Me Talk Pretty One Day

1. How did Sedaris take a potentially boring experience - auditing a beginner's language class - and turn it into a humorous essay? An interviewer once wrote that Sedaris's signature is "deadpan" humor. What is deadpan humor? Identify - and characterize the effectiveness of - examples of it in "Me Talk Pretty One Day."

Through skepticism, Sedaris made his essay humorous, even though it had a potentially boring topic. Sedaris leaves much room for doubt when making judgments, and then fills in those gaps with his own speculations, often times accompanied by outrageous remarks and blandly unobvious statements often times marked with sarcasm. This is tied into "deadpan" humor. "Deadpan" humor is really a bland sense of humor, of which is often times unpredictable and uncalled for. It is quite effectively used, because of the that way it comes across, it seems awkward, yet strangely it fits in. An example of this could be how Sedaris described his French teacher, as he said she had an accent. He sort of exaggerated it using random gibberish in place of her accentuated French, such as "fiuscrzsaticiwelmun"(276).

2. Describe how Sedaris reveals parts of himself throughout the story. By the end we know a fair amount about the speaker. How do we gain this knowledge?

Sedaris is revealing much of himself throughout this essay. He is rather discreet in a way, and disguises it using humor. Throughout the essay, he is expressing faults and blemishes of sorts. For example, his random use of gibberish when quoting his teacher may reflect on his misunderstandings of what his teacher was telling him, and that possibly he had a limited knowledge of French and that is what the language sounded like to him. Also, he says he appeared old when he makes the statement that his classmates were all "young, attractive, and well dressed..."(274). The reason as to why we are able to learn so much from this writing style is simple. Often times, what he is joking about is relevant to the matter at hand, and that the way he portrays it with each joke shows how he views such issues personally.