Sedaris vs. McLean

David Sedaris and Stuart McLean are both writers who specialize in humour. There are both similarities and differences between Sedaris' SantaLand Diaries and McLean's Polly Anderson's Christmas Party. Both pieces use humour as a way to engage the reader. By doing this, both writers pull the reader into their stories. Humour is also used by both writers to help the reader relate to the characters. Humour also causes the reader to empathize with the main character, namely Dave Sedaris himself and Stuart McLean's principal character, Dave. This in turn creates a stronger bond between the reader and the character.

Sedaris and McLean also use misfortune and stupidity to create humour, but they each do this in different ways. Sedaris focuses mainly on the stupidity of other people, such as the two loud New Jersey families that come to visit Santa at Macy's. McLean, on the other hand, uses Dave's numerous small misfortunes, which morph into larger problems, to create humour. Sedaris has a wicked sense of sarcasm, and uses it to his full advantage to create a humorous tone for his piece. For example, when Sedaris is asked why he would like to work for UPS, "I answered that I wanted to work for UPS because I like the brown uniforms. What did they want me to say?" This tone in turn creates a mocking, more serious tone than that of McLean. McLean's lighter, more trivial style of humour tends to state an obvious fact, and then contradict that fact in a humorous way. When Dave receives a note from the Ministry of Transportation saying that, "Before we can change the category code on your Driver's Licence, we must receive notification from an opthamologist of the change in your vision.," the next line reads, "Dave's vision hadn't changed in twenty years."

Although Sedaris and McLean both use humour as a way to make the reader empathize with their characters, but the way they each go about creating it is vastly different. These two different styles of humour result in the creation of two unique styles of writing, with Mclean's being lighter and Sedaris' more serious. These styles of humour and subsequent writing styles show that there are both similarities and differences between Sedaris' and McLean's work.