Patton Oswalt
speaker
1,066 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 Jun
Patton Oswalt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.
Appearances
This is just a general one.
You could just lean in and say, sorry if I look a little different.
I started trimming my eyebrows and I couldn't stop.
I know what you're thinking.
I'll tell you after we get through escrow.
Comedian, yeah.
He did. An insane World War II general.
You know, he's the opposite because he, my dad was a Marine. He did three tours in Vietnam. And he, I remember him saying, I never, ever want you or your brother going to war or joining the military forces. It is. So he was, when I veered into comedy, he was very happy. He's like, you're doing good. And like, he, cause he always loved, I mean, he loved Jonathan Winters and the
His mother's brothers and David Letterman, all that stuff. So the fact that I went into comedy, I think, made him very, very happy.
I went in in the summer of 88. It was, I'm sure you've experienced, everyone's experienced this, a version of this, the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college when you start to realize, oh, I need to figure my life out. I better figure out what I'm gonna do with myself. And I just started doing a bunch of different jobs. And none of them were clicking.
They were all doing fine, but it was like, if I lost this job, I wouldn't care. And then I went and did a couple open mics in D.C., and I just loved the hang and the world and the people, the fact that I was upstream of all the humor. I was at its source and seeing where it was coming out. I just loved it.
And like watching them sit around and kind of volley back and forth, a vague idea that would then keep getting refined and bounce around until it turned into a bit. It was like, oh, people create stuff out of thin air. There's no they. There's no them that's separate from us because these guys would come in and,
They'd bitch about a parking ticket they'd gotten or, oh, my fridge broke and half my food is spoiled. And then they would sit and write jokes. Like it was – that wasn't their whole – some people that I knew, it was like their life and the hassles of it was their life. And these were like, I still have those same hassles and then I create stuff on top of it. And there was something really –
There's like something even more human about that, that in the face of every other hassle that every other person is facing, I'm going to also think of something funny and try to make money off of it.
Yeah, I don't.
Hell yeah. All right. By the way, I'm swinging kettlebells while we do this. If you're just listening, there are kettlebells being swung and I'm eating a giant stack of pancakes because I got to go top trees up in Coos Bay. Yeah, I'm always, but I'm not, I wish I could, I don't have that ability to sit down with a notebook and just write jokes.
I, as you said, I drive around and deal with my day and while I'm walking around and dealing with my morning or my afternoon, I'm thinking of things. And so it's very, very conversational. However I'm talking to you offstage, I kind of go onstage and I'm still talking that same way. I just try to make it funny. So, I mean, it's just the way I think about the world.
I don't even, you know, it isn't even a defense mechanism at this point. It's a comfort zone that I have to be in. Because if I get to, I was thinking this this morning, by the way. The fact that I really have realized I hate the phrase that comedians are the truth tellers and the philosophers.
It's like, shouldn't we be comedians and our politicians and philosophers and journalists should be the truth tellers standing up for people so that the audiences I perform for, I can say silly shit that I made up that amuses them in this better world they're living in. We shouldn't be in a world where, well, hopefully, because that means we're living in medieval times.
That means the king is just sitting there going, well, I just passed a law where I get to sleep with all your daughters, and I know that feels terrible, but here comes a corncob, the farting dwarf, and he's gonna say that I'm fat, and that'll balance it all out. That's not how, no, there should be people setting that stuff right so that I can do jokes
Showing 841–860 of 1,066 · page 43 of 54
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