David Sedaris got his start in comedy as Crumpet the Christmas elf, campily dancing attendance in Santa’s grotto at Macy’s department store while clad in green knickers and a spangled bonnet. As he recalls in his first book, Barrel Fever, his merriment with the squalling brats and their bossy mothers barely concealed his outrage.
No longer elfin, Sedaris has matured into a devilish imp who scourges human folly and filth. In his later books he listens to strangers apoplectically effing at each other in the street, visits “a mall with cancer” in Manila, where every shop is an excrescent tumour, and dodges buoyant turds at his local swimming pool. “Grotesque is a plus,” he announces when browsing in a Notting Hill antique shop, which prompts the owner to bring out a French rococo snuffbox carved in the shape of a hunchback straining over a bowel movement. As seen by Sedaris, the deformed, indecent, preposterously decorative figurine is the embodiment of our species.
