Few authors could label a book-reading session as comedy and sell out five nights at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Yet David Sedaris can, and the event – a reading from his stories, articles and diaries, followed by a Q&A – comfortably holds its own against all the other standups on the fringe.
At times, Sedaris's writing blurs into live comedy. His story about being harangued by a sexist taxi driver would fit neatly into an observational comic's routine. The article he wrote for the New Yorker about language instruction tapes makes comic capital – of an unusually sophisticated variety – out of national stereotypes. And, reading from his journal, Sedaris also cracks a few jokes, one of which ("What did Cinderella say when she got to the ball?") is dirtier than anything I've heard on a standup stage this year.
Sedaris can get away with that, of course, because he radiates meekness and civility; these qualities contrast with the extreme eccentricities of the world he observes. He's like an American Alan Bennett, in that his own fastidiousness becomes the joke, as per the taxi encounter, or his diary entry about waiting interminably in a coffee-bar queue.
But the highlight is a spoof politician's speech, in which a Rick Perry-alike Republican insists he isn't running for president. It lays bare the egotism of all that hotline-to-God rhetoric, and is crammed with good jokes, like the one where his character blames his unmarried status on abortion; this prevented "the woman who was meant for me" being born in the first place.
Meanwhile, the language-tapes essay takes the comedy of inappropriate phrases ("We don't live here, we wanted mineral water") and spins them into something touching: a hymn to our flailing effort to communicate across cultures, to look up sweet nothings in our phrasebooks and whisper them speculatively through the dark.
