Why Aren’t You Laughing? David Sedaris reckons with his mother’s alcoholism.
Any week that we find two new David Sedaris essays is a good week. The funniest memoirs deal with old pain.
The author (rear) with his sister Lisa and their mother, Sharon Sedaris.
Sober, she was cheerful and charismatic, the kind of person who could—and would—talk to anyone. Unlike our father, who makes jokes no one understands and leaves his listeners baffled and anxious to get away, it was fun to hear what our mom might come out with. “I got them laughing” was a popular line in the stories she’d tell at the end of the day. The men who pumped her gas, the bank tellers, the receptionists at the dentist’s office. “I got them laughing.” Her specialty was the real-life story, perfected and condensed. These take work, and she’d go through half a dozen verbal drafts before getting one where she wanted it. In the course of the day, the line she wished she’d delivered in response to some question or comment—the zinger—would become the line she had delivered. “So I said to him, ‘Buddy, that’s why they invented the airplane.’ ”
Read Why aren’t you laughing? in the New Yorker.
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