Holidays on Ice
Oh dear, this has not aged well. I remember hearing much of this material on NPR years ago, including all of the SantaLand Diaries. And thinking it was hilarious. Clever humor, bitchy waspish queen tearing down American society and exposing all its hypocrisy and banality. Hilarious!
Now some 30 years later it hasn't aged well. Some of the pieces are outright offensive. The low point is in "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!" where not only do they mock a Vietnamese-American young woman for acting like a prostitute but they even do a little stereotyped Asian accent and a riff on the Full Metal Jacket hooker scene. I can see past the dated racist humor but then the rest of it isn't clever enough to keep my interest. What should be funny about Season's Greetings is the awful woman writing the letter, you could imagine this piece being a sharp parody of her ignorance and cruelty. And it is that, somewhat, but most of the humor is more us playing along with her hating all the other people in her life.
SantaLand Diaries is the biggest piece. I still like the shape of it, him skewering the Macy's Santa machine and this kind of synthetic crowd experience jollity. I appreciate the malice of him taking weeks of humiliating work as a mall elf and making it funny. But it's not quite funny enough. A lot of his jokes are at the expense of the New Yorkers who are going there, folks who are having a rough day too and just want a little Christmas joy. Sure some of them are awful, or self-centered, but I could have done with a little more empathy and a little less poison.
The whole gag of Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol is that kids Christmas pageants are terrible. That could be funny! But instead it just comes off as mean, either the humor is too subtle for me to get (unlikely) or just not sharp enough.
Dinah, the Christmas Whore works better. Its a somewhat sympathetic portrayal of Dinah, the prostitute, and his mother treating her with kindness. It works kind of like Burroughs' Junkie's Christmas, making an underdog a folk hero.
The pieces I liked best me additions Hachette made in the 2008 audiobook I listened to. "Six to Eight Black Men" is the real standout and is still hilarious. He's making fun of weird old racist Dutch traditions, a safe target. And he humanizes them by comparing to weird American traditions. The humor is all just in the weirdness of it, something totally relatable. "The Monster Mash" is also quite weird and interesting, his experiences in an autopsy office.
I think originally I enjoyed these stories because it seemed very gay. Now I'm struggling to hear anything gay at all in it. If I wasn't listening to the audiobook for an LGBT book club probably wouldn't have considered it gay at all. Sedaris' has that arch humor at a remove like the great gay comics of the 70s but that doesn't hit very hard in 2024. That's a measure of how much society has normalized this kind of gay writing and voice.
Note: I listened to the 2008 Libby audiobook version which at 4h20m has some extra content not in other versions.