THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE

The Anthropologist at the Dinner Table

There is a particular kind of intelligence required to notice what everybody else has agreed not to notice. David Sedaris has built a career from it. For more than three decades, he has observed families, airports, shop assistants, lovers, language lessons, neighbours, strangers and himself with the peculiar concentration of an anthropologist who has somehow been permitted to conduct fieldwork among his own relatives.

In The Land and Its People, age has not softened this instinct so much as altered its object. Sedaris is now approaching seventy. Parents have died, siblings have aged, friendships have accumulated histories, his relationship with Hugh Hamrick has passed the thirty-five-year mark, and the struggling writer who once cleaned apartments and worked as a Christmas elf is now an internationally successful author with money, property and expensive art. This presents an interesting problem for a comic writer: what happens to the outsider once he has become part of the establishment? Sedaris’s answer is essentially to remain an outsider anyway.

The title The Land and Its People sounds almost comically institutional, like an educational film shown to schoolchildren in 1973 before the teacher pulls down a map. It promises geography, customs, agriculture and national dress. Sedaris instead gives us his own wildly unreliable ethnography of the human species. He travels through Guatemala, Kenya and Vatican City, attempts to learn languages, encounters strangers, cares for Hugh after hip-replacement surgery, thinks about siblings, old friends and the dead, gets bitten by a dog and continues his lifelong study of the inexplicable things people say and do. The land is almost incidental. It is the people, and the strange business of having to live among them, that interest him.

The Sedaris Method

Sedaris is generally described as a humourist, which is accurate in much the same way that describing Jane Austen as a writer of romances is accurate. It identifies an obvious characteristic while missing much of what makes the writing interesting. His real subject has always been social behaviour.

He watches the tiny negotiations through which people establish hierarchy, intimacy and belonging: who is rude to whom, who pretends not to care, who wants attention, who embarrasses themselves, who believes they are being charming and who has misunderstood the social situation entirely. Much of the comedy arises in the distance between how people imagine themselves and how they actually appear.

Crucially, Sedaris does not exempt himself. The narrative “David Sedaris” is not quite identical to the private human being David Sedaris. He is a literary construction: vain, petty, obsessive, competitive, occasionally cheap despite being wealthy, sometimes startlingly unsympathetic and almost always aware of his own absurdity. This is central to the ethics of his work, because personal essayists inevitably exploit other people. Family members become characters, lovers become material, and a stranger’s embarrassing remark can survive in print long after the stranger has forgotten making it. Sedaris has always lived particularly dangerously in this respect because his family constitutes one of the great recurring casts in contemporary American nonfiction.

He purchases a certain moral licence by placing himself on the dissecting table alongside everybody else. His position is rarely simply: look at these ridiculous people. It is closer to: look at these ridiculous people, and unfortunately I am one of them. That distinction matters.

The Comedy of Ageing

Ageing gives The Land and Its People a different emotional temperature from Sedaris’s earlier collections. Mortality has been entering his work for some time, particularly following the suicide of his sister Tiffany and the deaths of his parents. Here it has become less an event than an atmosphere. He scrolls through an address book and discovers how many people he once feared losing have already disappeared. News that a childhood best friend, estranged for forty-seven years, has died from cancer produces not a conventional reconciliation narrative but the much stranger experience of grieving somebody who had already ceased to participate in one’s life.

This is where Sedaris can be unexpectedly devastating, because sentimentality requires emotions to arrive in recognisable forms and Sedaris is interested in the occasions when they do not. We can love somebody and not particularly want to see them. We can mourn a relationship we voluntarily abandoned. We can resent the inconvenience of caring for someone while loving them profoundly. We can discover that a person who has been absent for decades occupied considerably more territory inside us than we realised.

The essay concerning Hugh’s hip replacement is particularly revealing. On its surface, incapacity provides Sedaris with the familiar comic materials of ageing: medical equipment, indignity, bodily failure and the sudden intrusion of geriatric paraphernalia into domestic life. Underneath the jokes, however, is a considerably more serious subject. After more than three decades together, love has inevitably begun to include care.

Romantic literature traditionally privileges beginnings; Sedaris is increasingly interested in duration. Long relationships develop their own languages, irritations and cruelties. The declaration of love becomes less significant than knowing where somebody’s medication is, driving them home, tolerating their habits or understanding exactly which complaint can safely be ignored. Sedaris refuses to prettify this kind of intimacy, which is precisely why it feels intimate.

Money Changes the Joke

There is nevertheless a legitimate difficulty with late-period Sedaris, and The Land and Its People occasionally runs directly into it: he is rich. This would be an irrelevant biographical observation were class not so important to observational comedy. The early Sedaris wrote brilliantly from marginal positions — badly paid jobs, cheap apartments, artistic failure, language incompetence and the peculiar humiliations associated with not quite possessing the social or economic power one would like.

That material has gone. The Sedaris of 2026 can write about owning works by Paul Klee, Franz Kline and Alexander Calder, or buying his sister Gretchen a $2,400 cashmere cape during a cancer scare while contemplating eventually inheriting it back. Wealth inevitably changes the comic equation because it changes one’s relationship with inconvenience. Many situations that once trapped Sedaris can now simply be escaped with a credit card.

A writer need not remain poor in order to remain interesting, and demanding otherwise would amount to a bizarre punishment for success. Sedaris’s best response is not to disguise his privilege but to make it another object of comedy. The expensive cape is funny precisely because generosity, morbidity, consumerism and self-interest become almost impossible to separate. He can perform an extravagant act of kindness while simultaneously calculating its eventual return. That is pure Sedaris: goodness contaminated just enough to become recognisably human.

The Foreigner

Travel provides another solution to the problem of success because it repeatedly deprives Sedaris of mastery. To travel is, in some respects, to become incompetent again. Language is especially useful to him for this reason. Sedaris has long understood that speaking a foreign language reduces the adult self to something approximate. Intelligence exceeds vocabulary; personality becomes trapped behind grammar. His earlier French-language essays made this discrepancy central to their comedy, and The Land and Its People continues the fascination through his obsessive use of Duolingo. The app’s chatbot even becomes an unlikely recipient of information about his family.

There is something more serious underneath the joke. Foreignness makes visible all the cultural assumptions that fluency conceals. At home, we rarely notice the hundreds of rules we obey automatically; abroad, the obvious becomes mysterious again. Sedaris thrives in this condition.

His journeys are consequently less travel writing than exercises in estrangement. Guatemala, Kenya and Vatican City are not presented as destinations to be authoritatively explained. The joke is frequently the American attempting to navigate them. This matters because the traditional travel writer has so often assumed the authority to describe “the land and its people” to readers back home. Sedaris quietly reverses the gaze. The traveller is every bit as peculiar as the people he observes.

Cruelty and Tenderness

Sedaris’s humour has always contained cruelty. This is not an accidental defect in the work but one of its aesthetic conditions. Comedy requires discrimination: something must be selected as ridiculous. Contemporary culture sometimes prefers humour whose moral credentials have been established in advance, but Sedaris belongs to an older comic tradition in which discomfort is part of the transaction.

He notices vanity because he possesses vanity. He recognises snobbery because he understands its pleasures. He detects selfishness because he is willing to describe his own. What is particularly interesting about The Land and Its People is that this cruelty increasingly coexists with tenderness.

“Cool Mom,” an essay about his mother, Sharon, is perhaps the clearest example. Sedaris takes the faintly ridiculous contemporary language of online parenting advice and measures his late mother against a list of principles describing what supposedly constitutes a “cool mom.” The conceit ought to produce satire. Instead, it gradually becomes something much more affecting.

This is mature Sedaris at his best. He approaches emotion sideways. Rather than announcing grief, he constructs an elaborate joke and discovers grief waiting at the end of it. The technique protects the writing from sentimentality while allowing genuine feeling to emerge. Indeed, the jokes often make the sadness more powerful because they delay our recognition of what the essay is actually about.

An American Essayist

There is something distinctly American about Sedaris’s achievement. The personal essay occupies a curious territory between literature and conversation. At its worst, it can become little more than autobiography in miniature: something happened to me, and here is what I learned.

Sedaris almost never tells us what he learned, and this refusal is one reason his essays endure. There is no compulsory revelation, no therapeutic conclusion and very little pressure upon experience to become inspirational. People remain difficult. Families remain unresolved. Ageing continues. The dead stay dead. A journey may produce nothing more profound than an anecdote about underwear, and that may be enough.

In this respect, Sedaris belongs to a tradition extending beyond comic writing towards writers such as James Thurber and Dorothy Parker: stylists for whom humour is not an interruption of serious thought but a method of serious thought. Comedy can reveal social reality precisely because it refuses the language society uses to describe itself. Sedaris listens for the discrepancy.

Keep Your Eyes Open

The Land and Its People is not flawless. Twenty-eight essays inevitably produce variations in intensity, and occasionally the familiar Sedaris machinery becomes visible: encounter, irritation, escalation, perfectly calibrated outrageous observation. Some jokes edge towards the “grumpy old man” persona rather more than they illuminate their subjects.

But perhaps this is itself part of the interest. We have been reading Sedaris long enough to watch the comic persona age. The young outsider has become the affluent older man irritated by the world, aware of death, surrounded by objects he can finally afford and people he increasingly cannot afford to lose. To pretend otherwise would be artistically dishonest.

What remains remarkably intact is his curiosity, and that may ultimately be more important than youth, anger or even comic sharpness. Sedaris continues to look. He notices the passenger on the train, the peculiar phrase, the animal behaving strangely, the absurd medical appliance, the badly designed system and the embarrassing family habit. Where most of us allow familiarity to render the world invisible, he keeps converting it back into spectacle.

Sedaris has spent his career demonstrating that ordinary life is only ordinary when insufficient attention is being paid to it. That is why the apparent triviality of his material should never be confused with trivial writing. A Duolingo lesson, a hip replacement, an expensive cape, a dead friend’s name in an address book: these are small things, but lives are overwhelmingly composed of small things. The great events are exceptional. Breakfast, irritation, jokes, shopping, family telephone calls and the people sitting beside us constitute most of existence.

His achievement has been to understand that the comic essay need not transcend this material. It simply needs to look at it closely enough. In The Land and Its People, Sedaris is older, richer and perhaps a little crankier, but he remains one of our sharpest observers of the gulf between the civilised people we imagine ourselves to be and the peculiar creatures we actually are.

★★★★★ — Acerbic, observant and unexpectedly moving, The Land and Its People is not a reinvention of Sedaris but a compelling demonstration of why the Sedaris essay has become a literary form almost entirely its own.