A David Sedaris audiobook is always better when it features live performances. This is the case for Live For Your Listening Pleasure. This Sedaris comedy CD features 5 comic essays by someone who is perhaps the best comic essayist of the last twenty or so years, if not more. Live For Your Listening Pleasure consists of biographical essays where the writer’s funny look on life shines. This is not Sedaris’ best CD but fans will enjoy it.
Live For Your Listening Pleasure does not begin strong. Davis Sedaris has been writing uninteresting contemporary fables and Cat and Baboon is even weaker than most. It is not enough to make characters animals to write a fable. Lafontaine demonstrated the animals are used to soften the blow of societal criticism and observation. Here, it’s just animals doing and saying stuff.
Author, Author is a comic essay about Sedaris when he is on a book tour. The humor here lies in the author’s idiosyncrasies. These include giving his audience little gifts like single servings of Tylenol or condoms. Especially funny moments include buying a gross of condoms at Costco and tales told by and encounters with people during the Q&A.
The third comic essay on this David Sedaris CD is Innocence Abroad. This was an essay requested by NPR’s Fresh Air that did not make the cut. This does not mean Innocence Abroad is not good; it probably did not readily fit the program’s theme. This essay is about how some people try very hard to pronounce foreign words as genuinely as possible. Sedaris gets every ounce of funny out of this.
Laugh, Kookaburra is a decent enough bit about the author’s experiences in Australia. Laugh, Kookaburra does not rise above the personal essay. The humor is there but does not really connect with the reader.
David Sedaris Live For Your Listening Pleasure closes with Diary Entries. These are the paragraph equivalent to the one liner joke and are the best moments on this Sedaris audiobook.
Live For Your Listening Pleasure
David Sedaris
Hachette Audio 2009
75 minutes
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