Among her many other pursuits, Kristen Schaal regularly cohosts the cornucopic and duly lauded Hot Tub Variety Show with her friend and fellow comedian Kurt Braunohler, who once described watching Schaal onstage as “a little bit like a billion suns exploding in each eyeball.” Doing an interview with Schaal is not so different from being privy to your own private variety show. Over the course of our conversation, she mimicked no fewer than a dozen voices and imitated a dead cockatiel.

Schaal’s life also bears some resemblance to a variety show. She’s recently garnered praise for her role as Mel in the HBO comedy series Flight of the Conchords. She’s taken her stand-up to cities across the U.S., and to the U.K. and Australia. With Braunohler, she’s developed the series Penelope: Princess of Pets for the online site Super Deluxe (so far, only three episodes have been posted, but more are in development and the fourth will double as a New Pornographers music video). She’s appeared in many other online shows and shorts, in movies, on TV, and in commercials. She’s also the founding member of the Striking Viking Story Pirates, a program that promotes literacy and artistic expression in New York City schools by adapting stories kids have written into theatrical productions put on by professional actors. She’s won boatloads of awards and distinctions: Best Alternative Comedian (at HBO’s 2006 U.S. Comedy Arts Festival), Best Female Stand-up (at the 2006 Nightlife Awards in New York), the Second Annual Andy Kaufman Award (hosted by the New York Comedy Festival), and Australia’s Barry Award, to name just a few.

Schaal is very generous with her audiences, although she never panders. Her work, which she’s compared to “tiny plays on stage,” might include dramatic readings from the newspaper, audio recordings of crickets laughing, or mock marriage proposals. It forces audiences into a kind of kinetic perceptiveness, making us feel smarter just for keeping up with her.

This interview took place on a wintry day, over coffee and enormous bowls of granola. We met at a bird-themed restaurant in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, and given that we were in Park Slope, famous for its brownstones and its babies, we probably shouldn’t have been surprised that our breakfast coincided with mother-toddler sing-a-long hour. While we chatted, we were regaled with such classics as “The Alphabet Song,” “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”

—Alena Graedon

I. THE BIRD DECADE

BLVR: How much do you think environment affects your comedy? I’m partly thinking of the fact that you grew up on a farm in Colorado and so much of your work includes animals. So,...