Patton Oswalt is a chronicler of the topical and deeply personal. Whether he’s agitated or playful, his comedy has long grappled with the frustrations of real life at ground-level and the larger uncertainties of this volatile political moment.
It has taken him through grim territory but also intimate moments of uplift. As he once pondered in his book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, “What is stand-up comedy except isolating specific parts of culture or humanity and holding them up against a stark, vast background to approach at an oblique angle and get laughs?”
His stand-up career began in the late 1980s. He’s since led 10 popular comedy specials, including Netflix’s “Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping,” for which he won a writing Emmy. He then won a Grammy for the album version of the same show.
Oswalt’s next special is “Tea & Scotch,” which premieres June 9 on 800 Pound Gorilla’s YouTube channel. Recorded in Madison, Wisconsin, the comedy set is both outspoken and heartfelt, telling stories about showing his teenage daughter John Carpenter’s Halloween for the first time, phone-banking for Kamala Harris, his 30 years on Prozac, and finding relief while scrolling through lawn-clearing videos. (“It is my porn!”)
While comedy remains at the center of his identity, he’s also enjoyed a very busy acting career—from voicing the rat hero and would-be chef Remy in Pixar’s animated Ratatouille to hundreds of on-camera roles in the likes of “Veep,” “The King of Queens,” “Seinfeld,” “Justified,” and, last year, playing a Vulcan on “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.”
Without elaborating much, Oswalt, 57, reveals his hopes to soon expand beyond guesting on other projects to create something of his own as a filmmaker, and not necessarily a comedy. “My dream project’s going to be something that I create and direct,” he says.
At the same time, he continues honing his comedy skills, reflecting on his life, from growing up in suburban Sterling, Virginia, to now being firmly rooted in Los Angeles, hitting comedy rooms on tour during weekend trips. “Even before I started comedy,” Oswalt tells SPIN, “I was always able to joke with people and kind of flow with the conversation and take it places that maybe I didn’t even expect it to go.”
Did you have comedy heroes that drew you in this direction?
Oh, absolutely. God, you name ’em. Before I started, it was definitely people like Pryor and Carlin and Steve Martin and Albert Brooks. And then once I started doing comedy, it was just all my friends. It was everyone that I was hanging out with and kind of competing with and inspired by, all of that.
Did you see any comics from the earlier generation that you learned something from just by watching them go?
I got to see Carlin live a couple of times. I got to see Leno before I started. But once I started actually getting into clubs, I was hanging out with people like Dave Chappelle, Brian Posehn, Sarah Silverman, and David Cross, and those were the people that were really influencing my moment-to-moment development.
From a distance, talented comics hanging out backstage together would seem to create a special charge in the air.
Well, there’s definitely an immediate, “Oh, I’m watching this person do this, and yes, I had this bit in my head, but they just inspired me to go a whole other direction with it.” The time that we spend talking before the show even starts, there’s definitely that feeling of something that we were just talking about backstage is fueling me to say something on stage. It’s all about the hang. The hang is just as important as the work you put in before you go on stage, or when you’re on stage, to me.
I recently saw a clip online of someone heckling Jerry Seinfeld and the guy getting completely eviscerated in an effortless way by Jerry. I don’t know how often you get heckled, but why do people do that? What is going on there?
Especially now, people are so used to talking online and commenting on things and reacting to things that when someone’s in front of them, IRL, they want to comment on that in the moment. They think that they’re in a constant dialogue with people. And then there’s also jealousy or boredom. There’s nothing’s more frustrating than a heckler getting tossed out of a show going, “I was just trying to help the show. I was just making it funnier!” I mean, everybody wants to be funny. Nobody wants to think that they’re not funny.
Have you seen a successful heckler?
Oh, yeah. When I was coming up, I got beaten by hecklers all the time. Any comedian that’s good with dealing with hecklers lost to hecklers many, many times coming up. That’s why they’re so fearless and confident now. They’ve gone through all of that.
In your new “Tea & Scotch” special, you talk about showing the original Halloween to your daughter. That’s a big decision.
She was always pressing me to watch movies way scarier than I thought she was ready for. But when a kid really brings you a well-thought-out argument, I think you need to reward that. And she brought me a pretty well-thought-out argument as to why she should watch it. So I watched it again and saw that actually by today’s standards, this is still a great movie, but it’s not that scary. Then we watched it together and I had a rude awakening as to what my daughter actually thinks is scary, based on what my memories of scary is.
What got you into horror movies?
I can’t remember the specific moment that got me into horror movies, except that when I was little, I just loved monsters and loved the thrill of being scared and fantasy and stuff like that. It was always a thing that I was immediately into. I just loved it. There’s no explanation. Some things they just press your buttons, and that’s something that pressed my buttons, man.
You were recently on “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” as a Vulcan. How was that experience for you?
It was a blast, getting to work with that crew and that cast and being on a set where it was a 360-degree practical set. I thought I’d be in front of green screens and stuff. But no, they actually built the hallways and the decks and the rooms in the chambers. It’s just a fun world to get to play in.
Were you a “Star Trek” fan as a kid?
I’m not deep into the lore because Star Wars kind of captured my brain when I was 8. And “Star Trek” was a little bit ahead of my time, but I know enough about it, and I certainly appreciate how amazing the world is.
You’ve been making movies and television for a while. How has that affected you as a fan, seeing behind the curtain?
It just makes me appreciate movies even more. Now I know the kind of exhausting, exacting emotional work that goes into getting those scenes and making it feel like it’s just a bunch of stuff flowing. It makes me love the art form even more now.
What aspirations do you have now as an actor?
I want to keep acting in movies, obviously, and then I want to write and direct. I’m working toward that right now.
What do you have in mind?
I don’t really want to say right now, but I’ve always been fascinated by the kind of low-stakes, low-life crime world. That is something that’s always drawn me in.
In your comedy specials, does the balance between topical and observational comedy that you do fluctuate over time, depending on what’s going on in the world?
It fluctuates. Each special I do is just a snapshot of me reacting to the world at that time. I’m not trying to do anything beyond that. I’m trying to capture that moment and this is how it feels.
This particular moment in politics seems very different from what you probably remember growing up. Are you still surprised as it continues down this path?
You’re always shocked when they do the thing that you were only imagining them doing as a worst-case scenario. But I think now we’re almost at the point where we are so worn down by the constant absurdity of it all, I will be really interested to see what the breaking point is, what that line is—if there is one.
You mentioned phone-banking for Kamala Harris in your special. How often are you that directly active?
I do different things at different times, but it’s just as those things come up for the most part. I’m really trying to work on my work. I think we’d all like to just be able to be able to do that, more than have to constantly be terrorized by events every day.
It seems like a strange time when a war starts the same week NASA is sending people back to the moon.
It is weird how we are at the extremes of our highs and lows right now. It’s insane. Humans have been the furthest they’ve ever been away from this planet, and they’re poets. They’re sending down these beautiful transmissions. And then we have a guy on the ground who’s saying, “I’m gonna wipe out a civilization.” I don’t know how our minds are going to keep both of those together, but we’ll see.
You mentioned in the special how Trump was a reaction to Obama. What do you think the reaction to Trump will be?
I have no idea. There’s either going to be a radical version of empathy and kindness, or it’ll just get even darker. A lot of people equated cruelty with strength, and a lot of them aren’t going to be able to come back from that.
According to polls anyway, it seems like Americans are falling out of love with the current president. Are you hopeful about that?
I’m hopeful about that, but I think it’s going to take a generation. I don’t think we’ll be able to throw a switch and go back. We’re so far down this road. There are so many people that are like, “If I can’t have this level of cruelty and pettiness, I’d rather the world burn down.” That’s a level of nihilism that we’re going to have to work through.
Are there things going on in the world that give you hope?
Well, of course. I mean, the stuff that’s going on with NASA. And for as much pushback as there is, there are some big leaps forward. The fact that they had to work as hard as they could to turn back the advances that were made in women’s reproductive choices—and for trans and gay people—shows you how far it had come. That’s what they were reacting to. So if we could come far before, maybe we can do it again.
What kind of music were you into when you were a kid—and more recently?
Oh, man. I very much loved classic heavy metal, a lot of country, and then a lot of punk, post-punk, all the alt stuff from the ’90s, Pixies, a lot of Elvis Costello, a lot of Beastie Boys, a lot of Kinks. And then now just smaller groups that no one’s heard of, like Warm Soda and Bleached. There’s so much great music still happening. That also gives me hope, you know?
Was there a concert that really moved you and stood out for you at some point in your life?
Watching the Pixies open up for Love and Rockets [in 1989] when I was in college really kicked my head open for that whole era of music. It took me forwards to Nirvana. Another show that I remember: I saw PJ Harvey at the Viper Room, that was pretty amazing.
In your comedy, when a show is going really well, what is the feeling for you in the room?
The best way to describe it is I’m outside of myself, and I’m more connected with the larger crowd, the larger feeling of the room. I know this sounds very vague, but you are not even thinking about the set or what you’re doing joke-wise or word-wise. You’re just talking to the audience, like they’re one person. That’s the best way to describe it.
What was the best comedy set you ever watched?
For me, I remember there was a night that Dana Gould was at Cobb’s Comedy Club [in San Francisco]. This was in the ’90s. The material was already amazing, but then he went off on some almost hallucinatory riff about Larry King interviewing guests and the time-space membrane. I can’t do it justice, but it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and it’s definitely the best set I’ve ever seen.
Politicians will often appear at an event and perform some jokes, obviously written by other people. How do they do, generally?
Some people are funny and some people aren’t. Some people can deliver jokes and some people can’t. It was very telling in the 2008 election, if you watch the Alfred Smith dinner [in New York], when Obama goes up—he’s funny, but you can tell he’s like, “I could still blow this.” He’s very self-conscious, and then McCain goes up and just destroyed. It’s not that Obama did badly—but I think McCain at that point looked at the numbers and was like, “Yeah, I’m not gonna win this thing. I can just relax.” And that sometimes creates the best set—when they’re like, “It’s a Thursday night, no one’s really watching that’s gonna help my career or hurt my career. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” That’s when you get comedians at their best.
