"When you are engulfed in flames" by David Sedaris

This is a book of short, humorous, essays which reflect on the oddnesses in the way we humans interact with one another. In some ways these are like the scripts for a stand-up comedian of the 'observational humour' variety. There aren't many jokes, the humour depends on a slow build. I heard Sedaris read one of these stories on the radio and I laughed aloud several times. Although so far as I can tell what he read was word for word identical with how it appears, I only laughed aloud once or twice at all the other stories in the book. I guess it is the way he tells them. Or perhaps reading is different.

Given the nature of the stories it is difficult to select single lines that give any idea of how funny Sedaris can be but here are a few:

• "A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection." (p 57)
• "I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy's name" (p 65)
• "Mess with me, and I'll stick my foot so far up your ass I'll lose my shoe." (p 79)
• "'Most people, most humans, receive a present and say thank you', I told her
•        'Not when they get garbage like that, they don't'" (p 95)
• "here the pathologists used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages." (p103)
• "It's funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers." (p 113)
• "One gets an idea of the tireless, hardworking immigrant who hits the ground running - or, more often, driving." (p 162)
• "Take the crows that descend each winter on the surrounding fields and pluck the eyes out of newborn lambs." (p 170)
• "If it played non-stop in a skanky-smelling dorm room, he's got it." (p 173)
• "I could light a cigarette without thinking. Now I don't light it and think so hard about what I'm missing that there isn't room for anything else." (p 283)

"I can't make out the list of ingredients, but they taste vaguely of penis" (p 287)

July 2017; 22 stories; 310 pages

I have also read Let's explore diabetes with owls by the same author.