With an expansive vocabulary and a dry sense of humor, Sarah Vowell entertained more than 250 people with stories of Teddy Roosevelt, a Westerner’s guilt about living in the East and obscure German films in her lecture “Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World.”

“If you must take the stairs at the Empire State building with your aging parents and sister with a baby the size of a fax machine, go in front and don’t look back,” Vowell said during the lecture in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union Tuesday night. “If you do, your parents will look like one of those Renaissance frescoes of Adam and Eve being expelled from the garden.”

Vowell, an author and humorist, is known for her commentaries and monologues on public radio’s “This American Life.”

Eschewing the typical personal lecture format of self-discovery and tear-jerking, Vowell offered five monologues to the audience, each a tightly knit story of social commentary and unexpected humor in her life.

She poked fun at her “pretentious” adolescence, a time of subtitled German films and existentialism.

“I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature,” Vowell said.

She drew heavily upon her roots in Bozeman, Mont., especially to contrast her current life in New York City.

One monologue focused on a Thanksgiving dinner at her apartment, hosting her visiting sister and parents, who still lived in Montana.

Vowell described the dread she felt at the prospect of five days with her family in the city, listing the topics that were off-limits as conversation pieces: “National politics, state and local politics, music, my personal life and their so-called God.”

Usually, she explained, her family goes to the movies as a bonding activity.

“We go to the movies so we can be together without having the burden of actually talking to each other,” Vowell said.

Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln found their way into several of Vowell’s monologues.

Roosevelt served as an icon to Vowell in her childhood; her father told her stories of Roosevelt’s youth.

“I envied Teddy Roosevelt, but I wanted his asthma,” Vowell said, because of her childhood desire to sit inside and read.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or the reenactment thereof, was fodder for several comments at the beginning of Vowell’s speech. Citing the famous “Fourscore and seven years ago” section of the speech, in which Lincoln refers to the Constitution, Vowell quipped, “You always begin with the good news.”

Greg Vitale of Ames said he attended the lecture because he enjoys Vowell’s sense of humor.

“She’s just got a way of finding the funny side of the implausible situations that she finds,” Vitale said.

Vowell ended with a description of her guilt, enjoying her current life in New York.

“I like my life in the East, but the only Western thing I have in me is my guilt about it.”