The Dark Soul of the Family

     Sedaris' short stories share the common theme of exposing the dark underside of human nature and family life in America, an oppressive blanket of guilt and suffering which can only be overcome by humor.

     While on a tour of the Anne Frank house, David Sedaris remodels the kitchen and the attic in his head, elated that he has finally found his dream home after having buyer's remorse about his most recent apartment in Paris. In the middle of this wonderfully irreverent moment (one of many stories in which Sedaris jokes about otherwise off-limit topics), he spots a quote from Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi: “A single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way. If we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.” Sedaris follows this quote with his own reflection:

He did not specify that we would not be able to live in her house, but it was definitely implied, and it effectively squashed any fantasy of ownership. … I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing [turned in the Frank family], and caught my reflection staring back at me. Then, beyond that, across the way, I saw the most beautiful apartment. (Sedaris 187)

     This humorous self-reflection summarizes the variety of themes in this collection. Sedaris frequently delves deep into his own soul to bare its darkest thoughts, unafraid to acknowledge that human nature frequently causes us to do some pretty terrible things, like gorging oneself on chocolate to avoid sharing with the friendly neighbors (12). He reveals the dark belly of a consumer-society, in which sex lives are reignited by expensive purchases, homes are filled with creepy knickknacks, a college student dies with a bearskin rug in her trunk, and no matter how much wealth or stuff people own, we are “disappointed by how little pleasure they brought” (69). Sedaris rejects his own family, whether it's his father's clothes and mannerisms or lifestyle or his brother's redneck baby-raising, but at the same time embraces them. He reminds us that every person has a dark side, every relationship has its dark moments, and every family is flawed. Although, it may be the other way around: that the average person's life is actually filled to the brim with sadness and disappointment, while the moments of sunshine are found only in humor. Sedaris' strength is that he is able to tell jokes even about taboo topics such as the Holocaust, slavery, abortion, and pedophilia.

     In “Hejira,” Sedaris recounts the time he was kicked out his house for being gay (except he doesn't know the reason for a few months). Outside of his sisters' apartment building, a stoned Sedaris and his sobbing mother sit in the car, and Sedaris wonders what passersby think: “Did they see us as just another crying mother and her stoned gay son, sitting in a station wagon and listening to a call-in show about birds, or did they imagine, for just one moment, that we might be special?” (90). Sedaris has another moment in “Repeat After Me,” later in the timeline, when his sister breaks down in the car after telling an embarrassing (and morbid) tale:

She reached the inevitable conclusion and just as I started to laugh, she put her head against the steering wheel and fell apart. It wasn't the gentle flow of tears you might release when recalling an isolated action or event, but the violent explosion that comes when you realize that all such events are connected, forming an endless chain or guilt and suffering. (155)

Is this not the summary, again, of Sedaris' entire project? His family stories become the vehicle for exposing the “endless chain of guilt and suffering” in every human life, in his family and in others'. There are far too many examples to list all of them here.

     For Sedaris, only two cathartic elements overcome this pain: the first is the dark humor found in these tales; and the second is the act of sharing these stories with the world. Sedaris feels lingering guilt, sarcastically connecting his own exposing-naked of his family members to the turning in of Anne Frank's family, but like his OCD compulsions, even when a family member asks him to promise not to tell, he can't resist. “Repeat After Me” ends with Sedaris' painting of a strange picture: he gets out of bed in the middle of the night and repeats slowly, for hours, the words “Forgive me” to his sister's parrot (156). Sedaris is quick to indict himself for his crimes against his family, quick to reveal the darkest parts of their natures. And even the storytelling becomes a plea for forgiveness for the story's own existence, contrition and absolution and penance rolled into one.

Sedaris Knows How To Tell a Story

Mark Twain argued that in writing humorously, what matters is not the content of the story but rather the manner in which it is delivered. A humorist must maintain an air of gravity and disinterestedness while paying careful attention to pacing. His prescribed formula had several key elements, all of which we see at play in David Sedaris’ 2004 collection of autobiographical essays, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Employing a sharp and dry self-deprecating humor, Sedaris crafts twenty-two tales that embody the unique American art of the humorous story.

Part of the high art of a humorous story is ability of the author to string together incongruities and absurdities “in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way” while presuming to remain “innocently unaware that they are absurdities” (Twain, 241). Sedaris does exactly this in “Possession,” an essay in which he decides Anne Frank’s historic hiding place would be the perfect apartment to call home. He writes: “The entire building would have been impractical and far too expensive, but the part where Anne Frank and her family had lived … was exactly the right size and adorable, which is something they never tell you” (184). He goes on to casually describe her kitchen as an “eat-in with two windows,” and calls the fireplace “the focal point” of the family’s sitting room (185). To reduce the home of a beloved child hero senselessly killed as part of the greatest atrocity in modern history to a series of potential design improvements is preposterous, but Sedaris does so with utter gravity, creating a juxtaposition that results in hilarity.

The twenty-two essays are littered with humorous “nubs” (to borrow Twain’s language), acting as punch lines delivered without fanfare. Sedaris tells a joke as if simply stating a passing observation. In “The Girl Next Door,” for example, he describes an eyebrow-less nine year old as having a face “like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons” (107). This creates a comical image for the reader but is expressed “apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud,” commanding from the audience a level of attention to detail and nuance (Twain, 241).

In “Blood Work,” we see the slow and deliberate pacing Twain emphasized as indispensable to the humorous story. The essay describes Sedaris’ time glamorously spent cleaning apartments in New York City. One client attempts to clarify whether Sedaris would be cleaning at 2 in the afternoon or morning, which Sedaris describes as the point which he would “later recognize as the first sign of trouble” (126). He then breaks the paragraph, which acts in effect as Twain’s famously described pause. The suspense has been established. Thus, everything that follows – from Sedaris’ arrival to the swelteringly hot apartment and his encounters with its sweaty inhabitant who won’t stop talking about Fire Island – is received in anticipation of this “trouble,” building tension that is ultimately released when the reader realizes the intention of the client. The result is an exceptionally funny story that stands out within a collection of exceptionally funny stories.

In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Sedaris employs every aspect of Twain’s humor formula. Regardless of the subject addressed – familial guilt, aging romance, or neighborly disputes – the message is delivered artfully, precisely crafted to deliver the type of unexpected laughter which makes you spit out your or wake your roommate. It is indeed a “high and delicate art,” and one which Sedaris has undoubtedly mastered.

To Truth! [Reflection and Spontaneity]

In Dress Your Family in Courduroy and Denim, Sedaris writes vignettes of his own experiences. That is, while his reflection likely helps him, he performs for his audience (we know we can always slightly embellish in solo performance and creative writing). Yet had he merely told his stories without reflecting on them, the audience would not benefit. Therefore, his prior reflection is crucial to the effective telling of the story.

            If we look at “Consider the Stars,” the story about Thad and the rock and the dentist, we note that Sedaris walks us through the whole anecdote, beginning with a description of just how important the popular crowd was. After the anecdote, Sedaris tells us, “I thought about Thad a lot over the coming years…” (Sedaris 52). He imagines many possibilities for Thad’s future, and finally hopes to run into him living in the same city he lives in. “It doesn’t have to happen today, but it does have to happen. I’ve kept a space waiting for him, and if he doesn’t show up, I’m going to have to forgive my father” (Sedaris 52). Here we see a sweet, almost nostalgic sadness. This only comes from Sedaris putting the story into perspective, having thought about his mentality at the time of the incident, what his struggles were around that time, and what Thad, an infectious popular boy meant to him.

            Yet we feel as though he is just remembering it and telling as he remembers. This air of spontaneity is certainly cultivated. Just as Mark Twain in “How to Tell a Story” and Descartes in his work say that one must not laugh at one’s own joke, Sedaris does not. The fact that his stories about his own experiences aid this skill, for this means he has fully experienced them and has viscerally experienced more than just the “funny” parts.

As implied in Twain’s “How to Tell a Story,” and as is a common practice of all storytellers, the goal is truth. Sedaris’s reflection is able to bring the stories back to a place of truth at the end, for he either puts them in perspective. Oftentimes in Sedaris’s vignettes, I found the ends to make me a bit sad. For example, the last line of “Full House” (the sleepover story), Sedaris reads: “For now I would savor this poor imitation of tenderness, mapping Scott’s shoulders, the small of his back, as he shuddered beneath my winning hand” (Sedaris 41). This last line reveals the true painfulness of this incident for Sedaris. How hard must it be for a closeted gay adolescent boy to attend an all-male sleepover in a society that assumes (and at that point, demands) heterosexuality?

And although he tells the story from a place of humor (and with good humor), I did not find myself laughing as much during this particular story as in some of the others, but rather felt sympathy. Yet if Sedaris did not tell the story from a place of humor, we the readers might have complained in response to his morose, self-pitying tone. Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, tells us that to receive sympathy, a person must lower their emotional state enough for us—who haven’t experienced the pain—to reach. Here, there is a useful link between sympathy and humor, as both are at the center of good storytelling, and thereby truth. Thus, Sedaris, in writing this book of stories, works with the juxtaposition between reflection (past/future) and spontaneity (present), and comedy and pain (two parts of the truthful whole) in order to get to some truth.

 

 

 

 

Sedaris' Hall of Mirrors

            Throughout David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, there is a heavy emphasis on roles and appearances. He writes about everything from his mother’s constant striving to appear of a higher social class than they are to his own insecurities with the way he comes off to those around him. All of this makes me wonder if these struggles with expectations and realities are the foundation of and reason for his writing.

            He discusses in many chapters the assumed roles he and his siblings had had. In the chapter “Repeat After Me,” Sedaris talks about these “roles” or as he furthers it, “titles that effectively told [them] who [they] were” (144). Worse than these roles, though, seems to be the children’s lack of fulfilling some of them. Lisa, for instance, failed to live up to her role as “leader” and this became disheartening and confusing for the rest of the children. Sedaris, here, seems to be pointing to the extreme importance that labels and expectations have, not for just the person seeking to fulfill them, but for those witnessing the fulfillment… or lack there of.

            These ideas come back up regularly throughout the book, but they stood out the most to me in the chapters “Chicken in the Henhouse” and “Nuit of the Living Dead.” In “Chicken in the Henhouse”, Sedaris becomes hyper-cautious of the way he appears to those around him, not because he acts strangely on his own, but because of the national outrage against pedophilia and homosexuality of priests. Sedaris feels that once people identify him as a homosexual, the rest will inevitably follow and no matter how he fights it, the rest of his character will not matter. Some identifiers end up overpowering any other possible characteristics and taint the perception of a person as a whole.

            He returns to this issue again in “Nuit of the Living Dead,” but with a bit more clarity. As he guides a lost tourist through his home, he begins to recognize all the little oddities in its appearance that may add up to say something quite different about himself and the situation than is actually the case. He writes, “An unexpected and unknown visitor allows you to see a familiar place as if for the first time” (254).

            It seems that for Sedaris, the effect of appearances on one’s perceptions and expectations both for oneself and for those around them go hand-in-hand. While one’s role expectations for oneself will guide one’s actions (perhaps more for some than others) and while one’s appearances greatly affect another’s expectations and perceptions of them, these perceptions can also loop back around and change the way one sees oneself in the first place. For Sedaris, it seems highly likely that his writing would allow him this new sort of clarity. Much of his writing is based upon his actual life and experiences which perhaps is not all too clear to him in its true purpose, but by opening all of this up to other people, namely, his readers, he is achieving that “much keener” focus (254) that comes with the echoing and reflection of one’s appearances back out one’s own understanding of self, creating an endless hall of mirrors for Sedaris to walk through.

Disorganized Experiences

            If you tell a joke and nobody laughs… is it still funny? Maybe. But funny or not, jokes still have point. There’s a reason you tell the joke in the first place and whether or not people laugh, is one thing, but whether or not they understand your point…. That’s a much bigger issue.

            Turner’s article points to social life and experience as the driving force behind comedy. I would seem that one’s experiences, surroundings, as well as one’s relationships with those around them are the main influences upon whether or not a certain joke is understood. If one does not understand the social contexts of a joke, they might not get the point because the teller and the hearer are of such different backgrounds. For instance, in LaMott’s story, we, as Americans understand the bits of humor included with the various mentions of George Bush throughout the text, but someone less familiar with his presidency might not understand the humor of the points brought up.

            Turner goes a little further into this when he talks about the difference between half and whole incomprehensibility. According to him, if something is half incomprehensible, it creates wonder, whereas, if something is completely incomprehensible, it will create boredom. This idea of creating wonder can be seen in Millman’s story where as the narrator learns of Iceland and things she can only halfway grasp, her intrigue grows and becomes insatiable.

            This same idea can apply to humor. Somebody who does not know American politics at all may be extremely bored by LaMott’s constant mention of it, but someone who has a bit of an idea can still get many of the points in a way that could still keep them interested.

Douglas agrees with Turner in his article saying that one’s social life affects the perception one has of a joking situation. Douglas talks about joking as a kind of anti-rite, saying that, “The message of a standard rite is that the ordained patterns of social life are inescapable [while] the message of a joke is that they are escapable” (156). Humor, for Douglas, connects and disorganizes. In order to do this though, we must go back to Turner’s point that the social environment must be shared amongst all parties. It is impossible disorganize that which is not already understood as organized amongst you.

I saw this at work recently at my service learning site. The students have been reading the book, The Corner, written by the creators of The Wire. The book centers around the lifestyle of drug dealers in Baltimore city. This kind of social surrounding is not altogether unfamiliar to these students, so they know the general social patterns inherent in the situation. The teacher of this class is an older white male who clearly does not share the same background as the students.

One day, in class, the students were discussing the dialogue used in the book, because much of it is written in the dialect of the drug dealers themselves which is very different from the language one might be used to hearing in the classroom. A lot of the kids said they could understand it well and one of them raised her hand and asked the teacher if he did and his answer was, “Yeah! I didn’t have a problem at all!”, to which the students burst out laughing. For them, this was a situation where they’re social patterns were disrupted. For this older white man, and their teacher nonetheless, to be able to connect with the world of the book in that way completely disorganized their understood structure of society and that juxtaposition was hilarious for them.

Because there was an understood experience or social understanding, the kids could laugh at a spontaneous joke made by the professor. Although, perhaps not an intentional joke, there was humor present in the claim because of this shared social experience. Understanding of context seems to be crucial to humor as a whole, because without it, audiences tend to be lost.

An Apotheosis of Wit

While discussing Hau'ofa, our class discussions touched on the notion that humor is primarily contextual: in order for expectations to fail we must have set expectations; in order for the absurd to be transgressive, there must be a normalcy that can be transgressed. However, we didn't dwell on the notion of context, often focusing on the immediate explanation for a joke. Metaphysics, theology, anthropology: the approaches in today's readings (whether expressed through academic writing or through literature) are all about "contexts"—of culture, of life, of the divine plan, and of the universe.

Turner, in "Images of Anti-Temporality," describes two facets of human experience: firstly, that we are inherently social creatures. I think modern liberal capitalism has a tendency to alienate us from that reality, unless we actively fight back. ("I tried to cooperate with grace, which is to say, I did not turn on the TV," the narrator says in “Ham of God.”) Turner also describes a second facet of human experience: that time doesn't move rhythmically, but rather in leaps and bounds of narrative, in breaches of the social order.

Douglas analyzes the combination of the funereal and the scatalogical that combine to form the foundation of a typical African joke structure. He steps back to see how jokes play roles in the broader cultural rituals of our life, and even suggesting that jokes themselves are a form of death (Douglas 160). Jokes are both a breach of cultural norms and a coming-to-grips with the deepest mysteries of human experience.

If my analysis is correct, I think that this gives a two-fold meaning to LaMott's short story “Ham of God.” Aspects of this story are absurd; one of the funniest moments comes when the narrator, hoping for help from God, is instead handed a free ham at the check-out counter at the grocery store. But on a higher level, shouldn't we all be wondering sometimes if God sometimes laughs at our own breaches of God's plan? LaMott's narrator is frustrated that the Iraq war is a breach of plan of “the left”: this isn't the direction the country is supposed to be going! Father Tom helpfully puts into perspective that God doesn't abandon people in suffering. He doesn't try to explain the divine plan, but reminds the narrator that there is one, and that we each have a small part to play.

The great joke of the whole story occurs when the narrator receives a ham. Not only does this violate our typical expectations at a grocery store (maybe we'd be less surprised at a Casino, where one is supposed to win things!), but it also doesn't conform to the narrator's plan for herself. The humor actually has a genuine and life-giving part to play in a plan much greater than the capitalistic enterprise of Coca-Cola bottles, Ritz Crackers, and organic bananas. Although the narrator's reception of the ham is humorous, the humor dissipates when her friend actually needs the ham.

Millman's travel narrative presents us with a similar scenario: Gudmundur, the Icelandic trawler captain who speaks poor English, doesn't like threesomes, writes poetry and collects shards of ancient Icelandic mythological heritage, is a tremendously humorous character! But his humor comes from two of our contexts: firstly, our non-Northern Atlantic Western culture, in which thousand-year old feuds and ancient relics are completely foreign, even humorous, concepts. Secondly, we don't have a story in which to fit Gudmundur. The narrator is traveling to Turkey! This Icelandic man seemingly emerges out of nowhere. But from Gudmundur's perspective, he isn't a humorous person simply in his act of being. In fact, he's travelling for work, having his romantic life interfered with, and sharing a piece of his treasured national heritage with a strange American fellow. And within Millman's narrative, Gudmundur is the “thorn in the side” that eventually leads the author to explore the North Atlantic, meeting more fishermen and shepards and priests whose day-to-day lives conform to a whole series of plans and expectations, but for an outsider are quite funny. I don't know if Millman is religious or not, but it would certainly seem to be part of God's plan that he met Gudmundur.

Both Millman and LaMott present narrators who encounter humorous scenarios that later are more providential than funny. Returning to Turner, this speaks to his notion of human experience as yearning for connection, even while our own selfish natures and individualistic society try to prevent us from building meaningful connections. I previously discussed how Turner's theory of history relies largely on breaches in the social order, much like African jokes rely on breaches in the social order that must be understood in order to be humorous. Turner's theory of history also suggests that events must happen within culture for history to even move forward (although whether human society is improving or disintegrating can take hundreds or thousands of years to know: LaMott's quote from Chou En-lai speaks to this).

I would suggest that in our lives, which occur within cultural norms, personal plans, subjective expectations, and ultimately, a divine plan, our personal narratives move forward not rhythmically, but unevenly. And the great leaps of our personal narratives, as experienced by the narrator of “Ham of God,” occur when God reveals His plan. For someone who isn't religious, I imagine these moments would come when the “next step” suddenly makes sense, and the next door to one's future is opened, even if subsequent doors remain hidden and still closed. (A Jesuit I know once told me that sometimes all God is asking us to do is to try something—it's in the trying that we'll learn whether or not we are supposed to succeed.)

A person of prayer myself, I certainly know the feeling that time has come to a standstill. I often feel as if my own temporality (my own history) could be recorded by reference to dates and times and places when suddenly "the plan" made sense, when God's plan unfolded in front of me just one little inch more. And the dry spells in between those miniature revelations? A desert, a chaos, a formless void, as Turner describes. Much like LaMott's experience laying in bed on her birthday, hopeless and despairing. Already halfway through the fall semester, I feel like time is moving too fast! Perhaps that's because in my subjective experience of time, the rhythms of life have continued uninterrupted by any recent divine revelation. I will remain precisely the person I was at that last “God-moment.” Father's Tom advice here might be that there is a divine rhythm, a reason for every moment, and that from God's perspective, history marches forward precisely as planned, even when we subjectively feel like it moves in fits and starts.

Douglas suggests (echoing Turner) that African cultures have reached an “apotheosis of wit” and that the joke rite reflects the “conditions of human knowledge” (Douglas 162). Yes! Jokes are all about what we think we know and what we actually know—not only in the present moment, but in broader cultural contexts and at the very fringes of human existence.

Understated Reality

Catlin Castan

Dr. Ellis

Humor Studies

10 October 2014

Understated Reality

            LaMott begins her narrative with, “On my forty-ninth birthday, I decided that all of life was hopeless, and I would eat myself to death”(3). Similarly, on the first page of Last Places, Millman offers us the image of “a little half-digested sheep’s brain salad on the floor”(1). While LaMott and Millman describe very different situations, both authors use the same technique of understatement to convey their authorial messages. By “playing down” things like suicide, exposed bodily fluids, and death—things we usually regard as serious--LaMott and Millman catch us off guard as they invert and reintroduce our conventional understanding of these occurrences. In doing so, we are more easily able to identity points of literary emphasis and approach the difficult content of their writing. Specifically, in Last Places, Millman describes a man that he sits next to, he explains:

            “Indeed, he was so composed that when a particularly violent lurch sent two dozen raki glasses crashing to the floor, he didn’t bother to look up from the notebook in which he was writing. A short while later I found out that the      man’s name was Gudmundur”(2-3).            

In this excerpt we notice that Millman chooses to articulate the concept of death through the subtle mention of the man not “looking up”. While we may be a bit confused as to what actually transpires, Millman aims to clarify this ambiguity by using verbs in the past tense when describing the same man in the following sentences. As we come to understand the gravity of the situation, we begin to question Millman and the appropriateness of his trivializing of death—we struggle to find firm ground to stand on.

            While reading “Ham of God”, LaMott also makes it difficult for us to find sturdy ground. Specifically, LaMott flawlessly constructs a narrative in which she overly expresses her discontent for President George W. Bush, however; Amidst her endless critique of politics, appeals to suicide, death, and food, we begin to understand LaMott’s most important message: that of faith. Here, we notice—as LaMott does—that despite our many differences, faith is universal.

            Towards the end of LaMott’s piece, we learn that she wins a free ham—a quite random and rather awkward thing to win. Interestingly, though, this seemingly mundane “prize” becomes an act of God—a divine miracle—as we observe her gifting the ham to an old friend who is in need. In this moment, LaMott transforms the everyday into something that is sacred. She also reveals our humanly capacity to become divine through small, selfless (and sometimes absurd) acts—she urges us to find faith within our own lives and does so without coming off as the overbearing preacher.

            After reading Turner’s piece, I felt that he touched upon a lot of what authors such as LaMott and Millman are doing—that is: performing a narrative ritual for their audiences. Specifically, Turner explains:

            “Theater, though, breaks the unity of the congregation which is ritual’s  characteristic performative unit, converting total obligatory participation into the voluntary watching of actors by an audience. Such dualism and   distancing create the possibility of critique . . . and the possibility of subjunctive evaluation of what was tribally most sacred and beyond question may be a lively item on the cultural agenda”(255). While reading LaMott’s piece, it is unlikely that we would arrive at the same conclusion—universal faith—if it weren’t for LaMott’s commitment to chaos and absurdity; through her narrative style we are able to achieve the appropriate “distance” that Turner explains is essential to our experience as critical readers.

            Humor makes this same experience possible. Similar to many of the other authors we have read—especially Douglas—we have learned the ways in which humor functions as a disorienting and distancing agent that ultimately promotes self-reflection and awareness. In “The Joke”, Douglas explains how humor serves to highlight various social structures and conventions. I tend to like Douglas’ notion of humor as an “identifier” because it coincides with our semester long debate over humor’s ability to bring about social justice. While I am still uncertain as to where I stand regarding the matter, I would like to think that humorous writers--or perhaps the act of ritual—at the very least make their audiences “aware of what was hidden before”(Turner 248).