Standup comedy is an illusion. The performer must trick the audience into thinking he or she is telling a story because it just occurred to them, or that something which never happened actually did. In Patton Oswalt’s latest Netflix special, however, there’s no artifice in his haunted eyes when he talks about his late wife, Michelle McNamara, and it’s clear that every tortured word is true.
“It’s a huge myth that you write the best stuff when you’re in the depths of despair,” Oswalt says during a recent interview. “You gotta get beyond the first little bit and then you can look back at it in a much broader context and find a way to talk about it.”
Some of the stories and jokes he began telling in the fall of 2016 were too intense, some just didn’t hit the mark, and others he thought would illustrate what the hellscape of grief felt like ended up not working. All in all, though, after the initial shock of doing comedy again after unimaginable tragedy, the process turned out to be pretty typical: culling the best material through trial and error. Returning to comedy began to feel normal. And then Donald Trump was elected president.
“You have to become a bit of a detective and figure out what’s significant and what’s just neural chaff to get you confused and not focused on what’s actually crucial and useful,” he says.
While the omnipresent political chaos provided merciful respites from grief, Oswalt would not go so far as to call them welcome distractions.
“The whole process of grieving is to get beyond it so you can get back into the world,” he says. “And I was suddenly put into a position where if I was able to get beyond my grieving, this was a really shitty world to try to get back to right now. So it may have motivated me to make myself better so I could help make the world better, but it wasn’t like I was anxious to get back to this fucking garbage fire that people seem to have to be living through from day to day.”Like all of his previous outings, Oswalt retired the material after the special was released. This time, however, one gets the sense that even if he is done with the material, it’s not done with him.