Sedaris was one of three youngish humorists named David who enraptured the literary-adjacent world during the 1990s, the other two being David Eggers and David Foster Wallace. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of essays about the pandemic, aging, and the slow but inevitable death of his father, David Sedaris simultaneously asserts himself as the undisputed past master of this tone and captures its fundamental weakness, applying the style he has developed for the last 30 years to a subject matter for which it is almost eerily unsuited. The institutional tone in 21st-century humor is unequipped to deal with anything that matters.
fluent, voluble, and suspicious of sentiment in all but the most abbreviated expressions - but I also wish to levy the connotative assessment. I have selected this word for its denotative meaning - i.e. Nobody attends church anymore, but we all still have to go to the gym.Ībove all, it is glib. It is strongly influenced by camp, both in its use of self-deprecation - the voice of 21st-century humor is anxious and assumes that we are, too - and in its gleeful substitution of aesthetics for the discredited values of the past.
It is selectively irreverent, willing to make catty remarks about what people are wearing to the funeral but dead serious about the importance of, for example, voting for Joe Biden. If the idea of funny without jokes strikes you as impossible, I invite you to consider the dominant mode of prose humor for the last 30 years - the New Yorker stuff, the gossip-blog stuff, the read-aloud-on-NPR stuff, whose tone has so thoroughly suffused the upper middle class of print and web media that we don’t even recognize it as a tone anymore. In his short essay “How to Tell a Story,” Mark Twain describes the difference between humor and comedy: while comedy looks for laughs in inherently funny subjects and events, the humorous story “bubbles gently along.” Comedy is about jokes, in other words, while humor is about tone.
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