Then, rallying a crowd, she loudly blames Sedaris for the imaginary stench in a toilet where he has taken a discreet, non-odorous pee. Amy first stages a tantrum by hurling a Balenciaga dress to the floor after being told that it’s reserved for someone else. Shopping in New York, Sedaris is outwitted by his sister Amy, an actor and writer whose dangerously free spirit prompts him to introduce her, with a twinge of alarm, as “a comedy person”. “Well, I never heard of any of them,” the child sneers in triumph. To correct the boy’s insubordination, Sedaris declares: “I’m rich and famous.” Unimpressed, his tormenter demands proof. At home he’s reduced to nonentity by an obnoxious seven-year-old guest. In France, before learning the language, he “can’t get a laugh to save his life”: it’s an existential predicament, because he feels he has forfeited “my thing, my identity” and is not “recognised as a whole person”. The happy-go-unlucky Sedaris is forever being frustrated, humiliated or downright annihilated, and the mishaps he chronicles probably explain why readers feel so fondly protective towards him. How does a comedian convince people that he’s not joking? Sedaris writes “You are a horrible human being” in the book she buys when she laughs, he says he meant it, at which she laughs again.

At an autograph session in California, a customer bustles to the front of the long queue, claiming that as a senior citizen she’s entitled to priority. Yet it’s only on the silent page that he defames them: the whore and the hag remain unscathed while Sedaris seethes. He refers to her as “the whore”, while another guest who joins her to coo over the “fur babies” she has left at home is “a jism-soaked hag”. At breakfast in a Washington hotel, he watches a woman set a plate of bacon and eggs on the carpet to feed her guzzling terrier. Though Sedaris may want his words to hurt, even kill, they often rebound. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of autobiographical sketches, he broods about the cosmic injustice of Covid-19: noting that a million Americans died in the pandemic, he fumes that he didn’t get to choose a single one of them. His recent volume of diaries, A Carnival of Snackery, surveys a panorama of “war and calamity – natural disaster, mass migration, racial strife” and asks whether humour can make these afflictions endurable.

All the same, this feisty fellow has undertaken to set the world to rights through comedy. Sedaris presents himself as a damaged specimen, scarred by a cantankerous father and an alcoholic mother, hen-pecked by four domineering sisters, additionally suffering from a lisp, a nervous tic and the usual addictions. Tragedy has no monopoly of mortality comedy may be a better guide to living with the certainty of extinction

Happy go lucky david