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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

Satiric shockumentarian Michael Moore has called comic Patton Oswalt “the smartest, funniest guy I’ve met in comedy in recent years.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-star and executive producer Jeff Garlin is a fan, too. Oswalt, he once declared, “is the only man I will allow to apply lotion to my forearms.” Heady praise, that. But wait, there’s more. The sweetly ribald ironist Sarah Silverman claims that Oswalt’s brilliance leaves her “feeling both inspired and fraudulent,” and filmmaker Judd Apatow contends that he’s “way funnier than I am.”

Judging by his new pastiche-of-a-book, Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland (Scribner, $24), Oswalt has a knack for translating his often dark and dagger-like humor from stage to page. Ostensibly a memoir of sorts, ZSW includes lots of stuff about zombies, spaceships and wastelands. And wine. And vampires. A follow-up to his intergalactic mega-bestsellers The Falsely Recovered Troll-Bog Memory, Andro-Borg-Bot and the kid favorite Everyone Resents,* it covers everything from Oswalt’s childhood movie obsession and his “insane” Uncle Pete to life on the road and his soul-sucking visit to the MTV Style Lounge “gifting suite.”

The author confirmed, however, that funny ultimately trumped facts. Which is to say that, in the spirit of humorist David Sedaris’ work, ZSW is “true enough.” And in case you’re into this sort of thing, it’s beautifully printed in MT Pugmire Gothic, a nonflorid, pre-post-Brutalist “curl-type” vowel recessive font.**

Speaking somewhat sleepily by iPhone from his bed in Burbank, the former sitcom standout (he played brainy nerd Spence Olchin on CBS’s “The King of Queens” from 1998 to 2007) and voice of Remy the rodent gourmand in Disney/Pixar’s enormously successful animated film “Ratatouille” (2007) answered a slew of mostly disjointed questions on a variety of topics.

On the highest Challenging Stage he’s ever reached on the classic arcade game Galaga:

I hate to brag, but I looped them. If you go far enough, you loop back around to the first one.

On how he’d rate himself in Dungeons & Dragons User Abilities (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma):

I don’t even want to go down that road. That would be so depressing now.

On getting into comedy more than two decades ago:

Comedy just clicked for me when I first tried it. It didn’t go well, but it just felt like this is a world that I would like to be in.

On knowing he’d pursue comedy for a living:

I cannot remember a specific moment. It was more like a thing I looked back on after a while and realized, “Oh, OK, now I’m here permanently.” It wasn’t based on the money I was making or the security. It was that general feeling of “this is who I am now.”

On being forced early on to watch unfunny hacks:

It was an education of what I didn’t want to do.

On experiencing life to enhance his art:

It’s not that I have a bucket list. I just want to be out and be open to something happening around me. Going shopping in a grocery store can spur ideas just as much as skydiving.

On performance nerves:

There always have to be nerves, especially if you’re trying out new stuff. But it fluctuates all the time, from moment to moment.

On the benefits of success and fame:

It just gives you access to do the things that you want to do. It gives you more opportunities to execute what you conceive creatively.

On someday writing a novel:

That is absolutely not out of the question.

* These aren’t actual books by Patton Oswalt — or anyone else. But he did make up the titles.

** This typeface is a figment of Patton Oswalt’s vivid imagination.