The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.

Sedaris is wryly describing the low cultural status often assigned to “humor” in publishing and bookselling. The joke hinges on the mismatch between an author’s carefully crafted comic prose and the way it can be merchandised or reviewed alongside mass-market gag compilations—here, the widely syndicated “Cathy” cartoons. His line points to a hierarchy in which serious literature is presumed to belong elsewhere, while humor is treated as lightweight, disposable, or merely commercial. At the same time, the quip is self-aware: Sedaris’s own success depends on comic writing, yet he critiques the industry’s tendency to flatten very different kinds of humor into one shelf label.