I always thouht this was one of the dumber stories to appear in TNR in the last couple of years.  Headline:  Comedian exagerates for comedic effect.  As my daughter would say "duh!"  I can't believe there was anyone who thought these stories were true to begin with.

Alex Heard's article seems longer ago than a mere 14 months. His piece was in, I believe, the first or second issue of the revamped, newly bi-monthly TNR. It is obvious that Sedaris spins things for comic material. Makes me wonder how much "truthiness" there was to his hilarious New Yorker piece on sitting next to that woman from hell on the flight that they both took.

This just in: Story told by humorist not entirely true, or even possibly made up. In related developing news, sources say the horse might not actually have walked into the bar, and the president and the pope may never have been on the same crashing flight together with only one parachute.

Breaking news to add to this fast-moving story: Some of Mark Twain's anecdotes also cannot be verified. One source close to the Twain camp accuses Garrison Keillor of fabricating whole cities. Bear with us, we're just being handed this note ... Yes, it now appears that key details of Andy Griffith's memoir of his first football game also cannot be verified.

A new bulletin says authorities now suspect that guy at your last party who told the good story that everyone laughed at may have exaggerated key details and invented dialogue. We will continue to monitor developments in all aspects of this breaking story.

LOL, Rhubarbs...perfect comment on that story...

The New Yorker takes non-fiction articles seriously, even the amusing ones, except for Shouts & Murmurs, of course. They even have fact checkers. I guess I am old-fashioned enough to take the position that there is plenty of funny material out there to not have to spin it and twist it and invent new material to combine the actual with. I was impressed with the New Journalism for about fifteen minutes back then but just about all of it looks very dated now (Tom Wolfe's Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers has outraced the hourglass, but that is an exception). Hunter Thompson was funny when I was a teenager. The New Journalism repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second time, as tragedy. I know that I adhere to an impossible ideal; even in serious journalism we get the Stephen Glasses, the Janet Cookes and the Jayson Blairs. Let them spin, let me and my kind critique.

Well, of course one should be skeptical of the leaky truths exhibited in humor writing... but come on now... y'all just ruined a week I've been looking forward to for a long time now.

Man, if TNR keeps running these shocking exposes, I'm going to have to be a lot more careful about what I tell girls at bars.  

Next on the agenda: Dave Barry. The shocking expose of a journalist who writes for the Miami Herald, and, who, apparently, has written many untrue things!

Obviously Alex Heard felt betrayed when reading Sedaris' work and actually "thought" it was real. Any reading of Sedaris' work by anyone paying attention would realize that David polishes his stories to such a degree that the kernel of the story lays buried beneath the colorings and exaggerations that every personal anecdote is susceptible too. Listening to David's voice does anyone actually believe that he can remember with vivid detail the happenings in his home at age 4 or 5? I read Naked with an understanding that they were personal stories told with a humorists eye and ear for knowing how to tell a good yarn.

I mean, I and my cousins have heard our fathers' childhood stories over the years and despite the relative consistency, details change or get exaggerated adding to the myths yet we understand them to be relatively true and equally blown out of proportion. Did my father really set fire to a tree to flush his neighbors out of their tree house? Did he and a friend really did a pit filled with broken glass ands scrap pieces of wood to "trap" the friend's older brother in it so they could beat him with baseball bats in revenge for being picked on? Who knows... but knowing my family there is some truth to those stories even all the facts are slightly ajar for the umpteenth retelling during Thanksgiving.

Besides if you're calling yourself a humorist the last thing you'll be doing is tell droll stories in limply written fastidiously flat detail.

David Sedaris is fantastic, but he wasn't straightforward about the factual content of his stories, and his description of the stories as true made them more interesting.  One judges fiction and non-fiction differently, and he left the impression that his stories were of the latter variety.  I think that the TNR piece was a good one.  I don't think Sedaris committed a grave sin, as much as a serious gaffe, and I wouldn't guess that he set out to deliberately deceive his audience.  But, let's be honest.  He is not a comedian doing a stand-up routine, nor is he plainly adopting a made-up persona.  He is a "humorist" writing essays about his life which are ostensibly true.  No doubt some would guess that the stories are truthy or realish, rather than true or real, but others would not, and he should be honest about that as he is doing.  There was absolutely nothing wrong with TNR looking into it.

C'mon people, why does humor have to be fictional? The comic material that surrounds us is hugely finite, if not infinite in its variations. There will always be a place for a Dave Barry. I like him immensely. But he does write - and has written - frequently that "I am not making this up" when he retails something factual. The non-fiction section of The New Yorker is supposed to consist of "I am not making this up" pieces, again excepting S & M (I just realized that abbreviation is ambiguous but oh well). So dab, would you take it laying down if it transpired that D. Barry made up even the Iamntu parts of his shtick?

what libref said 1:01pm. Elegant post. This is esp shrewd (like the marxian adaptation, btw):

"The New Journalism repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second time, as tragedy."

"So dab, would you take it laying [sic] down if it transpired that D. Barry made up even the Iamntu parts of his shtick?"

Eh. To my mind the IAMTU clause is the exception that proves the rule. All other times we can assume he is exaggerating for comedic effect. I remember being in high school and not liking it when a couple of great storytellers I knew would exaggerate stories i had been a part of. That's not [exactly] how it happened!! I would think. But here is the thing, the essence of what they were saying was true and people found it entertaining. Why should I be the fact-police? If a reporter exaggerates, I mind (a lot), but if David Sedaris does, well, I basically expected that all along. Have you read his books? Or his stuff in the New Yorker? Or heard him talk? I mean, come on, it should be obvious even to a crusty pedant.

LR:  "I was impressed with the New Journalism for about fifteen minutes back then but just about all of it looks very dated now (Tom Wolfe's Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers has outraced the hourglass, but that is an exception)."

I'm relieved to state that I re-read Wolfe's 1973 collection "The New Journalism" a year ago and found several of them (esp. Robert Christgau's "Beth Ann and Macrobioticism") to be far from dated (except in the most superficial sense, of course).  Still, after all this time, many were sharp, convincing, and often remarkable pieces of writing.  Also, Wolfe's introductory essay on the origins and characteristics of the sub-genre is well worth a new look, as he grasps in a visceral way how reporters and other journalists took the techniques of fiction and transformed them into tools for non-fiction writing.

Ironyroad: I should have been more clear. Tom Wolfe, in general, is worth rereading.

Teplukhin2you: Thanks much. You know your Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Impressive.

I remember that piece. I thought, "aww! Well, that makes sense. The scene with his mom and his teacher in the first story in Naked seemed exaggerated. But I really hope the one with the dirty book with all the misspellings is as true as can be. Especially the part about Amy using it as the text for her doll classroom." I didn't feel cheated or outraged at all. Maybe because nobody ever claimed the stories were completely made up. And maybe because I don't feel I have the right to know the whole unvarnished truth about the Sedaris family.

Yeah, I'm actually with LR on this one.  If you write a piece, however humorous--and I must confess, Mr. Sedaris's jokes are wasted on me; I find his stereotyped bitchiness boring in the extreme--stating as a matter of fact that you worked at the Dorothea Dix State Mental Hospital and describe in great detail several of the more grotesque goings on that you witnessed there, does no one believe it makes a difference whether or not you actually worked there?

But who would confuse David for actually being a journalist? Let alone a part of the New Journalism movement? He's simply a humorist and essayist in the fictive-non-fictive. I read his stuff as simple entertainment and the embroidery of his prose to tell a story is what he's about. Anyone who's actually wasting time fact-checking David Sedaris or parsing his words for some recognizable pattern of New Journalism needs to find a better hobby or at least stop pretending it matters in the world.

David Sedaris' prose is not New Journalism. What the Bush Administration practiced in the run-up to the war. Now THAT is New Journalism.

Singlespeed: I never contended that David Sedaris is a New Jornalist. He is indeed a humorist. The Bush run-up to the war was not New Journalism, either. The best of this genre gave color to and an excellent sense of what was going on, eg., Wolfe's Mau-Mauing. The Bushies did none of that; they just put reverse spin on everything that they touched.

Gotcha. I suppose I confused the sidetalk of New Journalism within the Sedaris's non-fictive biographical exaggerations that he was practicing a form of New Journalism. I've mixed feelings about Tom Wolfe. Having read the Right Stuff and From Our House to Bauhaus, I enjoyed the first thoroughly and it read very much as a novel, the second came off a bit pedantic.

I would argue the Bushies trafficked in a perverse form of New Journalism in creating complete fiction passed off as fact then inserting it into the media stream. Telling a kind of alternate reality fiction in place of the realities of the world. But then it just could be they were practicing self-delusion as press release.