The trick with humorous writing (and it's only the first and most important of many tricks) is that you have to make it look easy. You have to make it look as though anyone can do it. Accordingly, many writers think they can do it, and would do it, if only they thought it was worth doing. More tragically, some writers actually think they are doing it, and nobody has yet found the courage to tell them they aren't. (We won't mention names, but I think you know who I mean.) The truth is that genuinely funny writers are frighteningly rare, and genuinely funny books of autobiographical musings rarer still. Fortunately, quite a number of them seem to have been written by David Sedaris.

In many ways, Sedaris is a throwback. Comedy is a harsh thing these days, and the gentle humour of observation and strange experience that Sedaris purveys has gone right out of fashion. Nonetheless, in his native America he is a bestseller: the first print run for this, his sixth book, was 900,000 copies. It may be slightly more modest in this country, where many people have vaguely heard of him without having read him, but unlike so many American humorists, Sedaris is highly exportable. His concerns are the universal ones - love, death, spiders, the advisability or otherwise of displaying a human skeleton in your bedroom - and his method is that of a storyteller. So while he is ostensibly writing essays in a traditionalist New Yorker or Punch vein, he is actually telling a story you want to finish. It's fiction by any other name. It's also consistently funny and true.

Sedaris is in his early fifties, gay, introverted and slightly awkward in the world - an observer rather than a participant. Like many humorous writers he does what he does essentially because he is completely unsuited to any other form of paid employment. But it has been a long haul. Dabbling in visual and performance art in his youth, without any success whatsoever, he first came to prominence in the early 1990s reading out bits of his diary on National Public Radio. His pieces still feel like diary entries, albeit highly polished ones, interspersed with snatches of autobiography. He has a lovely, sinuous way of writing, saving the gag until you've forgotten you were expecting one. Here he writes of a neighbour: “Arrogant, pushy, proudly, almost fascistically opinionated, she was the person you found yourself quoting at dinner parties, especially if your hosts were on the delicate side and you didn't much care about being invited back.” Unusually for a comic writer, he doesn't overdo the jokes, and they always emerge naturally from the tale he is telling. The one piece here that doesn't relate directly to his own life, an address at Princeton University in which he pretends he went there, is the only one that feels overworked and underfelt. Otherwise there's scarcely a wasted syllable.

And he is eminently quotable. “Her lower jaw...stuck out slightly, like a drawer that hadn't quite been closed.” (Oddly enough, I read that just before seeing a Keira Knightley film.) In one essay, he frets about an elderly Frenchwoman, “the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no face-lift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have hurt me to take her crutches into consideration”. He always makes it look this easy, but it isn't, it really isn't.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
Little, Brown £11.99 pp310 Buy the book from Books First £10.79 including free delivery

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