There’s a puff quote on the back of this book saying “The older Sedaris gets, the funnier he gets”, and this is simply not true. His first couple books are fantastic — wholly original and hilarious.
But he’s plenty funny these days, too. It’s just that the pieces collected here are a bit samey — they’re (almost) all around 15 pages long, and he majority of them have been published in the magazines you’d expect (i.e., The New Yorker), and they’re tailored towards that sort of reader: They all have that kind of structure, and they’re all about the same sort of things.
There are a couple of harsher pieces here, and flipping to the colophon page shows that they haven’t been published anywhere before.
But I mean, Sedaris is still funny, and he’s a really good writer. I’m not complaining, really — I’ll keep buying his books until either he or I die.
Happy-Go-Lucky (2022) by David Sedaris (buy new, buy used, 4.17 on Goodreads)