The hilarious, award-winning comedy writer Larry Doyle has a new book out this month. Deliriously Happy is a compilation of short, funny pieces Larry wrote for The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. You might know Larry from when he wrote and produced The Simpsons. Or maybe you know him from his first novel, I Love You Beth Cooper. If you’re a true Larry Doyle fan then you know that he also wrote the wildly fun and inventive novel Go, Mutants! and was a writer on Beavis and Butthead. And then there are the Hollywood films he’s written! Because there’s so much to talk about with Larry, I thought I’d narrow it down by subject matter and number. Hence, here is the Larry Doyle Six Question Sex Interview:

There is sex in all your books but it’s never straight-forward sexy. It’s always, well, embarrassingly funny. Can you explain this?

I was unaware that sex was not embarrassing. Clearly I should have read up more on the subject before attempting it.

Most sex writing is embarrassing and funny, though not intentionally. My goal is to one day write an amazing sex scene, Olympic and profound, that is also funny on purpose. That will be my life’s work.

And romance in your writing (like in the essays “Life without Leanne” and “Disengagements”) is fraught with agony that makes me cringe and laugh at the same time. Has your romantic life been as painful at that of your fictional characters and fictional selves?

I suspect my romantic life has been much less fraught with agony than the average mope, which allows me to give it the kind of exacting attention it deserves.

I often wonder if I would have been a better writer if I had had a shittier life; maybe. But I feel like I have been gifted with a mostly fortunate life and a terrible attitude toward it.

How often did you slip some inside sex joke into Simpsons dialogue? Can you say or will you be sued?

Approximately 80 percent of the conversation in the Simpsons writers’ room was about sex and violence, often in combination, about average for the business. (The other 20 percent was about lunch.) Writers shared stories of Hollywood sex apocrypha (Mostly about Lucille Ball, oddly), current salaciousness (we heard the story of Monica and the President’s Cigar months before it became public) and were given to flights of transgressive fancy (one extended riff pitching a TV show following the adventures of Jon Benet Ramsey’s sexy cowgirl ghost was unforgiveable but oh, how I laughed). It was inevitable that references to all this would slip in, although usually in the most innocent context. For example, the writers had a fondness for characters saying, “Where do you think you’re going?”; that’s a Lucy story (which is also referenced in Go, Mutants!)

Which was more fun: writing teenaged sex in I Love You Beth Cooper, alien sex in Go, Mutants!, or normal human sex in some of the essays in Deliriously Happy?

I approach all sex writing with trepidation (see above). That said, Go, Mutants! allowed for a more satisfying level of perversion.

What is your favorite fictional sex scene from any movie, TV show or book?

The Donald Sutherland-Julie Christie scene in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, which my father mistakenly took me to when I was 15. I hesitate to watch it again for fear it will not live up to the pornocopia seared into my amygdala. Also the most terrifying movie I’ve ever seen; make of that what you will.

This is a question straight from the great Gina Frangello: With what fictional character would you love to have sex?

Any of the characters Zooey Deschanel has played.

But you probably mean literature.

We can rule out the more obvious ones, like that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Dolores Haze. There’s Rachel from Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, but my view of her is clouded by Ione Skye’s portrayal in the film; likewise, Jennifer Connelly as Eleanor Abbott in Inventing the Abbotts and Suzanna Hamilton as Julia in 1984.

I’m going to go with Eve, because her expectations would be low.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Mr. Wayne told spectators as he lighted the first batch from the warehouse where he has gathered thousands of books in the 10 years he has run the store, Prospero’s Books. When Mr. Wayne sought to thin out the collection, he said, he found that he could not even give the books away to libraries and bookshops, which said they were full. So, he said, he began burning the books to protest society’s diminishing support for the printed word.

—New York Times

THE HOT BOOK

Where am I? The Vegas Book Show? San Diego Litcon? Have I made it to the end, to Powell’s, at long last?

“You’re in Cleveland,” Alison says. “Barnes & Noble Arena.”

Cleveland? How can I be in Cleveland? Wasn’t I just in St. Louis?

“We had to move a couple things around to get out of Collin’s way.” The Mockingjay tour, in its sixieth week. Two dozen singing, dancing, battling teens. Why can’t she just read the damn book, like the rest of us?

“Drink me,” I say, only half alluding. Alison pours us two Absolut Writinis (8 oz. Absolut in a coffee mug with an Altoid chaser), courtesy of our tour sponsor. I fish my right hand out of the bucket and reach for my medicine. “Back in the bucket,” Alison says, all marm, pressing the mug into my left. I return my right to the ice water, where it now lives. It’s not even my hand anymore; it’s ballooned into a monstrous cartoon of a hand, Homer Simpson’s mitt. It lies quietly on the bottom like a strange aquatic animal. (Not bad. I’ll have to use that.)

The chanting. Rhythmic, primal, it begins:

Ree -ding . . . Ree -ding . . . Ree -ding!

“Al,” I say, finishing my drink. “I don’t think I can do this tonight.”

She sighs. Alison’s a seasoned tour pro and has heard this before, from me, from DeLillo, from all the chicks with lits. “You’ve got twenty thousand people out there, some paid scalpers three hundred bucks to come hear you read,” she preaches from the playbook.“Not to mention what they spent on T-shirts, and readings CDs, and giant foam bookmarks. . . .”

“They’re not even laughing at the jokes anymore. They’re laughing at the punctuation.”

“Your punctuation is funny.”

“So many people. Such long names.”

“You’re lucky it’s not a memoir,” Alison says. “They’d tear you apart.” Poor choice of words, I think, considering this very stadium held the last reading of James Frey, somewhat ironically torn into only eighty-seven little pieces.

Ree-ding! . . . Ree-ding!! . . . Ree-ding!!!

I hoist out what used to be my writing hand. “It’s dead,” I pronounce.

“Marty,” Alison says.

Dr. Marty, the tour physician, shuffles over. He lays my bloated corpse of a paw across his lap. He pokes it. “Boy’s right,” the doc says in his syrupy Staten Island drawl. “This thing’s about to fall off.”

“If I wanted your medical opinion, I would have asked for it,” Alison snaps.

The good doctor nods and reaches into his bag, removing his fixings. He pops the syringe into the vial, pulls back on the plunger, and slowly withdraws a potent cocktail of vitamin B, morphine, and Major League Baseball–grade steroids. He taps my wrist twice and plunges the needle in. I don’t even feel it.

“This got Updike through the Couples tour,” Dr. Marty says.

“You think it’s bad now. Back then they not only bought the books, they read them.”

Outside, the crowd has gone into an undulating roar. They are doing the wave, apparently.

“We better get you in there,” Alison says. “We don’t want another San Antonio.” The Last Symbol fiasco. Dan Brown’s flight was delayed. Before he could be helicoptered in, eight people were dead and posed ritualistically.

As I climb into the golf cart, I notice something on Fox News. People. Anger. Flames.

They’re all throwing my book into the fire. I could tell because of the distinctive cover.

I had said a stupid thing. The reporter showed me one of the full-page ads my publisher had taken out in newspapers across the country, quoting some blogger calling my novel “the greatest book ever written.” Surely, the reporter asked, I didn’t think my book was better than the Bible.

“It’s funnier than the Bible,” I said.

And I believe that. The Bible isn’t funny at all, except in a broad conceptual way. But I shouldn’t have said it, probably.

There are bonfires going in twenty-six cities, Megyn Kelly says, and on a couple of cruise ships. I stare at the screen. My words, on fire. My lovely books, thousands of them, turning to ash.

I chuckle. They didn’t even get a volume discount.

The cart comes out of the tunnel into what was once center field. The crowd roars and squeals in equal measure. They have come for the word. And I’m going to read it to them.

It smelled like men. And maybe that was because there were over thirty of them and only three women. One woman was teaching naked yoga and as far as I could see (I dipped my head in to glance at the class), all the followers were men.

Larry Doyle is the author of the best-selling book, I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER. He also produced and wrote The Simpsons for several years, wrote Beavis and Butthead, was the entertainment editor at New York Magazine and wrote a bunch of Hollywood movies. Oh, and he regularly writes very funny pieces for the Shouts & Murmurs section of The New Yorker.

I caught up with Larry at Evergreen Café in Baltimore where we often sit together and work. Larry was working on the webpage for his amazing and hilarious new novel GO, MUTANTS! (HarperCollins, June 22th). I was working on this interview.

You know the last author I interviewed for TNB was Audrey Braun who hung up on me because she was in the middle of buying No. 7 Breast Cream at Target. You wouldn’t blow me off for breast cream, would you?

It would depend largely on why I needed the breast cream, and how urgently. As a former journalist I would also recognize the color value of having you, as the reporter, accompany me while I was buying the breast cream, though this might work better if I was Eva Green, or anybody whose breasts the reader would like to imagine being smeared with cream. I suppose the true corollary of this for a male author would be penis cream, in which case I change my answer to, “Where can I buy this penis cream, and what does it do?”

GO, MUTANTS! takes place in high school in what appears to be both the past and the future (at once). One of my favorite characters has breasts that become gigantic and a head that progressively shrinks. Was she based on anyone?

Every man’s ideal woman. My, that was glib, and sexist. And untrue, since the character, even after her head shrinks to the size of a baseball, still won’t shut up. I probably should have stopped with the first offensive remark. I would also like to change this answer, please, to: “The character is based on a dear friend of mine who bravely battled this condition for a number of years before discovering, to her horror, it was being caused by the increasingly large quantities of breast cream she was rubbing on herself every night. She’s all right now, thank God, but doesn’t date as much.”

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be you. I mean you have one character who is a drunkard—a detached head soaking in fluid who wouldn’t mind if her husband whacked their daughter so she could have a nice body to go with her head. When does this stuff come to you? In the middle of the night when you can’t sleep? While you’re at Whole Foods buying fruit?

I don’t see your point. Are you saying that other people’s families aren’t like that? I was simply working in the new realist school, like that guy who wrote that book but then wouldn’t go on Oprah, the tool. (Oprah: I would never do that to you.)

I read GO, MUTANTS! in one sitting while in bed one night. I was laughing out loud (waking up my husband who became rather irritated with me) and often re-read funny bits just to laugh again. Do you crack yourself up when you’re writing? Or are you your own wife who’s heard all her husband’s jokes?

I don’t laugh in bed. I consider it coarse. I’m surprised you’re not divorced. The only time I laugh at my own stuff is when it’s been such a long time since I wrote it that I’ve forgotten . At my present rate of alcohol intake, this is approximately three days.

This is a two-part question: which character in GO, MUTANTS! most resembles you? And, if you were a character in the book, which other character would you want to have sex with? I’d want to do it with Johnny, the radio-active ape-boy, by the way. Jelly is too gelatinous. And J!m is way too longish a person for me (also, the shedding skin really doesn’t turn me on).

I’m the radioactive ape-boy, of course. (Note to readers: this is sadly untrue. I’m J!m, the sullen teen, only I’m not even long. Don’t tell Jessica.) I would like to have sex with J!m’s mom, the platinum blonde catwoman. And yet, I don’t like cats. I like dogs, but wouldn’t want to have sex with a doglady. I can’t explain it, or rather, I shouldn’t.

Last question. If you could live in the GO, MUTANTS! world where there’s a sort of 1950’s rebellious innocence and a year 2040 mega-connected-cyber world, would you? Or do you like the here and now?

Well, obviously the world of GO, MUTANTS! is one that any reader will want to return to again and again. As a practical matter, one has to consider that in the book five U.S. states are radioactive wastelands (and France is gone, for what that’s worth). Assuming I didn’t have to live too near one of those states, and was the rightful king of this world, I would choose fiction over reality any day, as my wife will attest.