The forthcoming book “Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers,” by the humor writer and journalist Mike Sacks, includes interviews, advice, and “ultraspecific comedic knowledge” from several dozen comedians, filmmakers, and writers, including Mel Brooks, Amy Poehler, Roz Chast, and one of contemporary fiction’s funniest writers, George Saunders. In the conversation below, Saunders talks to Sacks about his family’s sense of humor, the connection between satire and compassion, his early comedy influences, and how he came to embrace the funny side of his writing.

In the past, you’ve talked about growing up in South Chicago, and that, as a child, you felt total freedom. But how do you think South Chicago affected you as a writer?

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. They were just merciless in terms of grammar and syntax and spelling, which was incredibly helpful later. They gave us the tools we could later use to build our taste. They forced us to become little language fiends—almost like, say, a great chef might force his kids to become food fiends. That taught us basic discernment. Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you’ve done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I’m always being edited by my inner nun. So in some ways this is good—it makes for good revision. But it can also be killing—you’re never satisfied.

How about as far as humor? Is it tied in any specific way to Chicago? I think I got the idea that the high-serious and the funny were not separate. The idea that something could be gross and heartfelt at the same time. Some of the funniest things in South Chicago were also the most deeply true—these sort of over-the-line, rude utterances that were right on the money and undeniable. Their truth had rendered them inappropriate; they were not classically shaped, not polite, and they responded to the urgency of the moment.

In Chicago, people often told these odd little Zen parables, ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out, but behind which I always felt were deeper questions looming—like who we are, and what the hell are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil of tears?

Do any specific anecdotes come to mind?

My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I’ll call the Smiths. We didn’t know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith’s mother, who was in her nineties, passed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred:

Dad: “So sorry for your loss.”

Mrs. Smith: “Yes, it’s very hard.”

Dad: “Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life.”

Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): “Yeah. This is the sickest she’s ever been.”

My dad came home just energized from this. I loved his reaction. My family was such a big influence on me. There was a real respect for language. It was understood as a source of power. Everyone was funny in a different flavor. You could make anything right—diffuse any tension, explain any mistake—with a joke. A joke or a funny voice was a way of saying: All is well. We’ll live. We still love you.

Can you talk a bit about your mother and father?

My father was from Chicago and my mother was from Amarillo, Texas. They met at a dance when my father was stationed down in Texas, in the Air Force. They were nineteen when they married, and had me when they were twenty-one. My dad is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, but he didn’t go to college right out of high school. He got out of the Air Force and moved back to Chicago and he did a bunch of different things—he was a collection agent for State Farm Insurance and then ended up as a salesman for a coal company. This was when there were still a lot of buildings being heated by coal. For awhile he was selling directly to landlords, and apparently sneaking into basements to do reconnaissance on the type of coal they were getting from other companies. But then he gradually worked his way up, and when I was in grade school he became vice-president of the company. Around that time he had a falling-out with his boss and quit. He bought a couple of now defunct fast-food franchise restaurants called Chicken Unlimited, and that’s what he did while I was in high school. Well, that’s what we all did: worked in the restaurant. My mother and sisters worked the counter; I drove the delivery truck; my uncle managed one of the stores.

The main beauty of that job was getting to go in there day after day and see this parade of American characters. For many of those people, our restaurant was the closest thing to family they had: lonely, lonely, lonely. It would have been impossible for me, before that job, to imagine how filled America is with lonely, isolated people.

Many of the characters in your stories, whether they are good or bad, young or old, tend to be quite lonely.

What I remember about all this is that particular gloating teen delight that there were such crazies in the world and that I wasn’t one of them. But also the way this got complicated by coming to know them, by seeing them in these sad private moments, in our restaurant, sitting at one of our plastic booths all alone. The other kids and I were actually pretty good and gentle to them when the chance arose. But, of course, among ourselves, it was all posturing and harshness and war stories about what “the wackos” had done that day. Makes me sad to think of it at this thirty-year distance.

Do you remember any customers in particular?

Oh, sure. There was a woman we rather brutally called, but not to her face, “The Wacko.” She’d come in around four in the afternoon and chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis hour after hour. She used to wear a ratty imitation fur coat and talk to herself. She lived in a complex behind the restaurant. Almost the minute she got home, she’d call for delivery: a pack of cigarettes from the machine we had in the store and a large Pepsi. She’d sometimes order three or four times a night. I was the delivery guy, so I’d go over—I made seventy-five cents a delivery—and she’d be in this furnitureless apartment, shaking and talking to herself. And she wasn’t all that old either. She later slit her wrists and jumped in the Chicago River—only to be pulled out by some passing hero.

Then there was a guy whose claim to fame was twofold: He’d try to pick up girls by wearing his old security guard uniform and harassing them at the mall, and it was his “old” security guard costume because he’d gotten fired from his job as a security guard after being caught doing what he described as “allegedly masturbating against the curb of a Fotomat.” I didn’t even know what that meant, exactly. In his defense, he always claimed innocence. But the charge seemed pretty … specific.