In years to come, I can tell the grandkids I was at the Royal Festival Hall the night Keir Starmer celebrated his landslide election victory there. Will I tell them that I was at a David Sedaris reading, and left hours before the Labour leader arrived? Reader, I may. Unlike other election night entertainments I’ve attended over the years, this audience with the American humorist unfolded without reference to political earthquakes beyond the venue’s doors. The only flicker of topicality found Sedaris reading from recent diary entries, the most up-to-date contending with Joe Biden’s dithering debate performance and the debased language of US political discourse.
Of boilerplate and cliche, Sedaris is a sworn enemy, and nothing could be further from banal public-realm speech than the spry and specific essays he performs for us. By now (Sedaris is 67), his readers and audiences know exactly what to expect of the North Carolina man, and get it in spades: demure slices of life contrasting our host’s fastidiousness and seeming civility with the rudeness and/or eccentricity he finds everywhere about him in his travels through America, the world – and many an airport in between.
