David Sedaris Is Coming To Australia To Read You Some Charming And Hilarious New Stories

David Sedaris is an award-winning essayist, best-selling author, and all-round funny man who often contributes to podcasts like This American Life. Through collections of work such as Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim and Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, he’s mined his life for every single devastating, strange and ridiculous story people usually hoard and embellish to eventually divulge to close friends at dinner parties, and openly shared them with the world.

Now, in what will be his third tour of Australia, he’s coming to share them with you.

Even better: they’re all relatively new. The much-loved writer will be reading from a selection of his most-recent unpublished essays and diary entries live on stage in eight performances across six cities next January. Similar to his radio work in the way that it’s not quite stand-up comedy, not quite regular reading, An Evening With David Sedaris will come to us after an extensive tour of the US, and a number of re-inventions over the past few years. It seems this man will never run out of great stories.

If you’re not totally familiar with his work, this dreary Monday afternoon is probably the best possible time to get acquainted. Sedaris’ essays for The New Yorker are a great place to start and there’s certainly a bunch to choose from. Here’s one about summer vacations with his incredible and eccentric mother who you should get to know immediately and here’s another about the suicide of his younger sister just a couple of years ago. One thing you’ll notice very quickly is his ability to effortlessly entertain while completely destroying you.

If you’ve got some headphones handy (and want to make it look as though you’re still doing work), dive into a few of his pieces spoken aloud. Here he is reading ‘I Like Guys’ — an essay from his book Naked about being bullied at school and coming to the realisation he was gay:

Here he is riffing on America at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival just a couple of years ago:

And here he is being adorable and bumbly and funny (in the same dorky dad shirt) about Presidential campaigns and childhood and airplane food.

There are few people in this world who can still get laughs from jokes about airplane food.

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DAVID SEDARIS NATIONAL TOUR

An Evening With David Sedaris will run nationally from January 17-23. 

NEWCASTLE: January 17, Civic Theatre — bookings via Ticketek

SYDNEY: January 18 – 19, Sydney Opera House — bookings via Sydney Opera House

BRISBANE: January 20, Brisbane City Hall — bookings via Ticketek

MELBOURNE: January 21 – 22, Hamer Hall — bookings via Arts Centre

HOBART: January 23, Theatre Royal — bookings via Theatre Royal

PERTH: January 24, Octagon Theatre — bookings via TicketsWA

All tickets are $65 and go on sale this Friday, August 14 at 9am.