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Patton Oswalt’s world, as well as his daughter’s, was annihilated on April 21, 2016, when Oswalt’s wife, Michelle McNamara, died unexpectedly.
The next day, Oswalt released his fifth stand-up comedy special, Talking For Clapping, which wound up winning him both an Emmy and a Grammy. But where would he go from there? After a few months away from the stage, the celebrated comedian began the rehabilitation process by sharing stories on late-night talk shows and newspaper interviews, and eventually onstage, too.
Here’s how he described the aftermath for him and his daughter in a September 2016 appearance on Conan:
Oswalt already had found plenty to laugh about in the cruel coincidences and ironies of dealing with tragedy, and you can hear how he has tagged and built upon these stories in his new hour for Netflix, Annihilation.
It helps, of course, that so much of our world has seemingly turned upside-down in the past year. So much so that Oswalt can open the hour by tricking his audience into thinking they’d just missed something in the first five minutes by not looking at Twitter. “That’s the world we’re living in now,” he notes.
Which also explains why Oswalt feels he cannot write jokes about Donald Trump any longer. Even if he does describe our current president as “racist scrotum dipped in Cheetos dust” and a cartoonish supervillain whose origin story Oswalt at least can understand.
“It’s exhausting!” he exclaims. “Imagine there’s an insane man on the sidewalk, just shitting on the sidewalk and yelling about Hitler. So you’re looking at it, and you immediately think of the funniest joke about shitting on the sidewalk, and you turn to tell it to a bunch of people, and behind you, he’s taken the shit and made a sombrero out of it.”
By the time Annihilation reached you in October, any jokes he made at the taping this summer would already be outdated or out-Trumped by his escalating madness. “Donald Trump is sour cream in the sauna,” Oswalt said.
Oswalt’s no fighter, no matter what his genetic test results may lead him to believe. After a fun story describing his close encounter with a bar fight, he takes about 10 minutes to talk with audience members in the front row. In most cases, this segment would be considered pure filler and left on the editing room floor. But Oswalt needs the time, both for himself and for the audience, as a buffer before he segues into the second half-hour, devoted to the death of his late wife and how it impacted Oswalt and his daughter.
You even see him turning to pause and summon up the emotional strength before taking the mic again to describe the worst day of his life.
For Oswalt, who has relied upon pop culture references for both comfort and comedy, they proved little use now. In reality, he jokes that Bruce Wayne would not have become Batman as a young orphan, but more likely have grown up to become a fat vegan slam poet. Oswalt recounts how he took his daughter back to elementary school days after Michelle’s death, how they traveled for Mother’s Day, and in a more elaborate retelling of the story he delivered last September on Conan, how he worried that perhaps he was the one who had died, and this was his Hell.
His way out of this “numb slog” is to close with a weird, dirty closing bit that always cracked Michelle up.
Through Annihilation, Oswalt finds catharsis. As he remembers his late wife’s philosophy and shares it with us: “It’s chaos. Be kind.”
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.
