Liv Sisson attends An Evening with David Sedaris at Auckland’s Town Hall.
The last time I saw David Sedaris live, I was 15. My mom introduced me to his work, possibly as a way to say, “Look kid, our chaotic, sometimes neurotic, family is actually wildly entertaining, normal even”. It was a school night, so we didn’t stick around for the author’s famous signing line, but I’ve been a fan ever since.
I tried to craft a line that describes David Sedaris, but his website nails it: “With sardonic wit and incisive social critiques, Sedaris has become one of America’s pre-eminent humour writers… a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today.”
A Sedaris story can take you from a cottage in “singularly beautiful” Maine, to a grotty McDonald’s, to the trash filled streets of Cairo. In these tales Sedaris might be walking around Macy’s dressed as an elf, meeting the pope, or asking a stranger about the last time she touched a monkey.
Last Friday, An Evening with David Sedaris kicked off at Auckland Town Hall. Would I find him as delightful as I did 14 years ago? The lobby was a complete cluster, jammed with people, many of whom looked a bit like David himself – gentlemen with slightly quirky style, passable for Ponsonby and/or the Upper East Side.
Sedaris entered stage left to an enthusiastic and long applause. He hadn’t been to New Zealand since 2012 and this was only his second visit. He opened with a short story about mispronunciations. The kind you and a pal might overhear then repeat until the end of time. Think “tortoise” but said as if you were Parisian.
The Town Hall must love a gig like David Sedaris. The set up was simple, but the show was nearly sold out. It was just Sedaris and a lectern. It feels novel that people are willing to pay to see a writer simply read their work in 2025, the age of short form and sensory overload.
When I tried to describe the evening to my aunty she said, “Ah, so he’s a comedian.” Sedaris’s Wikipedia page also describes him this way, but I wouldn’t. In his shows, he reads published material, new material that he’s testing and past entries from the diaries he’s been keeping for 40 years. He does ad lib a bit, but it’s not standup, and he’s not trying to make you laugh every second. It’s entertainment in its simplest and oldest form.
“I want to show you my outfit,” Sedaris said after his opening bit, emerging from behind the lectern. He was wearing black and white saddle shoes, knee high socks, billowy short pants, a sport coat and his iconic glasses. “I wrote something about these pantaloons,” he told us, then launched into a story he’d never read live before.
Before Sedaris sends a new story to his editor, he likes to read it live to an audience at least 20 times. As he read his pantaloon story, he was marking it up, based on our responses. By the time he submits a story, he’s worked out the awkward bits and identified the funniest bits – it’s a polished gem.
Sedaris then read ‘A long way home’ – a story published in The New Yorker last year. In it, Sedaris and long-time partner Hugh make their way home to New York City from Maine. As travel delays unfurl, Sedaris invites a lone female traveller to join them on their drive. She needs a ride and Sedaris needs a buffer from Hugh’s increasingly grumpy disposition. He also wants to be left alone on the drive to do Duolingo. His streak is now over 900 days.
I’d already read this story, but Sedaris’s live reading was such a treat. His voice is iconic. It’s been described as pleasingly strange and is truly part of his craft. When he finished, he told us about the relentless fact checkers at The New Yorker. They contacted the rental car company, for example, to confirm he had in fact ordered the car for the time he had written.
Some of the night’s biggest laughs were fuelled by a handful of diary entries Sedaris shared. These nuggets offered a glimpse into his role as chief observer of his own life. Many stemmed from conversations he has had with fans in his own signing lines over the years. “You know when your labia drops out?” one fan asked him when she got to the front of the queue. No, he said, then told the story she shared with him. Sedaris is always mining for stories.
It’s well documented that question time with writers can be punishing, but this crowd did well and asked (mostly) real questions. Do you consider your life interesting? What do you think about Trump? In response to the recent plane/helicopter crash in my home city, Sedaris noted that Trump was quick to blame Biden and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), “when he could have just said… poor skaters.” I accidentally laughed at this. Even in real-time, and on hard-time events, Sedaris’s comedic delivery is perfect. He exited stage left with three small curtsies.
After the show I joined a long queue to meet my hero. He famously spends a longer than average amount of time with each person and always gets through the entire line. On this night he signed and chatted for about as long as he read – three hours of performance all up.
When I made it to the front, Sedaris opened the conversation, “So tell me, Liv, do you waste a lot of money?” I don’t gamble, I replied, fumbling and being generally lame before recovering with “pedicures”. Sedaris then told me his family gives each other facials when they get together, and I told him I’d recently gotten a facial just outside the prison gates of the Hanoi Hilton. We chatted away, he signed my books and drew little pictures in them with his many coloured markers. It was magical.
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