Michael Schur wrote for Saturday Night Live and The Office before cocreating, writing, and producing Parks and Recreation and, most recently, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, two half-hour comedies that have won critical acclaim and loyal fans. His brand of humor contains an extraordinary amount of pathos while maintaining irreverence, and that complexity is embedded in Schur himself.

In 2005, Schur’s fiancée (now wife) was in a minor car accident. Despite the lack of visible damage to the other driver’s car, the driver she hit reported the accident to the police and later said the car’s bumper was “creased” and would cost more than eight hundred dollars to replace. Schur asked the driver (“Saab Guy,” as Schur called him) to let it go, since the nearly imperceptible scratch wouldn’t even show up in a photo and filing a claim would contribute to rising insurance rates, but the driver responded, “That’s not my problem.” Frustrated by Saab Guy’s callousness, Schur offered instead to donate the same sum to Hurricane Katrina relief if the driver would drop the claim, but Saab Guy was reluctant. So Schur asked his friends “to shame a petty Saab driver” by promising to donate to Katrina relief as well. If Saab Guy agreed to drop the claim, they would donate as planned, but if he refused, they’d be welcome to donate anyway, “in the name of, like, ‘Saab Guy is a Jerk,’” as Schur wrote in an email to his friends. He created a website to track the responses and received thirty thousand dollars in pledges in around twenty-four hours. But as satisfying as reprimanding someone stubborn and self-centered might appear to be, Schur blogged that he was “wrestling with some tough questions.” He couldn’t sleep; he asked his friends for advice and even called ethics professors at three universities. Ultimately, he and Saab Guy worked out a deal: Schur would cut him a check for the cost of repairs and Saab Guy would donate a portion to charity. More interesting than the compromise was Schur’s candor when blogging about the situation: “It just feels a little wrong, in retrospect… None of us, I would say, could hold up under the kind of scrutiny we have put Saab Guy under… This has been one of the most interesting and complicated events of my adult life. It has twisted us around, sparked a lot of heated debates, and made us feel everything from euphoria to despair. It contains dozens of ethical and moral questions, the details of which we might be unraveling for years.”

I wanted to interview Mike Schur because his work radiates optimism and a faith in humanity that feels like...