Clearly, I should've read David Sedaris before 2000. That, however, is when friends nagged me into reading Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris' collection of humorous essays about moving to Normandy, France. It won him the 2001 Thurber Prize for American Humor, and I can tell you I've never laughed harder at any book before or since. Sedaris grew up gay in a rowdy Greek-American family in North Carolina. I'm a straight Los Angeleno, but it seemed to me Sedaris and I saw the world through the same neurotic, cynical filter. He's just better and funnier writing about what he sees through that wry periscope than I am.

A few years ago, I had the wicked pleasure of reading from Sedaris' collection Holidays on Ice in a cockeyed Christmas revue. Specifically, I read "Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol," a purported critique of grade-school Nativity pageants; and if you think I was a mean theater critic, you should give my man "Thaddeus" a try. Actually, though, my favorite of Sedaris' holiday pieces is "Six to Eight Black Men," about the Dutch version of Santa Claus and his sidekicks, each named Zwarte Piet. You can find Sedaris' reading of that essay on YouTube, so I'll let him explain the rest. Suffice it to say a red-nosed reindeer is the least of Santa's secrets. The audio version of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, the book from which that piece is taken, won Sedaris a Grammy. His sister Amy is an actor and comic, best known for her lead role in Strangers With Candy and a colorful series of Downy fabric softener commercials. David Sedaris' most recent book is the 2013 bestseller Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls.

Regular NPR listeners know his hypernasal voice well, thanks to years of appearances on Morning Edition and This American Life. Indeed, it's become all but impossible to hear his stories and essays in any other tone. It gives me great pleasure, then, to write as pretty as I can about his live appearance Sunday at the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts. There's no word yet on what he's performing, but recent shows included readings from "English Lessons" (about learning Japanese) and "The Happy Place" (about his first colonoscopy). And if that's not a wide enough spectrum of comic material, then we just don't know what is.

AN AFTERNOON WITH DAVID SEDARIS, 3 p.m. Sunday, May 3, Pantages Theater, 901 Broadway, Tacoma, $29-$85, 253.591.5894