If you like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, you’ll like Paul Rudnick. They come from the same mold. Like them, he exemplifies a kind of wit he himself calls “gay banter” and which has three defining characteristics. It is ironic. It is self-deprecating. It has a full-blooded swagger. But even more significantly, it can often be devastatingly funny.
There are one liners: Bennington has been forced to “eliminate its major in advanced bulimia, or as it’s also known, dance.” There are comic scenes like the family Christmas party in Kansas. There are devastating satiric portraits (the notoriously difficult actor Nicol Williamson) and loving tributes to weirdly wonderful friends (the costume designer William Ivey Long). There are laugh out loud anecdotes about the famous and those almost. I Shudder is a collection of 15 essays on everything from his childhood in Piscataway and the death of his father to character sketches of some of his more flamboyant theater cohorts and his experiences writing for movies like Sister Act and Addams Family Values.
Interspersed among these essays are five “I Shudder” pieces which are presented as passages from the diary of the 63-year old Elyot Vionnet, something of a curmudgeon, who observes with consummate disdain the collapse of social values around him and sees it as his duty to do something about it. The young woman who goes through life with her cell phone in her ear and pays no attention to the world around her must be taught to broaden her outlook. The talentless Martha Stewart wannabe must be shown what true talent is all about. In Vionnet, Rudnick creates a voice that has the irony and the swagger, but has none of the self deprecating quality of “gay banter.” Vionnet knows what is right, what is good, what should be, and he is going to damn well make sure he gets that message to those who need it. Be it taxi hailing etiquette or celebrating the holiday season, he is going to set the world straight.
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