“‘Pipes’ was really a story about me being very, very unhappy and knowingthat I have to find a way to another place to survive, and that other place, I think, is the stories.” Keret adds: “Because my pipes are definitely the stories.”

Within his stories, Keret lavishes affection on his characters as if they were newborn children. “I really love my characters—all my characters—and it’s difficult for me when people say, ‘I really like the story about this asshole,’ and they think that I think he’s an asshole, too. But I don’t, I really like him.”

Keret believes that the source of the confusion is his un-American use of irony: “I use irony to actually create empathy, but in America I find people who see the irony as more hateful. In the States, people read the irony of my stories as patronizing and disrespectful for the object of the irony.”

His use of irony is often laugh-out-loud funny, which led Keret to a successful stint as a comedy writer for an Israeli comedy show resembling “Saturday Night Live.” He arrived there from a failed attempt reporting at a television news-magazine show.

“Every time they would send me out to do pieces that are very clear cut for them—like it was a killer or something like that—I would come back with this very ambivalent piece. I would show his side and show empathy for him and it’s really not good for ratings, because to be good for ratings you need to be very one-sided.”

Keret says they didn’t lay him off only because “they really liked me and they really had this thought that if they would fire me I wouldn’t find any other job.”

But Keret not only found work in TV and books, he’s also made a showing in the motion picture world. He lectures at Tel Aviv University’s School of Film and has made a number of award-winning short- and full-length films.