It is entirely possible that some out-of-work actors look forward to the seasonal gig of playing department store Santa’s helpers as a way to spread joy during the Christmas season. But it is more probable that they feel more like puckish essayist/radio monologist David Sedaris, who once took a job as a compulsorily cheery elf at Macy’s and found it to be the employment from hell.

Fortunately, the experience inspired him to wax comedically on the ordeal and Tony Award-winning actor-director Joe Mantello turned the memoir into “The Santaland Diaries,” an amusing little theatrical antidote to the treacly performances that crop up at this time of year.

The 70-minute show has become something of a local tradition, because elfin Michael McKeever has adopted it as his “Mark Twain Tonight,” a one-man show — or nearly so — that he clearly enjoys delivering. He is doing so this year under the auspices of Boca Raton’s Parade Productions, aimed at those who prefer the cynicism of “Bad Santa” to the sentimentality of, say, “A Christmas Carol.”

Although Sedaris’s name is never mentioned, McKeever is essentially playing him, a woebegone extra in a corporate holiday assembly line, an elf dubbed “Crumpet,” because all the better names were already taken.

He addresses the audience and recounts the indignities of being a 45-year-old man, reduced to donning the green-vested suit, candy-striped sleeves and stockings, floppy cap and curled-toed slippers of an off-the-rack elf. The costume is bad enough, but it is the forced joviality he is required to project while dealing with vomiting tots, pushy parents and inebriated Santas that really irks him.

Imagine the most perverse things that could happen behind the scenes in Santaland and they probably happened to Sedaris. If department stores are keeping the fantasy of Kris Kringle alive in order to sell more toys and more than a few snapshots of your pride and joy with a Santa stand-in, Sedaris, Mantello and McKeever are out to burst that commercial bubble.

McKeever strikes the right sardonic chord in his drily humorous narration, never overplaying his hand, which could have sunk this fragile material. It is hard to gauge what Parade artistic director Kim St. Leon has added to his performance, several years after McKeever first undertook the material, but the addition of comely Sheri Wieseman as Elfina, his props-supplying assistant, is a nice touch.

Eventually, “The Santaland Diaries” arrives at a somewhat touching conclusion, as if Sedaris did not fully have faith in his dark side. Maybe the ending makes the play more palatable for those with visions of sugar plum fairies dancing in their heads, but it would be hard to miss the gleefully jaundiced tone up until that point.