Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[CHATTER]

DAVID SEDARIS: I consider myself very fortunate

that I can rewrite a story and edit a story in front

of an audience.

Rose, we know each other.

When did we last see each other?

You know, you can't count on your friends to be honest.

You can pretty much count on an audience to be honest.

They're not going to laugh if they

don't think something's funny.

You're 58?

I absolutely don't believe that.

It's an honor to meet you.

Now have you ever eaten horse?

I have no interest, thank you very much.

What if I snuck it by you?

You're sitting in a dark room.

They know you can't see them.

They're under no obligation to have that [INAUDIBLE]

of pleasure on their face the way that they would

if you were in a brightly lit room.

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome to the stage, David Sedaris.

[ANNOUNCER]

I was in Baton Rouge in late May 2013

when a woman approached saying before I had a chance

to throw her off balance you got me to put my bra back on.

[LAUGHTER]

I set down my pen.

I beg your pardon?

I take it off the second I get home from work,

and that usually means it's off for the night she told me.

Means I'm not going anywhere for any reason.

Then a friend called and told me you were here, so I put it back

on and dashed over to see you.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, thank you I said.

I repeated the woman's story the following evening in Atlanta,

thinking it might get a nice response.

It did, but the laughs were ones of recognition

rather than surprise.

Do you take your bra off the moment you return from work

I asked the first person in line.

That particular diary entry, I read it

on stage a number of times, and I really

liked the way that it worked.

And then I mentioned it the next night.

And women came up and said I take my bra first thing I--

when I come off work, and it means I'm not

going anywhere for any reason.

And all these women came forward with these stories.

And I met women who said I take my bra off

on my way home from work.

And I said you pull over.

And they say, no, I do it while driving.

And they explained how that happens.

And I just thought it was funny because I grew up

with four sisters and a mother, and I never

knew this was going on.

So that was kind of a theme for the tour.

And then on another tour, the theme

was people defecating in stores.

People do it all the time.

They go to the dressing room at the Gap,

and they defecate on the floor.

And it happens every store.

You talk to anyone who works in a clothing store,

and it has happened there.

So that was a theme.

Sometimes you can take incidents and stitch them together

and make a story, make an essay that way.

And I guess I just think of them as kitchen sink essays.

I mean, you've got all these things lying around,

and you just find a way to assemble them and connect them

so that they have meaning.

[CHATTER]

On my next book tour, the theme was monkeys,

and on the latest one, it was items

men shove inside themselves and later have

to go to the emergency room to have extracted.

This started when an ER nurse told me

about a patient she had seen earlier

in the week who had pushed a dildo too far up his ass.

The door shut behind it.

[LAUGHTER]

So he tried fishing it out with a coat hanger.

When that proved the wrong tool for the job,

he snipped it with wire cutters then

went after both the dildo and the cut

off hanger with a sturdier fresh hanger.

You hear this from doctors and nurses all the time.

Their patients shove light bulbs up

inside themselves, shampoo bottles, votive candles.

And they always concoct some incredible story

to explain their predicament.

I tripped is a big one.

I mean, OK, I'm pretty clumsy.

I trip all the time.

But I've never gotten back on my feet with a pepper grinder

up my ass.

[LAUGHTER]

Not even a little bit.

I'm pretty sure I could tumble down

all the stairs in the Empire State Building

naked with a greased up pepper grinder in each hand

and a box of candles around my neck

and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum.

[LAUGHTER]

So I got all these really great stories about things

that men have shoved up their asses, and--

but that doesn't make an essay, right,

unless let's say I were to start shoving things up my ass

and I could--

then I could turn it into an essay.

But I didn't know what to do with all these great stories,

and so I collected them and then I stitched it

to another theme that developed over on my book tour.

So I've got to try to go back and forth so I can kind of have

sustained laughs instead of, oh, the first half was funny

and the second half people coughed.

People coughing is the deadly--

you know, that's the last thing that you-- that's

the audience telling you that if they

were reading this on paper, they would be skimming now.

So I made notes on everything I read tonight.

I got an idea of how to join them together again,

and I jotted it down on my paper.

And I'm going to go back to the room,

and I'm going to hope I can read my handwriting.