I haven’t read Sedaris or Burroughs, but Saki definitively fits the “dark, bitter, dry, funny” description. A lot of his short stories are available online, one of my favourites is Esme. (I probably should post some kind of warning to this one, but I’m not sure how to phrase it without spoiling it. If stories about bad things happening to cute things bother you, you’ll probably be happier not reading it.)
I’ve read everything by Saki, Florence King and Fannie Flagg, all of whom I like. Shame there’s no good bio of Saki—I’ve read the only one, and it sucked.
Have also read (and seen) everything by Spalding Gray . . . Still too creeped out by his death.
Joe Queenan and I have Personal Issues. He and I worked for Movieline and Men’s Health at the same time, and my story proposals somehow wound up turning into stories by him, over and over again. I think it was the editors’ doing, but still . . .
I will make note of some of the others mentioned, thanks! (It goes w/o saying I have exhausted the works of Parker, Benchley, Woollcott, et al)
Fran Lebowitz. She wrote humor columns in the '70’s which were collected into two books (Social Studies and Metropolitan Life). I got a very Leibowitz vibe when I first started reading Naked, although she’s much less focused on auto-bio.
–Cliffy
I think Jonathan Ames might qualify. I very much enjoyed his What’s Not to Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer and My Less Than Secret Life. Like Sedaris, Ames draws a lot on his own life–mostly humiliating experiences that have more than their share of TMI–and emphasizes the scatological and polymorphously perverse. I believe on the jacket of one of the books he refers to himself as “the George Plimpton of the colon.”
I’ve thought of a few more since my other post. Hope you guys find some of them interesting, along with “dark, bitter, dry, funny”:
-Eric Newby and Peter Fleming. Both British travel writers who can write in a funny dry vein about their travels. See esp. A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Newby and Brazilian Adventure by Fleming.
-Mark Salzman’s memoir Lost in Suburbia was very good, witty.
-Writer Brendan Halpin can be funny even when writing about the darkest subjects, such as teaching high school English, or his wife’s breast cancer. His 2 nonfiction books are It Takes a Worried Man and Losing My Faculties .
-I found these fiction books to have the wry humor I enjoy. Big Trouble , by Dave Barry; Bridge of Birds , by Barry Hugheart; and The Mouse that Roared by Leonard Wibberly.
Eve, you might want to see if Burroughs’ interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” is archived at her site. It was a great piece. As someone pointed out earlier, his stories would be alot more funny if they weren’t true and so disturbing.
I like PJ O’Rourke’s essays, even though I don’t agree with his politics. He’s about as dry and sarcastic as you can get.
The originator of the dry, biting, sarcastic essay has to be H. L. Mencken. He’s reflective of his era (early 20th Century) with regards to lots of his beliefs, but he’s also an equal opportunity curmudgeon.
You might also try Calvin Trillin. Very wry.
Michael Thomas Ford is a very funny wry gay writer too. I would also recommend Gregory Maguire.