Last Laugh

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In his commencement address to Oberlin College’s 2018 graduating class, later published as an essay, David Sedaris offered some advice: be yourself. Unless, he clarified, being yourself means behaving like a woman he’d encountered several years earlier at one of his readings. At the time, he was helping to recruit bone marrow donors for the charitable foundation Love Hope Strength, and at his readings, he had begun allowing attendees to jump the book-signing line if they registered. As long as volunteers were under 50, the cut off age for donors, all they had to do was fill out a form and allow a cheek swab to match them with patients waiting for bone marrow transplants. Sedaris would usually get about 50 people to register out of an audience of 2,000. It doesn’t sound like much, he told the Oberlin graduates, but in a 40-city tour, it adds up. It was good work, and easy enough—until a woman in Napa, California, accused him of ageism.

The woman appeared to Sedaris to be around 65, but she wanted the quick path to the front of the line and threatened to sue for discrimination if he didn’t let her jump the queue. It was a small theater, and 20 people had signed up as donors, people willing to undergo a painful procedure to save a stranger’s life. “That, to me,” Sedaris writes in his essay, “is real heroism.” And then, he continues, you have this woman, wanting to get to the front of the line as quickly as possible so she can leave, masking her hurry as a fight against injustice. “Now that’s an asshole, a person you never want to be,” he writes. If you are like that woman, try not to be true to yourself.

Sedaris’s pushy woman made me think of aggressive drivers, who, by flashing their lights as they bear down on you, give the impression that you are in the wrong for following the speed limit. They’ll zoom right up behind you and ride your tail until they can pass. What do they think they are accomplishing by crowding the driver in front of them? One Saturday evening in early June, a friend and I were heading home on a four-lane, divided highway on the hilly coast of Cantabria. A small blue subcompact came hurtling up on a boxy silver SUV in the passing lane, which was itself passing a sedan in the right lane. The blue car got very close. I thought of how a tailgater will often cause me to slow down instead of speed up. On the face of it, this is a reasonable response. Slower is safer. But slowing down might also enrage the other driver, someone already prone to dangerous decisions at high speeds. So my prudence isn’t really prudence, but a disguised counterattack. You push, I’ll push back, I’ve thought at those times, frowning into my rearview mirror. And now I wondered if the driver of the silver car would react the same way. “That blue car’s way too close,” I commented to my friend, who was driving.

He kept his eyes on the road. Traffic was fluid but steady. It was drizzling. It was dusk. He grunted, as if the other driver’s conduct were not worth commenting on.

The blue car moved still closer. It appeared to be about two feet from the silver car. Both cars were going around 65 miles an hour. The speed limit was 75.

“Just look at that!” I exclaimed.

How many cars, I wondered, would be caught up in the accident if the blue car rammed the silver one. Would we?

I had rooted for the silver car to keep to its course and not let the blue car intimidate it, just as, reading Sedaris’s essay, I had rooted for him to stick to his guns and let only donors jump the queue. But now I hoped that the silver car would do the only sensible thing and quickly get out of the way.

Watching the drama from the relative safety of the other lane, I reflected that fear has to reach a certain intensity before it can overcome our natural tendency to resist pressure. Fear of a scene, fear of appearing foolish, fear of dying in a car crash. Was Sedaris’s woman under some pressure herself? Pressure that she was resisting with her demands and her threats? Pressure of aging, of losing power, perhaps? She should have accepted the inevitable. Sedaris himself should have bowed to the impossibility of a uniformly well-mannered audience. The SUV driver should have bowed to the importance of avoiding a collision. And the blue subcompact driver? The blue driver—a man, I feel quite certain—should have thanked his lucky stars he didn’t cause an accident.

At the Napa book signing, Sedaris faced the woman who had threatened him. Whether he had made her wait her turn or let her cut, I couldn’t tell. He signed her book, writing, “Yore an awful woman.”

She laughed.

He told her that he really meant it—truly, she was a bad person.

She laughed all the harder.

“That’s the drawback to writing humor,” Sedaris says in his essay. “People always think you’re kidding.”

Maybe not in this case, though. His reaction to her couldn’t have come as a surprise to the woman. Maybe she just wanted the last laugh.

As for the driver of the blue car, I couldn’t believe that even when the SUV slid into the other lane, he didn’t ease up but almost shaved it as he shot by. “That driver shouldn’t be allowed to get away with driving like that!” I told my friend as we proceeded down the darkening highway. Someone should teach him a lesson, but I’m glad no one tried to. It would have been nothing to laugh about.

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