I just saw my favourite writer, David Sedaris, read at Massey Hall in Toronto. This is the equivalent of a Grateful Dead fan — and I mean a real Deadhead — finally seeing the band live after decades of saying, "Aw, they'll never play here, man."

I don't go to live shows much. I have never seen Cirque de Soleil, finding contortionists as repellent as circus clowns. But I hear they fling themselves about a bit.

The great thing about Sedaris is that he doesn't bother with the theatrics. The man stands onstage and reads out loud.

He is also recession proof. Even as the North American public-speaking circuit withers and speakers' fees sink to dinner and a night at the Days Inn, Sedaris draws large crowds — 30 cities in 30 nights — who don't ask for much.

Our pleasures are simple, our needs are few. We want to hear a smart person talk.

The oddity of intelligence

It has come to this. I will pay 50 bucks to sit in a chair for 90 minutes and see a small man in a pool of light on a distant stage talk intelligently about the weirdness of daily life.

I enjoy this; it also causes me pain that intelligent people are now oddities, like bearded ladies in travelling carnivals.

Simultaneous pain and pleasure is what distinguishes a Sedaris audience. I have never before had the sensation of being in a hall where everyone shared my sensibility, that I could be friends with all of them. Or at least buy them drinks and recite my favourite lines, none of which the CBC would let me repeat here. Trust me, they're filthy.

Until the early 1990s, Sedaris cleaned apartments in New York City. He thought, as I do, that this was a fine and honourable way of making a living. Then he wrote an essay about the worst job he ever had.

Imagine being a grown man working as a Christmas elf at Macy's. Something will split your unconquerable soul, whether it's the urinating children, the white parents demanding they not get a black Santa this year, or the child missing a nose who is asked by a clueless Saint Nick, "And what would you like for Christmas, little girl?"

'I am really a dancer'

For Sedaris, the breaker was the pretense by the short (the only qualification for the job) adult elves in green velvet smocks maintaining that they hadn't hit rock bottom. As in "I'm really a dancer, you know."

After Sedaris read The Santaland Diaries on National Public Radio, people said what they always say about Sedaris — "I just heard that thing again and it still cracks me up" — and now he is a writer and big breadwinner who lives anywhere but the Carolinas where he grew up.

Sedaris is regularly described as an "irreverent" and "wicked" master of observational humour. He is not. In his six books, he simply investigates strangeness and it quickly becomes clear that everyone is strange.

You don't believe me? Look around you. Think about it.

Read on

Sedaris did an unusual thing that night at Massey Hall: he praised another writer, the American essayist George Saunders. So I read Saunders' latest book, The Braindead Megaphone and said what I imagine everyone says, "well this is good but it's not as good as Sedaris."

Saunders writes comic essays, too, but he's a family man and despite his MacArthur Foundation "genius award," a bit of a sentimentalist; this softens his focus.

Sedaris never flinches.

He will do odd things for copy, as writers do, and invariably have a worse time than even he had imagined. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, he takes French classes in Paris and is attacked by the teacher. Frenchless, he then misunderstands a nurse's instructions and ends up in a hospital waiting room wearing only his underpants, a mistake, he says quietly to himself, that anyone might make.

In Naked, he hitchhikes to Oregon as a teenager and is "rescued" by a born-again cursing Christian after working in a nightmarish apple cannery with a crazy man named Curly who has an impressive and terrifying collection of wall-mounted sex implements in his trailer.

The essay ends with Sedaris huddled in a wet ditch, wearing a pink lady's parka stolen in haste, thinking, gee, how could I have been so wrong about Curly?

Hold on to your towels For a story, Sedaris will go to a nudist colony and discover that the rule about sitting on a towel at all times is there for a very good reason.

Yes, it's all observational, as Sedaris' publisher timidly suggests. But the humour is also harsh, as hard on the author as on everyone he encounters.

Sedaris is gay, which was not pleasant for a boy in North Carolina in the 1970s nor indeed in many places now, including at the Obama inauguration, I hear.

He also had obsessive-compulsive disorder, which meant, as he was growing up, licking light switches and making high-pitched tiny noises at the back of his throat, disrupting class, dinner and every other daily thing.

He found class warfare fascinating (his father, who worked at IBM, was horrified to have to move the family to the South).

Sedaris, whose early life was arguably tragic, has always been on the outside, watching and assessing.

No easy consolation

Sedaris quoted Saunders to the audience. "Humour is what happens when we're told the truth quicker and more directly than we're used to. The comic is the truth stripped of the habitual, the cushioning, the easy consolation."

Shut out by the mainstream, good writers like him have snuck in the side door. It is now a Sedaris-welcoming world.

This is a fine thing. The cultural megaphone that Saunders refers to in the title of his latest book is no longer held solely by who he calls the brain-dead but by smart people, young-ish writers and performers.

I try hard to convince writing students that it's better to use the megaphone truthfully, the way writers like Sedaris do. For one thing, it's funnier. It worries me that they seem unconvinced.