Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Me Talk Pretty One Day, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Identity and Insecurity
Humor, Commentary, and Observation
Class and Belonging
Family, Love, and Support
Summary
Analysis
In French class one day, Sedaris’s teacher starts a conversation about holidays. She normally goes from one student to the next in an orderly fashion, asking questions out of the textbook in a way that makes it easy for Sedaris to anticipate which question will fall to him. Today, though, the students are encouraged to answer whenever they feel like it. This means that most of the answers end up coming from a middle-aged Moroccan woman who grew up speaking French. She is in Sedaris’s class because she wants to work on her spelling, but she is otherwise fluent. With confidence, she smugly leans back in her chair and shouts out the answers. However, when the teacher asks what people do on Easter, the Moroccan woman asks, “Excuse me, but what’s an Easter?”
One of the ways Sedaris explores identity in Me Talk Pretty One Day is by comparing and contrasting national customs, setting one culture next to another so that he can more objectively consider the practices of his own nation. This is precisely what he does in “Jesus Shaves,” as the Moroccan woman’s lack of knowledge about Easter grants him the opportunity to look at the holiday anew and interrogate it from an alternative angle. (To clarify, the Moroccan woman most likely doesn’t know about Easter because Easter is a Christian holiday, and Morocco is a predominantly Islamic country.)
Themes
Sedaris doesn’t care much for Easter. As a Greek-American family, the Sedarises always celebrated Easter according to the Greek Orthodox tradition, which meant Sedaris and his siblings didn’t get to go on Easter egg hunts on the same day as their peers (since Greek Easter takes place several weeks later). While celebrating, they would toast each other with red eggs, and whoever had the only unbroken one was supposed to enjoy a year of good luck. The only year Sedaris won, his mother died, he got robbed, and he had to go to the emergency room. Despite his reluctant attitude toward Easter, though, he thinks he can confidently help his classmates describe the holiday to the Moroccan woman. One student says that Easter is “a party for to eat of the lamb,” explaining that “one may too eat of the chocolate.”
Sedaris uses the conversation about Easter in his French class as an opportunity to reflect on his own experience with the holiday, revealing that his relationship with Easter isn’t necessarily the same as the average American’s. Still, he’s familiar with the way most non-Greek Orthodox families celebrate Easter, though his own alternate perspective only further demonstrates that there are multiple ways of looking at the same thing—especially when that thing is a religious holiday. With this in mind, he prepares readers to challenge the things they have perhaps always taken for granted about Easter.
Themes
When Sedaris’s French teacher asks who brings the chocolate on Easter, Sedaris raises his hand because he knows the French word for “rabbit.” “The Rabbit of Easter,” he says. “He bring of the chocolate.” Perplexed, his teacher stares at him, asking if he really meant to say rabbit. Sedaris assures her that he spoke correctly, explaining that the Easter Bunny comes in the night with a basket of food. The teacher shakes her head and says that in France a flying bell comes from Rome to deliver the chocolate. This confounds Sedaris, who asks how the bell would know where people live. In response, his teacher asks how a rabbit would know this, and though he recognizes the validity of this question, he can’t help but feel that rabbits at least have eyes. Confused, the Moroccan woman who asked about Easter isn’t listening anymore.
The confusion that arises when Sedaris and his teacher talk about Easter perfectly encapsulates the surprising cultural differences that often exist between two nations, even when those nations might not seem that different from one another. Indeed, the differences between Morocco and France are rather evident because one nation is predominantly Christian while the other is mostly Islamic. In reality, though, France and the United States are just as foreign to one another in some regards as France and Morocco. By putting this dynamic on display, Sedaris invites readers to reconsider the things they take for granted about their own cultures and what they think they know about other countries.
Themes
After trying to describe Easter to the Moroccan woman, Sedaris wonders if he and his classmates would have been able to effectively describe the holiday even if they could speak perfect French. How, he wonders, could they possibly have made sense of Christianity, especially with all of them coming from different backgrounds? This, Sedaris notes, is the nature of religion—it requires people to have a patient kind of faith, one that helps them believe things that are otherwise difficult to explain. In the same way that religious people cling tightly to their faith, Sedaris knows that he and his fellow students need to have their own kind of faith: the faith to believe that they will someday get better at speaking French.
Sedaris isn’t religious, but he does recognize the beauty and value of faith. Admiring the kind of devotion it takes to believe in something bigger than oneself (something spiritual and mysterious), he applies a religious way of thinking to his own life, acknowledging that his attempt to learn French requires a similar kind of forward-looking optimism. This is one of the few times throughout Me Talk Pretty One Day that he allows himself to become somewhat sentimental, casting aside humor in the interest of making a sincere observation about the nature of faith.
Themes
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If, Sedaris thinks, he can convince himself that he’ll someday become fluent in French, then he should also be able to believe in Christianity. Thinking this way, he considers God and humanity and feels his heart “expand[ing]” to accommodate the universe’s many beautiful miracles until, suddenly, he returns to the original topic of conversation, thinking, “A bell, though—that’s fucked up.”
Sedaris lets a rare form of poetic wonder creep into the end of “Jesus Shaves,” celebrating the beauty of faith instead of focusing on making a joke. However, he only does this to build himself up to the punchline of this essay, when he says, “A bell, though—that’s fucked up.” By saying this, he cheekily contradicts everything he has just said about embracing the mysteries of life and believing in things he might otherwise see as difficult to comprehend. He also ironically makes it seem as if believing in a rabbit who delivers chocolate is more logical and sane than believing in a flying bell, ultimately implying that it’s absurd to believe either of these things. In turn, he once again urges readers to appreciate the ridiculous ideas that society has taken for granted and accepted as reasonable.
Themes
