No matter the subject, David Sedaris’ delivery comes off as effortless and frank. Perhaps due to his half-Greek heritage - and “that half is enough” - family has permeated his writings. Americans mention their siblings a few months after befriending them, he jokes. Like family is also how his readers often feel when reading him. Last night in Piazza Castello, Marco Archetti was one of those readers, confessing his literary kinship with Sedaris and warmly probing him about his influences, process, and the meaning of humour.

As a youngster reading the laconic, matter-of-fact prose of Raymond Carver, David Sedaris thought “I can do that!”. Memorising a 1982 Broadway show by Whoopi Goldberg did the rest. Working as an apartment cleaner and an elf at Macy’s were odd but useful stops to develop his observational humour. He now maintains that his audiences have become his editors. When audiences don’t laugh, they cough: Sometimes “it feels like a tubercolosis hospital”, Sedaris quips. That’s when he knows something isn’t funny.

Across a best-selling career, David Sedaris has found humour in themes as disparate as Fitbit and death (and not when death is the result of excessive exercise). Casual conversations with nurses are endless sources of material, which he then turns into the “stuff I wrote since my last book”, as he calls it. The everyday feeds his comedic writing, but never with snark, which he condemns as “sarcasm without intelligence”. When readers express their affection by declaring Sedaris “so snarky!”, he trashes their letters and immediately writes at least two pages rife with self-deprecation. He keeps the same attitude in between questions too, turning his head twice to the screen used for streaming and then smiling back at the audience. Laughter ensues; no one coughs.