David Sedaris is in fine form in his new essay collection, The Land and Its People—if you like his brand of grouchy, gay-Larry-David-style joke-making . . . this book is less grim than Happy-Go-Lucky and Calypso, as Sedaris seems to be following the advice of a writing teacher he had back in 1990, a British woman named Freda Garmaise, who told him the only rule of writing comedy is NOT "don't punch down" but in fact "always be as tasteless as possible"—so there are lots of tasteless punch-lines and images in this book, and even some tasteless jokes in his essay about meeting the Pope—and, as with most David Sedaris books, I inhaled this thing and finished it in two days . . . I wish I could savor the humor, but his sentence-writing is so adept, fluid, and surprising that I just want to keep going—and I hope Sedaris keeps going—and I have the same wish for Larry David-- I hope Sedaris keeps going, even if his material gets thin, because I like his writing style, his tone, and his tasteless jokes.
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