Anyone who's read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" knows that David Sedaris is king of the "language-mixup story." At his sold-out appearance Monday at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, the bestselling writer started off with a great new example, an unpublished piece that expanded on his usual French-English mishaps to include Japanese mistranslations and the pretentious use of Spanish.

One delight of Sedaris is how his stories meander as they amuse. In this one, he mentioned how he moved to Tokyo for three months earlier this year to learn Japanese and, more importantly, to quit smoking. (The change of venue must have helped: He hasn't smoked for nine months.) He soon switched to another place and time, trying to stay awake in a lecture hall as a college art-history professor droned on. Though an English speaker by birth, the prof delights in the "genuine" pronunciation of such words as "Nicaragua" and "El Salvador," complete with heavily rolled R's and dramatic syllabic emphasis.

Since the professor is clueless about his grandiose affectation, he also fails to see why student Sedaris stays after class, asking questions designed to get him to repeat his over-the-top pronunciations aloud.

Sedaris, a regular on public radio's "This American Life," entertained a crowd that somehow looked MPRish with material for his next book, due out in spring 2008. There was also an unpublished story bound for the New Yorker and another he wrote for the radio. Hilarious sneak peeks all.

Cigarettes were one theme: quitting them, sharing them, stockpiling American brands while living in France, getting detained by Thai police for tossing one onto a Bangkok street.

Sedaris also discussed his boyhood as a sissy, flight attendants, swimming pools and his Greek grandma, a prodigious litterbug. Referring to the tendency of couples to divvy up chores, he said that while Hugh, his partner, is in charge of replastering the attic, "I dress dried bees in suits of tin-foil armor."

Running out of formal stories after 90 minutes, Sedaris milked laughs from one-liners he'd jotted in his diary. With his combo of polite solicitousness and occasional bursts of real anger, this squeaky-voiced gay guy generates so much goodwill that he could get a laugh reading the diaries of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Claude Peck • 612-673-7977

Claude Peck • cpeck@startribune.com