Clean Pants, Full Heart, Can’t Lose: Patton Oswalt Earns His Clapping For ‘Talking’ In His First Netflix Special

In Talking For Clapping, Patton Oswalt’s fifth hourlong stand-up special and first for Netflix, the clapping starts even before he starts talking onstage, befitting his status as one of America’s most beloved stand-up comedians.

Oswalt, currently heard on your screens in The Goldbergs and BoJack Horseman and the new movie Nerdland, is two years removed from his previous full-length release, Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time. That earned him a Grammy nomination. What has time since brought or wrought?

Certainly more perspective. Filming this latest effort at The Fillmore in San Francisco returned him to the scene where his career first took off two decades ago.

“It’s so amazing and surreal being back here,” Oswalt says in his opening minutes onstage. “I used to live blocks away from this theater in 1992-1995. Not a Whole Foods in sight! It was all sketchiness and just — I was in my 20s! And wasting my gorgeous body with its amazing stamina on weed and booze. Weed and booze! That’s all it was.”

Back then, being confused for a heroin addict felt like a compliment to him because he was trying to lose weight. But then as now, the San Francisco attitude cuts sharp.

Time in a bottle does provide distinct differences, though, as he learned when he flew back to the East Coast to visit his parents. Oswalt’s doctor prescribed him four Ambien pills for his insomnia, whereas his mother offered him a pill bottle the size of a police flashlight or a hollow M&M cane filled with a “trail mix” of prescription drugs.

“If I want three Vicodin, I have to do the ‘Coffee is for closers’ speech from the beginning of Glengarry Glen Ross to my doctor, and I gotta nail it. Maybe I’ll get three Vicodin out of the guy,” Oswalt observes. “If you make it past 70 in this country, you are invited to a pill party that would bring Bob Fosse back to life and kill him again. That is how many pills you are given. It’s amazing.”

He also realized, looking at his parents’ dog that’s meant to be lean and fit but isn’t, that they’ve merely duplicated the same technique they used on him. Which means all hope may be lost on him getting back into shape, even if society now tells us that we’re supposed to stay active past our 50s. He’s also past the point of worrying whether his comedy will win you over, too.

“I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I wasn’t going to lose you. And even if I was, I don’t give a sh*t. Not that — I want to have a good set. But if this set goes in the toilet, it will not equal the worst set I’ve ever had,” Oswalt acknowledges.

Speaking of toilets: If you thought the casino gig he described on his last special was hellish, then wait until you hear about his real worst stand-up show, two years into his comedy career, while still an emcee for a 1990 show in Roanoke, Va. Horribly ill with stomach flu and diarrhea, the young Oswalt counted on the performing arts phenomenon of “stage health” to carry him through, only to lose control of his set and his bowels almost immediately once the crowd quickly turned on him. “The entire planet betrayed me, including my body,” he recalls.

Instead of focusing on that visual, though, just imagine, as Oswalt does now, what an audience member must think of live comedy shows if that were his or her first experience with it.

As for his own memories, he still can sing the TV and radio jingles from the Virginia car dealers he first heard as a small child, although he wishes he could swap out that trivial nonsense for more helpful, vital information. “I have taken two infant CPR classes. I cannot remember am I supposed to press on her chest first or blow into her mouth first. That can save my daughter’s life. Very muddled up here. Not clear on it,” he says.

Oswalt has engaged time and again in recent years with web media and so-called social justice warriors, trying to push back when they’ve gone too far with political correctness.

That’s not where the real battles are, anyhow. As he observes, how can RuPaul get into trouble for saying the word “tranny,” while evil politicians who learn the correct terminology and lingo remain able to slip evil policies past the public? At the same time, Oswalt acknowledges that even the president you may love (Republican or Democrat) at some point approved of a policy that’s evil even to you. For Bill Clinton, it may have been NAFTA; for George W. Bush, torture; for Barack Obama in Oswalt’s eyes, drones. Progress may bring America its first female president, and Oswalt hopes it does soon, or even an openly gay leader, but the comedian warns that something bad still will come from it.

At least a woman in the White House could make sense of the American story. Oswalt’s descriptive metaphors aptly show us how women in the movie business often take roles as editors to sort through the mountains of film shot by male directors, and how the conception of a child forces a woman to cull through millions of male sperm to fertilize the egg and grow it into a baby with potential.

Whether that baby identifies as male or female shouldn’t matter as much as some politicians currently make it out to be. Oswalt tries to imagine what their opposition to transgender people could possibly be, and in the most timely of all of his arguments, offers a simple counterpoint: “It’s not a radical agenda if the solution is pants.”

Oswalt’s own daughter is now 6 going on 7, and if his father couldn’t interest him in sports, then Oswalt must make do with his own daughter preferring My Little Pony to Star Wars. “I leave her to her thing,” he says. Except he has managed to remember that trivial nonsense, too.

He closes with a story about a gloriously slacker of a hipster clown who worked one of his daughter’s friend’s birthday parties, and how one of the mothers provided advice that sticks with him today. “I’m so pissed off right now, but I kind of want to see where this goes.”

No matter what he may have thought of the clown, or you of Oswalt, you will want to follow them to see where they go. As long as they’re both wearing pants, that is.

[Watch Patton Oswalt: Talking For Clapping on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.