You might have thought he had milked his past dry in his previous collections, 'Barrel Fever' and 'Naked.' But until now he somehow neglected to mention his stint as a college-dropout speed-freak performance artist: In a time when bestselling 'humorous' books by the likes of Tim Allen and Paul Reiser leave one's sides intact, Sedaris is a prime candidate for funniest writer alive. He, too, examines the ridiculousness of those around him, but he does it with affectionate curiosity and not a jot of shame about his own mischievous weirdness he comes across as equal parts Perelman and Pee-wee Herman. Though Sedaris does contribute to the New Yorker, he is not, like his famed forebears, an urbane cocktail-party curmudgeon. Perelman and Robert Benchley, who spun their random observations into epically loopy fantasias. 'Me Talk Pretty One Day,' Sedaris' new collection of essays, fits loosely into the tradition pioneered by those literary wags of an earlier era, like S.J. Obviously some audience-gaffing specialist had determined that nobody would say no, as if the real question were 'Do you like being happy?' I like to think that if one of the saps from HBO had accosted David Sedaris - the only professional comic, if you can call him that, who consistently makes me happy - he might have replied, slowly and with wide eyes, 'Do you like tragedy?' On sunny afternoons, without fail, a small troop of hapless interns with HBO brooches pinned to their polo shirts would fan out over the grounds, fling themselves into the paths of innocent pedestrians and bubble, 'Hi! Do you like comedy?' I never actually saw anybody take a swing at one of them, but they were cruising for it. I used to go to work across the street from a lovely park in midtown Manhattan.

Me look pretty one day