Your first book choice is surprising – I think of it as a children’s book not a comic one. Why did you pick Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll?

I'm reading it to my seven-year-old twins, one of whose name is Alice so it’s easy to get her to listen. It’s about, of course, a girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a strange world populated by strange creatures. You’d have to be a zombie to miss the humour in it – it's hilarious. Although the book is ancient [1865] the humour feels modern. It's also very dark. I can't tell you how many jokes there are about dead children in it.

Did you see it as comic writing when you first read it?

I first read it as a child and again in college. Rereading it now, I realise a lot of my comic style comes out of that book. Carroll understates everything. It's filled with phrases like “if I should fall on my head I don't think I'd have much to say about it” – which would certainly be true because she’d be dead.

I guess the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter are pretty funny characters. Carroll was seen as part of a trend of 19th century “nonsense literature”.

The problem, when people talk about humour, is that it becomes so dreadfully serious.

Well before that happens, let’s turn to two collections of short fiction. Dating Your Mom is a collection of Ian Frazier’s comic pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, most of which were first published in The New Yorker.

Ian Frazier is a master of short humour writing. I picked this book because it was the first one of his I read. The piece “Dating Your Mom”, for example, is quite literally about romancing the woman who gave birth to you. It’s an absurd and even disturbing idea, but it's done in such a cheerful way that it never seems naughty. Frazier points out what the plus sides of dating one’s mom would be – potentially getting pushed around in a stroller, for instance.

There's another story in there about a guy raised by wolves, adjusting to human customs, and his wolf father shows up every once in a while in the night with a dead deer to show him where all the fatty parts are. It’s filled with wildly inventive and funny comic essays. Frazier has three or four collections out now, and I’d recommend every one.

Frazier is also known for his more serious work.

He's written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic for years and years, and he just wrote a book called Travels in Siberia. But for me he is the master of what The New Yorker calls “the Casual”. I learned how to write Casuals from reading his. He writes something that sounds simple, even a single note idea – like dating your mom – and then he twists it so you never see what’s coming, and in retrospect the whole concept seems to make some sort of sick sense.

You’ve just published your first collection of short pieces, Deliriously Happy. How did you decide what made the cut?

Anything that wasn't really embarrassing. I had stuff going back 20 years, so I was somewhat choosy. I cut out what I wasn’t proud of and whatever didn't make sense anymore. It’s organised in chronological fashion – not in the order I wrote them but in order of the periods of our life cycle they concern. Then there's a section in the book called “Pieces Left Out of the Collection”, where I put things that didn't fit naturally into the timeline.

You also chose a 1976 collection of stories by the writer Donald Barthelme. What prompted you to pick Amateurs?

This was the first work by Barthelme I read. I read it in college on a bus trip. I spent 16 hours travelling to see a girlfriend in Canada, who broke up with me as soon as I arrived. It was tragic. Amateurs leavened the return trip a bit.

It's a collection of his prime satirical – as opposed to experimental – pieces. There are really fun essays like “Some of Us Have Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”, which is an offhand account of some guys getting together and stringing up their friend because he had "gone too far". It’s never quite made clear what Colby had “gone too far” about.

Or there’s another piece called “I Bought A Little City”, in which the protagonist buys Galveston, Texas, and it seems like kind of a weird thing. And he says, “Then I went out and shot six thousand dogs.” Some guy comes up to him and says, “Could you shoot my dog?” And he says, “Mr. I love dogs.” So offhand and yet so funny.