A curmudgeon in a cassock: the weird, wonderful and hilarious world of David Sedaris

Ring out the bells, sound the trumpets and keep a firm hold onto your sides to stop them splitting – David Sedaris is back with a new collection of essays.

Looking a little ‘mother of the bride’ 

For those who aren’t familiar with his work, David Sedaris is a sort of crackpot doctor whose mission on earth is to inoculate the reader against the miseries of life by injecting humour into the banal, bleak or bizarre situations he seems to encounter every day.

No one is safe from Sedaris’s withering gaze. The late Queen, who he saw at a Buckingham Palace garden party, had ‘feet like hot dog buns’, while Pope Francis looked terribly ‘mother of the bride’ when he met him at a dinner for international comics held in the Vatican (just why his holiness organised this is unclear).

While the papal robes may not have impressed him, Sedaris does find time to buy a genuine priest’s cassock, floor-length and complete with 33 buttons. The bespectacled 69-year-old fell in love with this high-church costume because, apparently, it’s fantastically slimming. His only worry is a stranger may ask him for spiritual advice and he will have to say, ‘Oh sorry, I honestly just like the robe. It takes ten pounds off!’

Sedaris recounts the horrifying experience of getting married to his long-term boyfriend Hugh, ‘essentially a shotgun wedding’ orchestrated by his banker for purely financial reasons. (Sedaris is fabulously rich now and one presumes the nuptials might give Hugh some security.) When they were standing before the registrar both David and Hugh wore ‘the facial expressions you assume after learning that the doctor who’ll be checking your prostate decided to grow his nails out’. After a few formalities and a firm handshake in lieu of kissing in front of strangers, the couple left the courthouse and now pretend it never happened.

The Land and Its People is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

Naturally, for a professional curmudgeon, many aspects of modern wokeness infuriate him. He reminds the reader that he’s not queer but gay – ‘the difference is queer people are offended by everything’. Feebleness, he thinks, has become endemic because of over-praising children – ‘ask someone now if they have kids and they’re pretty much guaranteed to use the word amazing’. Sedaris wants to ask these parents, ‘Amazing because they discovered a cure for MS or can speak three words of Spanish?’

Beneath the tough comedic hide, there is a tender heart that beats throughout each of the essays. It’s touching when he writes about how much he adores Hugh, especially when he’s trimming the toenails David can’t reach anymore because of arthritis. Seeing the world through the eyes of David Sedaris is the perfect antidote for the problems of the world.