he was signed by publisher Little, Brown, which led to his critically acclaimed and best-selling essay collections Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008).

  Sedaris has reached a level of success that few writers, much less comedy writers, ever achieve. Writers are not supposed to headline sold-out Carnegie Hall shows, or get invited by Late Show host David Letterman to perform a live reading in front of millions. Has that ever happened before — or since? But Sedaris has consistently broken the rules. When Time magazine named him Humorist of the Year in 2001, it was not just pointless backslapping found with most humor-based awards. Sedaris has a universal appeal that spans a staggering array of ages and sensibilities, cultures and continents. Visit one of his U.S. bookstore appearances and you're likely to encounter a fan base that includes suburban housewives as well as heavily-tattooed young urbanites. Travel overseas, and you're likely to see a similar crowd.

  There have been a few attempts to discredit Sedaris — a March 2007 exposé in The New Republic asserted that he fabricated or exaggerated many details in his stories — but he remains as popular as ever. The only person who may not buy into the David-Sedaris-as-comedy-superstar hype is Sedaris himself. The author, who now lives in England and France with his partner Hugh Hamrick had to be talked into quitting his day job as an apartment cleaner in the mid–nineties, apparently unimpressed with his skyrocketing book sales. Even today, he occasionally admits to missing the minimum-wage grunt work.

  Which may explain why, after all these years, Sedaris still connects so strongly with his audience.

  You began writing somewhat later in life. How old were you?

  I started writing in a diary when I was 20-years-old, but I didn't write a story until I was twenty-seven. I recently spoke to my first writing teacher about that story, and he said, “I remember that piece! That was such a great parody of Raymond Carver!”

  You know, it wasn't meant as a parody. I worked on that first story so hard that I just thought, Well, no one will be able to tell how heavily influenced I am by Raymond Carver. But if there had been a Raymond Carver –parody contest, there's no doubt I could have submitted this story.

  Do you remember what it was about?

  It was kind of based on my own life at the time. I had taken a road trip across the country with my boyfriend, and we stayed in a motel. That part of the story was true — the other part was made up. I wrote about my boyfriend visiting his parents, which didn't happen.

  This first writing teacher had suggested that I go to graduate school. But something inside me thought, No, it's better that I just start writing. That's sort of my job as a writer, isn't it? Just to write?

  Maybe it's better that you never did earn an M.F.A.

  Any kind of graduate school scared me. I wouldn't have had the nerve to go to an Iowa Writers' Workshop. I wouldn't have had the confidence. Instead I went to art school [at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago], which was kind of perfect. You had to take a certain number of liberal-arts credits, and you had to take some English, and the teachers were very, very good. They had a lot to give. None of the other students wanted what they had to give, but I really wanted it — so it was like I had my own private tutors.

  What exactly did you want?

  By the time I got to art school, I was much more affected by the things that I read than by what I saw. If I were to go to a museum, I might look at a painting and think, god, I wish I owned that! Where would I put it in my apartment? What if I owned it and then sold it? I could take that money, and I could buy that painting over there. I wasn't moved by the paintings in the artistic sense.

  On the other hand, I also became a reader around this time, which is so important for a writer. If I read a story in The Atlantic, I would be in a daze afterward. It just meant so much to me. When I later taught writing at the Art Institute, I could very easily spot the students who never read. Their stories would be shit. I would point to their work and then to a published work. I'd ask, “Do you see a difference between these two things?” A lot of students couldn't see the difference. For them, there was no hope.

  Where did this sudden interest in reading and writing come from? It just suddenly appeared when you hit your twenties?

  It just came one day. When I was in high school, I would read the assigned books, but it never meant much. I remember having to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I hated it. I had to force myself through that book — just awful.

  Years later, when I was picking apples in the Northwest, I found myself with time on my hands. There was no entertainment. Absolutely none. I was just living in these fruit camps and I was constantly working — that was it. And it was at this point that I started to read Kurt Vonnegut and other authors. If I liked a book, I'd look at what author blurbed it, and I'd go and read their book. One book led to another, which led to another, which led to another.

  I think that it was helpful for me that I dropped out of college at nineteen and took some time off from school. I had gone to Western Carolina for a year, and I then made it through two-thirds of a year at Kent State. I ultimately left college, and I didn't come back for seven years. So when I finally returned to school, I was a lot older than the other undergraduates. I had had some experience by that point, and I think that helped with the writing.

  To be honest, though, I can't read any of my early work now. Actually, I can't even read what I wrote ten years ago, I'm so embarrassed by it.

  Ten years ago? Does that include your book Naked?

  Oh, yeah.

  What about it bothers you?

  Just overwritten, you know. It's too densely written. It's trying too hard. The way that the sentences are put down on paper just bothers me.

  I was lazy in certain ways. Years ago I wrote a story about my French teacher [“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” from the eponymous 2000 book]. I described how she threw chalk at her students. She used to get up in our faces and mock us. I wrote a story about her, but it never occurred to me that she would actually read it. Someone at the French school read the story when it was published in Esquire and showed it to the teacher — and it became my worst nightmare.

  I left some details out of the story, because it was easier for me, and less work. I really did like this teacher; all of the students liked her. Even though she threw chalk, she did care about us. But it was much easier to turn her into a monster. She more easily fit into what people's ideas of what a French teacher would be like. To have made her human would have been more complicated for me, and more difficult. It would have just contradicted most readers' ideas about French people. It was easier to make her a cliché — it was less work.

  What was her reaction?

  She felt betrayed and really hurt. I cringe every time I think about it. If I could take it back, I would. She contacted me, because the school was giving her trouble. So, I had to write a letter to the head of the school and say that s
he was a really good teacher and I was just kidding and so on.

  I don't even go into that neighborhood anymore, I'm so afraid of running into her. And if I did run into her, she'd have every right to spit in my face.

  I used to exaggerate a lot more than I needed to. So when I needed readers to believe me, they didn't. Again, it was easier.

  Specifically, what do you mean by “exaggerate”?

  I guess that's what I meant by “trying too hard.” Just this feeling that every character in a book, every little character that I ran across in my life, had to be of equal size and importance to each of the other characters.

  Can you give me an example?

  I wrote a story called “The Incomplete Quad” [Naked]. I did hitchhike from Ohio to North Carolina with a quadriplegic. But did the quadriplegic ask my father for his belt? No.

  So, just little things like that. And if I had to write that story again, I would not exaggerate so much.

  The word “exaggerate” might be the one that bothers certain critics.

  In the great scheme of things, the way I exaggerate in a story is the way I exaggerate in life. It's no different. That's just the person I am and always have been.

  I'm reading a book now called Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander, who's such a good writer. The book is very funny. There's a scene in which the main character is walking with his family to synagogue on a Saturday afternoon, and the character describes a brown Impala passing them.

  After I read this description, I imagined that some readers might ask, “How did the author remember that it was an Impala? And how did he remember it was brown?” There are people to whom that's a big question. Now, me personally, I don't give a fuck. I don't care if the car was brown, I don't care if the car was an Impala, I don't even care if it really happened. It's a good story that I'm caught up in. I just don't tend to think in that way.

  If the author were to write, “I think the car passed us, but I don't remember what it looked like …,” well, you can only write that so many times before the reader or listener is going to think, What is all this?

  It's like telling a story to friends and saying, “God, what's that person's name? I don't remember that person's name … shit! I just don't remember his name! Anyway, so I introduced him to, Oh damn it! She's the one who works at the movie theater ….” You can't hold an audience by telling a story like that.

  But readers just seem obsessed with that now.

  To be fair to readers, your last three books before When Engulfed in Flames have been labeled “essays” or “memoir,” and not “fiction” or “humor.” They also tend to be placed in the memoir section of bookstores.

  I want nothing to be labeled on the back of my books. But a publisher always wants a label so people will know where to find it in a bookstore. Not that it does any good. My book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim was found in some stores in the humor section, next to the collections of Cathy cartoons. Or, even worse, in the gay-and-lesbian section, beside the books about sensual massage and arranging your gay wedding.

  Whether you want your books to be labeled or not, they still aren't being labeled as “fiction” or even “humor.”

  Not in America — but elsewhere. In Germany, they're known just as “fiction.” In Germany, it's very simple: I wrote a book. That's it. “Did you read the book?” It just becomes “a book.”

  When I do interviews in Germany, journalists ask me, “How did you come up with the character of David?” And I say, “It's me.” “Well, how did you come up with the character of the brother Paul?” And I say, “I have a brother named Paul, and that's him.” “Why did you decide to set the stories in North Carolina?” “Well, that's where I'm from.”

  In your first book, Barrel Fever, there were two sections: “Stories” and “Essays.” Why can't your current stories be labeled as such?

  It's marketing. I have nothing to do with it. I think if I had to choose any label, and if I had to choose the placement in a bookstore, I would choose “essays.” But I suppose some readers might feel that “essays” are too dry — that they would just be about ideas and not about people.

  A reporter [Alex Heard] wrote an article in The New Republic [March 19, 2007] about how I supposedly make up things. Now, to research this article, Alex went to North Carolina and talked with my father and to some other people I had written about.

  There was one story I had written [“Go Carolina,” Me Talk Pretty One Day] where I described a speech-therapy class in elementary school as hypothetically being labeled FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. From what I understand, Alex talked to my former principal and asked, “Did you round up homosexuals and send them to speech class?”

  I wrote that as a joke. I don't think it ever occurred to me that someone would take it seriously.

  You weren't happy with that article, I take it?

  I never read the whole thing. My oldest sister, Lisa, called and read part of it out loud to me.

  The reporter made a few accusations: One was that the dialogue in your work seems a little too perfect. He also claimed that you might invent some characters out of whole cloth — or at least their personalities — such as the character Dusty at the upstate-New York nudist resort you wrote about in the story “Naked.”

  Just because someone has Internet doesn't make them a fucking detective. I mean, just because they decided to fact-check my stories doesn't mean they're right.

  This reporter asked one of the owners if Dusty was really crabby, which is what I wrote. Well, the owner was one of Dusty's friends. What else is she going to say? It's their friend! If you ask someone, “Is your friend really crabby?,” they're probably going to answer, “Our friend's not crabby.”

  The reporter also asked about this midget guitar teacher I wrote about it in Me Talk Pretty One Day [“Giant Dreams, Midget Abilities”]. The specific complaint was that I described the teacher's guitar as being red — but it was really brown.

  If I remember correctly, the article was more concerned with your giving this midget guitar teacher a fake name, “Mister Mancini,” and then making him out to be a homophobe — where, in reality, he might not have been anti-gay.

  Yes, but this reporter didn't talk to this guitar teacher. “Mister Mancini” is dead. The reporter, from what I understand, only talked with a student who also took lessons from “Mister Mancini.” I never said he was a bad guitar teacher. He was good. What I implied was that I was a bad student. Most of that story was true. The big things were true. Was every word of it true? I don't have a tape recorder. I don't remember every word that was said to me when I was like eight or even when I was twenty. There are older stories that if you told me to now rewrite, I would rewrite slightly differently. New information is coming into my head that might not have been there ten, twelve years ago. I have to make these stories work, and I have to make them funny. Memoir is the last place you should ever look for the truth.

  Would that hold true even for James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces?

  I'm sorry, but I can't understand why people would be upset about that. At the beginning of the book, he basically writes, “I'm a fucked-up alcoholic.” And now readers say, “That fucked-up alcoholic lied to us!”

  Well, that's what fucked-up alcoholics do! He's as much of an asshole at the end of the book as he is at the beginning! It wasn't like, “Oh, I quit drinking and now I'm a wonderful person.”

  I also think Frey's book was originally labeled as fiction but then labeled “memoir,” for marketing purposes. Now, I've been writing fiction lately — these little stories about animals. And what I've found is that audiences listen in a different way when they believe what you're telling them is real. There's just something about reality that makes readers or listeners think, If I had the time, if I just didn't have this job, I could write a book about my life — and that would be me up there reading out loud to an audience. But I've got this job, see.

  Reality is more effective.


  Anyway, it was bound to happen.

  What was bound to happen?

  Somebody was bound to say, “Okay, we're going to fact-check this story of yours, and we're going to fact-check this anecdote and this name and that detail.”

  The New Republic also implied that because you're now writing for The New Yorker, and being fact-checked to their notoriously exacting standards, you no longer feel you can get away with some of your crazier details.

  I definitely don't insert as many crazy details. And, in a way, that's good. Most of the time, the truth is so unbelievable that adding to it only makes readers think, Wait a minute — okay, I don't believe this anymore. If a reader is stopped by that, well, then you've got a problem.

  But I have no problem with fact-checkers. In the case of The New Yorker, the fact-checkers work with me and not against me. They're not sneaking around behind my back and calling my elementary-school principal. It's done in a different spirit.

  But to be fact-checked too much … well, sometimes that ruins the humor. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about my family collecting art [“Suitable for Framing,” February 27, 2006]. I had a line about a painting costing as much as the average person pays in car insurance. The fact-checker asked, “How much does the painting cost?” I told him, and he called back and said, “That's more than the average person pays.”

  And I said, “Okay. Then insert, ‘The average epileptic.’” He called back and said, “You'd have to change that to ‘epileptics in Connecticut,’ because Connecticut has the highest rate of insurance for epileptics.”