Holidays on Ice: Featuring Six New Stories
Written and Narrated By: David Sedaris
Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
Funny and irreverent, but oftentimes just plain mean
I chose this audiobook to add to what our little audiobook club was going to listen to for Christmas as it’s short, and I’d read it in print EONS ago. I remember laughing myself silly at the twisted irreverence, the non-PC themes, and such all. But what really swayed me when I picked up this in audiobook form was that Sedaris himself narrates it, plus there’s another woman, plus his hilarious sister Amy throws in the bellowed swaggering lines here and there. What’s not to love?
Anyway, I’m writing this before our club meets so I can’t tell you what my mom and my sister thought about it, but I will say that I interjected to them earlier that I felt I had to apologize a bit for what seemed irreverence taken too far and crossing the line over into occasionally offensive.
I think it’s like this, see. There’s one story: the “Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family” one where the narrator I believe makes it kind or more offensive than if you’d just read it in print and used your own mind-voice. Cuz see, in it a family is surprised when Dad’s stint in Vietnam yielded something nobody knew about: a daughter. Pretty funny, okay. But then the narrator voices the daughter as some ignorant and slutty Vietnamese hooker-type, and her vocabulary is filled with words like: Big Bird, shiny, five-dollah. It was funny reading it, but listening to it with the shrill tones and screechy tones? I felt it came off as racist. I dunno, call me a hypocrite for laughing at one and being irked and somewhat offended by the other, but there you go.
There are other things like that, and one story, “Monster Mash”, though brilliantly written is pretty danged depressing and should’ve been in a Halloween-themed book as it’s of David’s stint observing autopsies at a coroner’s office, and he discovers that he’s actually been pretty traumatized by it, sees death everywhere. I mean, ho ho ho, right?!?
Still, there is “The SantaLand Diaries” which aged well and is still particularly funny, plus the one about the theater critic who pans, eviscerates, children’s Christmas productions. Truly and wickedly good. And oh gosh, there’s a whole host of others that’ll make you smile and chuckle.
And tho’ Sedaris’s narration at first comes off as stilted and dry, he soon warms to the task, and I did appreciate his quiet wryness.
Dunno, maybe we’ve gotten all sensitive (Or maybe only I have) since this first came out in 1997 (22 years ago here in 2019). And I don’t know if I feel a trifle sad that I wasn’t able to get over the knee-jerk cringe enough to really open myself to the humor which so engaged me EONS ago.
Can’t wait to find out what my mom and sister think…!
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