Even when there is no new work to promote, he spends much of his time on extended tours in the United States and abroad. The current tour goes to places like Toronto, Minneapolis, Houston, Albuquerque, San Francisco, Missoula and many more; heads to Ireland and Britain; and returns to the United States in August. After he appears, he signs books and chats to people late into the night, even if that means all night long. (His record is 10 ½ hours, in Chicago.)

And so Mr. Sedaris remained at a table that night in the Kennedy Center until nearly 1 a.m. The readers snaked in a line far down the vestibule. Mr. Sedaris talked to every one of them. He was in no rush. His conversational gambits covered the sort of topics (abortion, religion, sexuality, disability) that people are advised to avoid in potentially non-safe spaces.

For someone else it would have seemed like a high-wire act; for Mr. Sedaris it was business as usual.

Mr. Sedaris: “Did you go to church on Easter?”

Reader: “No.”

Mr. Sedaris: “What is wrong with you?”

Along came a young woman who, like most people in line, had her first name (Chelsea) written on a card that she handed to Mr. Sedaris, for book-signing purposes.

“How old do you think you are going to be when you die?” Mr. Sedaris asked.

You would think people might be put off, but they weren’t. Not when Mr. Sedaris wrote “Christ died for you” in one woman’s book (“I teach high school students,” she said, “nothing offends me”); or when in another’s book he drew a picture of a three-legged bear with blood spewing from its stump because, he said, it had stepped on a land mine; or when he wrote “you will not be alone forever” in the book of a fan who said she was single.

Nor did anyone mind when he asked a (nonpregnant) woman if she might have an abortion this summer and then advised her to “do it while you still can, because you may not be able to have one in the future”; or when he wrote “you’re using that cane as a crutch” to a reader with a limp; or when he said, “What happened to your mother — is she dead?” to a man named Richard, who wanted a book signed for his father.

“She is to him,” Richard said.