Hmm, I have the exact opposite reaction. I agree with Sedaris’ own assessment of his voice: “high pitched and whiny.” He just annoys me.
As for the posters who are wondering what the big deal is with David Sedaris: I didn’t really get it, either. A lot of his stuff just leaves me cold; it’s either dark, bleak, and pointless, or too self-indulgent. But when he “hits,” it’s just phenomenal.
I still say that “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” which is reprinted in Me Talk Pretty One Day, is just about the best essay ever written, on any subject. It had me laughing out loud and then in tears by the end of it.
Not novels, but the essay collections of Roy Blount, Jr. are consistently laugh-out-loud funny. I wish I could write like him, and I wish I had his sense of humor, and I wish I’d done half the cool things he’s done.
His novel, First Hubby, is so-so and is probably extremely dated by this point. But his books of essays, in particular Now, Where Were We? and Camels are Easy, Comedy’s Hard, are just brilliant.
Fraser has a great fondness for the pirate era and how they’re portrayed in the movies. This is a comic send-up of the genre, but he’s also quite serious about portraying the era accurately. I read it every couple of years with great pleasure, and the image on the final page always made me sad that the adventure’s over.
As for David Sedaris, he is an acquired taste because sometimes his pieces veer over into a type of funny-horror or funny-mean, like the piece in which a theater critic pens devastating critiques of elementary school Christmas pageants. Very wicked, but I can understand why it’s not to everyone’s taste.
His “Santaland Diary” about his stint as an elf at Macy’s is hilarious, if only because it sounds like some of what he writes about actually happened.
I read every single one of her books while in middle and high school, so you’re not alone. They are really funny in a disecting human nature sort of way.
It is subjective. People told me how funny Good Omens was…parts of it are funny. But half of it reads like an obituary. Usually, with co-authored books, you can’t tell where one author left off and the other began. In this book it’s blindingly obvious.
The funniest books I’ve read recently are:
Jennifer Government by Max Barry
Martian Child by David Gerrold
And, even though humor isn’t the predominant theme, the wit of the narrator had me laughing several times - A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Shirley Jackson wrote two bruise-your-ribs funny books Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons
Tom Robins Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues are old standards.
I third Lucky Jim as the funniest book ever (easily). And I add an excellent book to go with it - White Noise, by Don Delillo. Both hysterical books about academia. White Noise is not quite as hilarious as Lucky Jim, but it’s still great. To give you a feel, our hero is the Chair of the Hitler Studies Department at his mediocre college. Hoping nobody will figure out that he doesn’t speak German.