David Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure

An uproarious live evening with America’s most incisive humorist
The five uproarious pieces that comprise David Sedaris’s newest audio recording, Live For Your Listening Pleasure, were recorded in various U.S. cities — Denver, New York City, Durham, Los Angeles and Atlanta — during his latest tour. Though always a delight to read, Sedaris is undeniably in top form when performing in front of an audience. Impeccable timing, uncanny mimicry and facetious parentheticals add luster to the stories’ innate hilarity. And, like all truly great comics, Sedaris mines the quotidian for his quips.

Social critique is always the uniting factor in Sedaris’s writing, and Live For Your Listening Pleasure is no exception. The invasiveness of chatty hairdressers becomes surreal when the stylist is a baboon and her client a cat. But while the recording begins with this ludicrous fable, Sedaris quickly transitions into the realm of humans. There are the professors who, within an academic lecture, pronounce, preposterously, the word “Nicaragua” like a native; there are the French names Sedaris gives to his garden rabbits that translate into English as “moist” and “unemployment”; there is the Australian bird of prey to whom Sedaris is forced to feed raw duck and the woman dining nearby with a babydoll in her lap. We return stateside with reflections upon the giant big-box stores and the value-size boxes of condoms they sell — both so quintessentially American. Always wry and forever self-deprecating, Sedaris evokes for us the queasy image of himself, poised for an unattended reading at Costco, where to add insult to injury, he sits beneath a sign cautioning, “No pictures please.”

You’ll double over with laughter; you’ll nod in solemn agreement; you’ll wish that the recording never ended and you’ll play it all over again.