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
Charlize Theron it's incredible so I always play with people that I'm never the funniest person in my group and I don't want to be I want to be around people that are funnier than me because then I up my game that can't be true it can't be true that you're never the funniest person in your group I've never felt that way and I'm not saying that out of I don't believe in false modesty I'm a funny motherfucker but I'm as funny as I am because I have I always have this chorus of people in my head that are like oh what
What's the different angle I could go here? It makes it fun for me. It doesn't mean that I can just go, oh, here's the obvious joke. And I just love that. I love that those are the people that I've surrounded myself with.
Oh, yeah, my dad loved comedy. My mom, we would always watch Carol Burnett. And then when I got a little older, I would watch SNL. And then I discovered SCTV that my dad also liked. And my dad loved Letterman and Monty Python, all that stuff. And my dad would always have comedy albums. He loved comedy.
I mean, the only military was if my dad got restationed somewhere and we had to move. Or there was one year he got assigned to Japan and we didn't go with him. So for a year he was gone, which was a bummer. But he tried to keep the military out of it. He was like, the military was my way out of my situation, but I want to make it so that these guys don't have to do that.
Was there a lot of... It was just like, you know, don't be an asshole. Like, you know, do your... But also, I wasn't this crazy, rebellious kid. I mean, I would, except for a few times playing hooky, I wanted to do well in school so I could go to college and, you know, have a life. I liked reading.
I liked, you know, there were certain things I wasn't good at math and science, very good at reading and history. So I'm like, okay, that's what I'm going to focus on.
Once I got there, I was in the back room of this place called Garvin's in Washington, D.C., and we— watching comedians, like watching them form a bit. There's a moment like that, and I'm so glad this got captured on camera, in the Seinfeld documentary, Comedian.
It's a good documentary, and it's also a really valuable documentary, and this is why, because there's a sequence where he's working on a bit about think tanks, and and he shows himself on stage with the early version of the bit and it's not working he hasn't found it but you can tell from his energy he knows something's there but he hasn't found it Then we cut to, he's at a table.
I think he's at the Olive Tree. George Wallace is there, Colin Quinn. And they're just batting. He's like, I got this thing about a think tank and how do you get fired from a think tank? And they're batting it around. And then George Wallace goes, you know, Frank, sometimes you don't think. And you just see the light go on for Seinfeld.
And I just had so many nights like that where I'm like, I'd go up and the bit wasn't working. And then someone would go, what about this? I'm like... That's where, yes, that's where it is. So like you add, and having that resource is always amazing, you know, with other comedians, hanging out with them and batting jokes around.
A lot of them are comedians, also other writers, other people in show biz. It's not that I'm only exclusive, but people tend to be friends with people who share their interests and share their mindset, so those are my friends.
No, I imagined a career in writing. Then I stumbled into comedy and was like, this. And then comedy just led to acting. That's when people ask me like, Give me some advice. I can give people advice on how to act. I can't give them advice on how to get into acting because that just kind of happened without me realizing it. It just happened.
I mean, I was in the movie Magnolia because I came off stage at the Largo one night and went back into the kitchen and Paul Thomas Anderson was standing there. He was like, hey, you want to be in a movie? I'm like, yeah. And then, I mean, I knew who he was. He was hanging around at the Largo.
Yeah, I was just like, hey, you want to be in a movie? I'm like, fuck yeah, I want to be in a movie. So, you know. I mean, that movie, his movie... which I know he wanted to be called Sidney. I've seen that movie like 10 times. I think that is just, I mean, out of the gate that guy knew exactly what he wanted to do.
I was, I mean, I don't know. I feel like it was his first time on stage, but he says it wasn't. But the first night I went on stage at Garvin's in the summer of 88, Dave Chappelle went up that night. He was 14, I was 19. And he was one of those guys that I remember from the get, his, like, oh, this guy's gonna be huge. Like he had that energy like he'd been doing it for 30 years, just killed.
Like, oh, this guy's gonna be huge. And sometimes you just know.
Not only was there constant doubt, but then there were those rug pulling moments where I thought I'd gotten over the doubt and then ran into something that made me have to rethink everything. And the biggest one for me was started in 88, moved to San Francisco in 92. In those four years, I'd learned to become a very, very good road comic.
I was starting to feature, but it was just, I was doing stuff that I was pre-thinking audiences would already like. There was nothing of me in that. And then I remember I went, moved to San Francisco and did a show at the Holy City Zoo. And I was there and it was like,
these amazing comedians going up, Jeremy Kramer and Greg Barron, Lankan Earl, Laura Milligan, Margaret Cho, like just doing stuff I'd never seen, like stuff they really, really, that they liked, whether or not the audience liked it, like that's what they like to do. And it was so, and I went up and did my killer road stuff and it, It's not that it ate it, but it was mostly comedians.
They were just like, well, yeah, that stuff, that works. And I just realized it was this weird, like... fuck, I gotta up my game. And I had to scrap my whole act and start from zero again. And having that happen and having it not be the end of the world the next day gave me a lot of courage. But that courage came from facing some genuine fear and failure.
Showing 981–1000 of 1,066 · page 50 of 54
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