‘Corduroy’ overwhelmingly funny

Thank God for the maladjusted lives of Lou and Sharon Sedaris. Their home may have been frenzied and their six children destined for therapy, but they gave us the shrewd and unconventional David Sedaris, who has created a successful career of telling hilarious, heartbreaking stories about his dysfunctional family.

His latest beguiling collection focuses on the Sedaris clan past and present and includes a few tales about his life in France with boyfriend Hugh, to whom the book is dedicated.

It will not surprise anyone that most of the essays are overwhelmingly funny, especially those involving his brother Paul, aka Rooster, for whom profanity is a sort of poetry. No event — not weddings or funerals — is safe from his searing obscenities.

“The last time I allowed my brother to hug me, I flew from Raleigh to New York oblivious to the sign he’d slapped to the back of my sports coat, a nametag sticker reading, ‘Hello, I’m Gay,’ ” Sedaris writes. “This following the hilarity of our mother’s funeral.”

Whether Sedaris is discussing a horrifying revelation about his sister’s telephone/bathroom etiquette (prepare to be disturbed) or Christmas customs in the Netherlands (Santa is a former bishop from Turkey who is accompanied by “six to eight black men” rather than elves), many of the stories teem with a cynical mirth, while others are quietly, painfully sad.

A perpetual outcast, Sedaris writes about growing up gay in Raleigh, N.C., knowing he wasn’t like the other boys, could never be the tough guy his father wanted him to be: “Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

Sedaris has always written about being an outsider or an oddball. In “Naked,” he disrobed for an unforgettable stay in a nudist camp. “Me Talk Pretty One Day” uproariously documents his attempts to learn French after moving overseas.

And he became famous after reading his “SantaLand Diaries,” about a holiday job working as a Macy’s elf, on National Public Radio. He has since become the closest thing public radio has to Elvis, so popular that his appearances at concert halls sell out (such as his visit to last year’s Get Lit! literary festival in Spokane).

If Sedaris feels much guilt for exposing his family’s personal secrets to a willing audience, he addresses it beautifully in “Repeat After Me,” an essay about his sister Lisa:

“She’s afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I’ll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I’m like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family’s started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they’re sick of it.”

But in the end, nothing stops him from mining his relations for literary treasure. In one of the book’s final essays, “Baby Einstein,” Sedaris writes about Madelyn, the only Sedaris grandchild. After proudly showing off a video of the baby’s first bowel movement, Sedaris’ brother holds the baby up to the screen “and she gave a little, two-syllable cry that sounded to Paul like ‘whoopee!’ but I interpreted as something closer to ‘help meeeee.’ “

Welcome to the family, Madelyn. And good luck.