Maureen Callahan says David Sedaris’ New York Times home interview was extremely obnoxious because his husband flew to London to check on their other homes

There are rich people, and then there are rich people whose spouse has to pop over to London to check on the other houses. Maureen Callahan says David Sedaris crossed into “extremely, extremely obnoxious” territory in a New York Times home interview that made his wealth sound like a charming personality tic.

The sin here is not that Sedaris is successful. Good for him. The man turned essays about family dysfunction, cigarettes, elves, and his own magnificent oddness into a literary empire. The sin, according to Callahan on The Megyn Kelly Show, is the soft-focus staging of it all: the penthouse foyer like an art museum, the pricey sculpture from Amy Sedaris, the husband dispatched internationally to inspect the property portfolio. It’s not a profile so much as an Architectural Digest fever dream wearing NPR tote-bag camouflage.

The penthouse foyer, I’m reading from the New York Times, resembles the entryway to an art museum.

The joke is the money, until the money stops being funny

Sedaris has always been good at making unpleasantness adorable. His whole comic machine runs on the gap between the polished sentence and the grubby confession. So a luxury object in his apartment can, in theory, become another prop in the act. But Callahan zeroes in on a quote that makes the bit feel less self-aware and more just… expensive.

That is a really, really good present

well, because it’s really expensive.

That is a very Sedaris line, blunt enough to read as a joke and vain enough to read as a confession. Callahan’s read is harsher: the profile does not frame the line as satire. It lets the money sit there gleaming under museum lighting. And then comes the kicker, which is the sort of sentence that makes normal readers look around their one apartment and feel personally attacked by the real estate section.

Callahan says the Times wrote that Sedaris’ husband, Hugh Hamrick, was going to Kennedy Airport to fly to London and check on “their other homes.” Her complaint is not subtle, but neither is the image. A man leaving one lavish residence to inspect the others is not relatability. It is Monopoly board upkeep.

Callahan is right about the vibe, even if outrage is the easiest pose in the room

The fair defense of Sedaris is obvious: he’s a famous writer, not a monk. Famous writers buy nice places. Their partners travel. Their sisters give them weird art. Nobody needs to pretend that the author of bestselling books should live under a staircase to preserve his comic purity.

But Callahan’s criticism has teeth because it is about tone. A celebrity profile can either acknowledge absurd privilege or accidentally worship it. From the fragment she reads, the Times seems to do the latter, admiring the tasteful strangeness while gliding past the class comedy sitting right there in the foyer. Sedaris usually knows how to make himself the butt of the joke. Callahan’s point is that this time, the joke may be on everyone expected to find it charming.

This is extremely, extremely obnoxious.