An overly simplified view of the World

Based on the blog entry by David Sedaris for The New Yorker, found in http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/19/070219fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=2

David Sedaris is most famous for his collection of essays and memoirs, where he recounts episodes of his life that would be seemingly ordinary, were it not for his original and humorous approach in telling them. The case is also so for this blog article Sedaris wrote for The New Yorker. The article's socially aware humor and argumentation will be discussed in the following paragraphs.

It took me a second read to identify the author's actual purpose for writing the entry. Sedaris criticizes the human need to continuously use stereotypical labels to assort roles for people in society. When dealing with homosexual couples, however, the relationship dynamics is suddenly not so familiar, and identifying "who's the man" becomes a tricky ordeal. Sedaris claims this is particularly hard because we "can't imagine any system besides [our] own". And he deems it almost pathetic that many people (supposedly) spend hours contemplating the dynamics of a homosexual relationship attempting to classify the individuals as something they can relate with.

The tone of the text suffers slight changes as the text develops. The first three quarters of the piece take on a humorous approach to the "water problem" in Normandy: they do not warn you when the latter is being shut off. Sedaris makes the reader at least chuckle as he describes his ways around it: "a saucepan of chicken broth will do for shaving", and "a lesser champagne" can be poured into the toilet tank. Unfortunately (or fortunately, for humor's sake), finding a way around making coffee proves to be a harder task: "a sort of Catch-22, as in order to think straight I needed caffeine, and in order to make that happen I needed to think straight."

But to humor us with the water problem is far from being the purpose of the piece. In order to ease into the ultimate point he wants to make, Sedaris tells a story about "a couple he once met." At this point it is interesting to note his assumption of a specific audience: the reader must be liberal enough not to be offended by Sedaris' blatant allusions to smoking weed, nor to the ubitquitous references to his own homosexuality (as retrograde as it sounds, admittedly not everyone is okay with gays).

We get a feel for the type of humor the story employs once Sedaris mentions what his first priority when visiting his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina is: to "get high and stay that way." It is in this quest for marijuana that he, together with his brother Paul, meet the dealer "Little Mike" and Beth (the couple originally alluded to). Dysfunctional in all possible ways, the couple subjects Sedaris to a series of absurd witnessings, such as hearing a remote control being casually referred to as "Nigger." When Beth finds out Sedaris is gay, however, she finally takes on an interest in him and asks the question that wraps the entire story with his argument:
" 'So this boyfriend,' she said. 'Let me ask, which one of you is the woman?' ” ..

With the end of this story, Sedaris takes on a different tone and becomes a more serious narrator, having concluded the background information he wanted his audience to have. He uses the woman's genuine (but perhaps exceedingly blunt) question to make the more broader statement that people in general "seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it." Indeed, it need not be an uneducated drug dealer's wife to have this doubt. Her query represents that of an entire population of individuals who seem to rely on this simplistic view of people and relationships in order to organize the world in their own heads. For homosexual relationships, learning "who cries harder when the cat dies" or "which one spends the most time in the bathroom" seems to (erroneously) suffice many people who attempt to understand the relationship dynamics.