There’s a whole essay about his adventures traveling to more impoverished eastern European countries with his friend Patsy that, a few years ago may have been just about the shopping they attempted to do but now ends with a “you don’t know how good you have it” message. Once, while doing a crossword puzzle on an airplane, he did not immediately ask the Black woman reading the Bible next to him if she knew how to spell “Schenectady ” assuming she wouldn’t want to speak with him since he was a white man and clearly queer (he uses the term “queen”) and that she wouldn’t know how to spell it. During the Black Lives Matter unrest in 2020, he recalls his own biases. Part of this is Sedaris’, sometimes in hindsight, keen observations about Western society’s issues. Set in the past few years prior to, during, and after the coronavirus pandemic, this new book is reflective of so many things: his relationship with his siblings-particularly the most famous one, actress-comedian Amy Sedaris-of white privilege (and also, as Sedaris smartly puts it, Western) privilege, of wealth and what it means to be in long-term committed relationships. Happy-Go-Lucky, humorist David Sedaris’ latest work, finds a different-more somber-person than the man who is still dining out on his experiences battling Karens during his stint as a department store Christmas elf or who once wrote a gag-inducing paragraph about his brother training his Great Dane to eat his pug’s poop.

But, comedy-or at least humor-post #MeToo, George Floyd, or coronavirus? Yeah, there’s a glut of those.īut what does this mean for someone who makes a career out of humor writing of being the person we’re supposed to go to get our minds off of sexual assault or murdered and missing people of color or (because I’m writing this mere days after the Uvalde, Tx. No one will write anything about what laughter feels like after we’ve all endured Chris Hemsworth with a dad bod in Thor: Love and Thunder or stayed awake through the two-and-a-half-hour-long final episode of Stranger Things. You know a cultural event is a major cultural event when there are a gazillion think pieces asking how we find humor after it.

David sedaris happy go lucky review