Don’t humor me

Well, well. It appears our friend David Sedaris (anyone who visits Manila on a book tour is considered a friend) is in some literary hot water.

His crime? Exaggeration.

It appears that some readers of Sedaris’ humorous, semi-autobiographical essays don’t quite get the joke. In particular, Alex Heard, whose recent article in The New Republic (“This American Lie”) challenges many of the situations depicted in Sedaris’ breakthrough 1997 book, Naked, claiming they never happened.

Now, who ever heard of a humor writer making things up? That would be, like, untrue, wouldn’t it?

If that were the case, we would never be able to read and enjoy Woody Allen, Dave Barry, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Stephen Fry or Larry David again.

After all, if you can’t trust a comedian to tell the truth, then who can you trust?

To be fair to Heard, an editor for Outside magazine, he still enjoys reading Sedaris, but has some bones to pick with several characters in his work that he says were “invented,” like the midget guitar teacher, and some nudists, and a couple hicks on a bus. But really, he is most perturbed that Sedaris’ work is placed in the “nonfiction” section of bookstores.

In this era of James Frey, when the author of A Million Little Pieces must repent on Oprah’s couch and tearfully admit that he “made up” chunks of his memoir, it’s not so surprising that other purveyors of “the truth” should be lined up for the pillory. Heard even suggests that Sedaris “issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people” he blew up out of proportion (or conjured up out of thin air) in Naked.

It’s curious that Naked is the object of Heard’s truth-seeking missives. When I read this sprawling book, I had no idea it was meant to be autobiographical (I didn’t find it in “nonfiction” but in “literature,” so Sedaris cleverly straddled that literary line). The stories were so diverse and obviously exaggerated, that I didn’t trouble myself over which parts were true or invented. (The book is also howlingly funny, a quality which has diminished somewhat in Sedaris’ recent work, starting with Dress Your Family in Corduroy and now his recent volume, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, which got a thumbs-down from New York Times writer Michiko Kakutani for being too slapdash. As opposed to slapstick, I suppose.)

Naked, interestingly, is Sedaris’ least favorite work. When he was in Manila he complained it was “overwritten.” “Naked was before I started writing for The New Yorker,” he told a bunch of Manila scribes in Powerbooks back in 2006 (he was here to plug and read from Dress Your Family in Corduroy). “American fact-checkers have gotten really ridiculous. It’s like minutiae. They had called and said, ‘You said in a story that your father had a grandfather clock made of walnut. And we talked to him and he said it’s cherry.’ And I said, ‘Whatever, if my dad said it’s cherry, go with cherry.’ So I can’t exaggerate as much as I used to. And I think often in the past I exaggerated when I didn’t need to.”

I asked Sedaris at the time which parts of his books were real and which were fictional, and he gave a slightly exasperated sigh. “I guess I always thought of things as, like, the truth run through a story mill? You know, like the truth is one thing, but the entertaining thing is another.

“You know, when Hugh (Hamrick, his boyfriend) reads something I wrote, he might say, ‘That’s not how it happened, There were six people at dinner, and you said there were only two.’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, but if I list six names, the reader’s trying to keep six names in his head, four of ‘em aren’t important. Let’s just get rid of them.’ So there’s nothing that would hold up in court.”

So this tendency to fudge facts appears deep-seated in Mr. Sedaris. Yet somehow, for a humorist, I don’t think it’s a hanging  offense.

After all, we read David Halberstam if we want a good depiction of the truth; we read P.J. O’Rourke if we want a good laugh. We read Jim Sheeler if we want hard-hitting reports about US soldiers returning from Iraq; we read Dave Barry if we want to know more about Beano. (Barry, incidentally, must constantly inform dubious readers that “I’m not making this up.”) I think quick readers are capable of spotting a whopper amid a flow of prose, even if it’s as carefully hidden as it is in Bill Bryson, Hunter S. Thompson or, yes, David Sedaris.

Sure, there are real issues about journalistic integrity these days, what with New York Times reporters and even New Republic writer Stephen Glass getting sacked for fabricating news. Reporters — real ones, the ones who tell the truth — deserve every Pulitzer and Nobel prize they get for dragging important stories out into the open. But a different sort of truth is served by humorists. They reveal certain things about ourselves, couched in exaggeration. Every standup comic out there relies on stretching the truth, distorting it for laughs. (“If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny,” says Alan Alda’s aphoristic character in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors.) So, too, do our literary humorists. If you take away exaggeration, their arsenal starts to get pretty slim.

There is the question of whether personal essays sprinkled with untruths deserve to be stocked in “nonfiction.” I would say if the larger proportion of a work is factual, then we can overlook the leg-pulling, just as we would that of a uncle prone to embellishing his fishing stories. It’s still basically in the realm of nonfiction.

Admittedly, there is a mean-spiritedness in Sedaris’ earlier work — a tendency to draw grotesque caricatures from American life, not unlike those found in Borat, and hold them up for ridicule (this may be another reason Sedaris is less fond of Naked). But grotesquerie is arguably a Southern Gothic tendency (Sedaris grew up in North Carolina) found in writers as diverse as Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and that incorrigible truth-stretcher to whom Sedaris is sometimes compared, Truman Capote.

In the end, it’s the desire for attention that probably drives Sedaris to stretch the truth. “I think large families are like that,” he told his Manila audience. “You have to compete for attention. Like, if we came home from school, if we would say to my mom, ‘Then, um, the teacher, um, she told Jerome he shouldn’t, um, raise his hand if he didn’t know the answer, and, um, he said, ‘Why not,’ and, um, she said…’ And my mother would say, ‘You know, I stopped listening about four minutes ago. That was so boring.’

“So you’d learn to say, ‘Jerome raised his hand in class, and the teacher slapped him across the face!’ And it’s not true, but at least it’s quick.”

Brevity really is the soul of wit. Fact checkers be damned.