Q&A: David Sedaris, American humourist and author, 64

David Sedaris, the American humourist and author, dispenses some key parenting advice on the eve of his Australian tour.

Man of letters: David Sedaris. Picture: Anne Fishbein

Your books including Calypso and Naked have sold millions of copies, and you tour up to 80 cities per year. Is comedy an antidote to the wars and other strife people are grappling with around the world? I think it makes it (global strife) easier to deal with - even if it’s something horrible - if you can laugh at it. A great number of Americans have been getting their news for years from The Daily Show, just because it was still the news but it was funny; maybe it was just a bit easier to swallow.

In your latest New York Times bestseller, Happy-Go-Lucky, you write that Covid killed thousands of people and “I didn’t get to choose a one (sic) of them”. Did you catch any flak for that comment? No, because I never read any reviews. Didn’t everybody feel that way? I knew a couple of people who died and it just seems unfair that they died and then somebody who’s like a massive asshole didn’t die. It’s just not fair.

You’ve said you didn’t care about your father dying in 2021, because you had endured years of criticism from him. Do you miss him? No, not a bit. I really don’t care that he died. I mean, he overstayed his welcome. You know, I mean (he was) 98. When my mother died, I was devastated, and every day was just awful. And I’d hate to have to go through that twice, so I consider myself pretty fortunate.

Funny bone: David Sedaris. Picture: Anne Fishbein

In 2018, you gave a commencement speech at Oberlin College in Ohio and a parent tried to storm the stage after you criticised priests. Are these speeches tricky? I’m doing the graduate commencement address at Columbia University this spring, and they’re really hard to do. One year I did one at the University of Buffalo. I had this whole thing about “as long as you’re young, you should do a lot of drugs and have sex with as many people as possible’’. I would say three quarters of the audience was from India, like full-out from India, wearing saris and stuff. That was not the audience for that speech.

You live in the UK with your partner Hugh Hamrick and you walk for miles every day. Is that a way of dealing with your obsessive-compulsive tendencies? Yeah, I mean, it’s something I have to do. I have to walk, you know, a minimum of 12 miles a day.

As you walk, you collect roadside rubbish and a British garbage truck was named for you in 2014. Was that an honour? Yes. It was just the one but you know that was enough for me. I went on a book tour so I was only there (in England) for two months of summer, but there wasn’t a single day that I wasn’t out there, picking up trash.

You are about to tour Australia and your Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney shows have already sold out. What can fans expect? I’ve already written one new thing for Australia. It’s about this theory that I have: for people who are deeply offended by everything, part of the problem is their parents never hit them, so they don’t know what pain is. You know when they say, “That was really painful when you said that word”, or “That was really painful when you made me look at that photograph’’? I’m suggesting that if you don’t want to hit your children, that’s OK. But other people should be allowed to; children now are like animals that have no natural predators left.

An Evening with David Sedaris opens in Hobart on February 1 and transfers to Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.

Tickets: davidsedaristour.com.au