David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and it is always great to hear him reading one of his stories on NPR, but lately I have felt he was running out of things to talk about. He has pretty much strip-mined his early years and his family for all the good stories and the life of a middle aged gay couple living in France was starting to wear a little thin. Luckily he has now turned to animal stories. Stories that would be benign if told with human characters, but are seriously funny when played out with animals. The illustrations by Ian Falconer are a great compliment to these short absurdest tales. I won't go into any of them in particular, but I will relay a joke that Sedaris told on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart that conveys the tone of the book.
A man answers the door and notices a snail on the stoop. The snail asks the man, "would you be interested in buy any life insurance?" The man reaches down, picks up the snail and flicks it out into the street. Two years later the man gets a knock on the door. When he answers he sees the snail, who looks up at him and says, "what the hell was that about?"
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment