Time Out New York called him “the funniest man alive”, New York Magazine believes he’s “the most brilliantly witty New Yorker since Dorothy Parker” and when critic Craig Seligman read him (over lunch) he “spewed a mouthful of pastrami across [his] desk” as he laughed.

The playwright, essayist, author, radio star and stand-up comedian David Sedaris started to really make people laugh back in 1992 when, on National Public Radio he recounted his experiences (later published as The Santa Land Diaries) as one of Santa’s elves during a Christmas job at Macy’s.

His collections of stories and autobiographical essays about his daily world, his odd jobs (New York apartment cleaner and volunteer at a mental hospital to name a few), his habits (smoking) and his wacky Greek-American family and upbringing in Raleigh, North Carolina, have become bestsellers.

Often anecdotal in nature and an embellished mix of fact and fiction (he admits that he is “prone to exaggeration”) his books have garnered a huge following in the States: there was Barrel Fever in 1994, Holidays on Ice in 1997, Naked in 1997 and Me Talk Pretty One Day in 2000. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim will hit US bookstores in June 2004.

His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s and Esquire . His live shows — delivered in his characteristic nasal voice with “deadpan creepiness”— completely sell out. He’s performed at Carnegie Hall, David Letterman has invited him on his show and there’s been talk for a while now about Wayne Wang (Smoke) making a movie of Talk Pretty.

On the other hand, plays, like The Talent Family, that he pens with his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, have been produced at La Mama , Lincoln Center , and The Drama Department in New York City. He’s won the Time Humorist of the Year award and became the third recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humour.

Turning personal to popular
In short, whatever Sedaris writes or talks about, he makes funny. He’s spent the last few years living a lot in France and so Talk Pretty includes anecdotes about his linguistic adventures and the habits of the French (“smoker’s paradise”) and what they think of Americans.

Ultimately though, his funniest material continues to come from his own family and relatives. He inherited a bit of Greek from his father (who was born in the US to Greek migrants) and since then, as he stated in an interview “the Greeks have...claimed me, so now I'm on these Greek-American radio programs and doing interviews for newspapers in Athens.”

But unlike his Greek-American peers making cinematic and literary headlines, Sedaris’ Greek jabs are nothing like Nia Vardalos’ Big Fat Greek Wedding, where humorous pokes at Greekness are more poignant than biting or Jeffrey Eugenides ’ more eloquent Greek-American hermaphrodite in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. Sedaris is straight and cutting: “The Greeks invented democracy and called it a day.”

The Greek grandmother is one of Sedaris’ most memorable characters. His own “Ya Ya” walks on her hands and knees to kiss a Greek Orthodox priest’s shoes. His mother’s protests against the arrival of her mother-in-law from “the old country” are not triumphant and “Ya Ya” isn’t deposited to a “nursing home” or “zoo” but rather comes to stay in the family home. The comedy it produces is brutal. “That might play back on Mount Olympus,” Sedaris has his mother shriek, “but in my house we don’t wash our underwear stockings in the toilet.”

In his stories, Sedaris is called “Greek”, “homo” or “Einstein” depending on the obsessions of the characters with whom he interacts. And while it is the friction caused between dysfunctional and different characters that drives his work, that brings out the bizarre in the mundane, Sedaris himself slips through any label.