Whether dealing with snobbish house guests or secretly mocking a college professor for overstressing his pronunciation of Nicaragua, memoirist David Sedaris finds humor in the tiniest details.
In his calm, sarcastic voice, Sedaris read three of his short stories to an audience in the Philips Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday night. The first story detailed the difficulties Americans have communicating with one another in foreign countries.
Sedaris had used French words to name all the rabbits that had multiplied in the front of his Parisian yard and had the audience in stitches.
A snooty American dinner guest insisted that Sedaris had named the rabbits after verbs instead of nouns and proceeded to give Sedaris a mini grammar lecture.
"I thought, 'What difference does it make if they are nouns or verbs? They're my bunnies,'" he read. "Oh, look at Runny and Moist. They're about to go visit their old friend Screened-in-Patio."
In addition to reading his stories to an audience of about 850 Gainesville "Sedarists," he also fielded questions and signed books after the show.
Sedaris' visit was sponsored by WUFT-FM Classic 89 and WJUF-FM.
Sedaris got his start in the early 1990s through National Public Radio and then branched out as a writer. He is the best-selling author of "Me Talk Pretty One Day," "Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy" and "Naked."
Sedaris' seamless transitions between vignettes of his story kept his audience enthralled.
He talked about the Polish man he sat next to on a "business elite" who wept the entire flight from New York to Paris because his mother had just passed away. And then, without losing a beat, he transitioned to a tale of childhood dinners with his Greek grandmother who farted incessantly.
"Nothing irritated my father more than the sound of his children's happiness," he read from his story "Cry Baby," which will be published in The New Yorker.
His father kept a heavy wooden spoon at the dinner table that he would hit the children with if they got too rambunctious, he said.
"There were nights the spoon would have blood on it," he read. "There would be nights hair would stick to the blood. And still, grandma farted."
Midway through his set, he was distracted by a paperclip on the floor next to his podium.
He picked it up and put it on the podium because he said it would have distracted him the rest of the night.
He kept the audience entertained throguh his quirky demeanor as much as through his quirky writing style.
In the last short story he read, "All the Beauty You Will Ever Need," which was published in The New Yorker, Sedaris recounted a time when he went with his brother Paul to buy marijuana from a man named Little Mike.
Little Mike and his wife, Beth, became increasingly amused when Paul told them that Sedaris is gay.
Sedaris said the amount of time people spend thinking about gay relationships is amazing.
"Now, which one of you is the woman?" Beth asked.
"Neither of us," he replied. "That's what makes this a homosexual relationship."
