There's something about David

At 56, he really should know better. But it would seem no one is safe from David Sedaris’ mischief.

“When you go on a book tour, you usually have a ‘media escort’ in the United States,” he explains. “It’s usually a doctor’s wife type. She picks you up at the airport and takes you to all your appointments and to the bookstore and back to the airport the next day. And these people know to expect anything from writers.

“SoonetimeIgettoacityonmytour, and there’s this doctor’s wife waiting for me with this sign in her hands. I walked up to her, took my suitcase and threw it on the ground and said ‘Pick that up!’, and kept walking. “I turned to look behind me, and she’d picked it up and was trotting after me! I said ‘Oh God, I’m just kidding!’”

After years of one-off appearances at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Sedaris is no stranger to Scotland’s capital. But when he spoke to Fest from the West Sussex home he shares with long-term boyfriend Hugh Hamrick, he seemed am- bivalent about his identity as a comedian.

“I never think about the way that [the show] is framed, because I’m not doing anything different from what I’d do in the US. I’m just reading out loud and answer- ing some questions,” he says. “An American producer who does a lot of my shows in the US just said to me a couple of years ago, ‘Oh do you wanna try doing something at the Fringe?’ and I thought, ‘Oh... okay!’ Just like that,” he laughs. “But I don’t think of myself as a comedian.”

Sedaris’s autobiographical vignettes have been a staple of the modern reader’s bookshelf since his essay SantaLand Diaries was read on National Public Radio in 1992. But in his new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, he takes a partial departure from examining his own life.

In recent years, Sedaris has become, perhaps grudgingly, sucked into politics. In a 2008 interview, he claimed that he and Hamrick were “the sort of couple who wouldn’t get married”, regardless of legislative changes in the US and Europe. The moderate backlash Sedaris felt from the gay community is perhaps the very thing he has always intended to avoid; his monologues, he insists, are useful vehicles for conveying social messages without getting preachy.

“Usually when I go on tour—which I do twice a year in the US, every Fall and every

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Spring—I bring a little piece of political satire with me. Something relevant to what’s been happening in the news. But with issues like gay marriage – I don’t want to write an essay about it, right? I feel like my audience voted the way I did. I didn’t want to be preaching to the converted. But sometimes you can just write something satirically that communicates ideas about politics.”

But, as ever, Sedaris’ real focus is on the poetic comedy of experience. And today, a recent 62-city book tour seems present in his mind.

“As a writer,” he says, “you can be a baby if you want. In bookstores I’m always shocked because I’m always willing to sign stock. I’ll sign as much stock as you want me to. Like at the end of the night they put dozens or hundreds of books in front of you, and you just sign your name. It doesn’t take any time at all. And people are terrified to ask you to sign stock! They think you’re gonna have a fit!”

“One night on my last tour in the US I signed books for nine-and-a-half hours. That’s not even including the reading, that’s just sitting on my ass and signing books,” he says, with that now-legendary deadpan tone. “And I never once said I was exhausted.” Proof, perhaps, that Se- daris has the stamina needed for his Fringe transition.