Comedian/actor Patton Oswalt returns for a stand-up gig at the Hawaii Theatre this weekend, sporting a fresh outlook for 2020.
He’s just not sure what that’s going to be yet.
“As far as the New Year is concerned, I’m just trying to keep my thoughts as blank as possible,” he said in a phone interview. “I try not to predict or expect too many things. I’m trying to be more in the moment, rather than go, ‘This is what’s going to happen, or this is what’s not going to happen.’”
It’s a slight change in attitude for Oswalt, who established his comedy bona fides through his recurring role on “The King of Queens,” the working-class sitcom. Having now attained film stardom with “Ratatouille,” where he voiced the main character Remy, and “Young Adult,” playing opposite Oscar-winner Charlize Theron, Oswalt’s attitude also reflects the luxury of reaching a point in life and career where perspective tends to take over.
“Sometimes I’ve been more optimistic or hopeful or expectant of things, but as you get older you mellow a bit and just go, ‘OK, let’s see what happens here,’ ” said Oswalt. He presently has a recurring role in the schoolroom sitcom “A.P. Bio,” where he plays the clueless principal, and will have a comedy special coming out in the spring.
OSWALT STARTED early in comedy, dropping in on an open mic in 1988 at a club near Washington, D.C., while still a freshman in college. (Folks might have some fun imagining the comedy pairing that could have resulted had Oswalt paired up with another young comedian who made his debut that night: Dave Chappelle. “He was 14 and I was 19,” Oswalt said. “It was hilarious.”)
He found that he liked the lifestyle: working late, having days free to “work creatively.” The hard part was keeping up with school.
“I was studying hard in college but I wanted to be a comedian,” he said. “So here was definitely that ‘push-pull,’ like, ‘So during the week you go to all these classes, but on weekends you go do stand-up comedy?’ ‘Yup.’ ”
But he did graduate, with a degree in English from the prestigious College of William & Mary, the second-oldest university in the country. Going from that to writing and performing comedy — for shows like MadTV — might seem an odd career choice, but it worked well for Oswalt when it came time to audition for “The King of Queens.”
The role of Spence, a subway-token booth worker who was the frequent butt of jokes by Kevin James’ Doug Heffernan, was described to him as “kind of a guy who’s too smart for his own good, who has all this intelligence but doesn’t quite know how to function in society,” Oswalt said. “Kind of a drifting type, which I totally understood.”
Having spent three decades in comedy now, Oswalt has developed instincts needed for the business. He said he no longer has to write out bits or gags, simply “working them out” live in small clubs and open mics before taking them on the road.
Whereas early in his career he mostly told jokes and comments in the observational-comedy vein, now his routines often consist of long, often self-deprecating anecdotes drawn from real life experience, like the time he performed at a casino and didn’t have to tell a single joke — everyone was so drunk they entertained themselves yelling out his roles.
“A lot of these things are things that really happened, and I just extrapolate from there,” he said. “I just try to tie them to something bigger or something to wonder about.”
OSWALT’S CHERUBIC, everyman appearance belies a sometimes dark view of life. He’s been known to take on supporters of President Donald Trump on his Twitter feed and devotes much of his 2018 project, “Annihilation,” a Netflix production that was nominated for both an Emmy and a Grammy, to criticizing the president.
“He spent $40 million (on the campaign), broke his ass, and now he’s got the job, and it sucks,” he says, explaining Trump’s behavior in office.
Accessing the dark side has especially helped in dealing with a personal tragedy, the sudden death of his wife, true crime writer Michelle McNamara, in 2016. Oswalt spoke openly about it at the time, telling Conan O’Brien, “I’m like every bad ’80s sitcom, where there’s a dad raising a kid by himself … except my sitcom sucks. There’s no punchlines. It’s just a lot of insomnia, and it’s a lot of me eating Cheetos for dinner.”
Oswalt, who has since remarried, made something positive out of the tragedy, commissioning the completion of a book that McNamara was working on about a serial murderer known as the Golden State Killer. Two months after it was published, in February 2018, Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer in two Californian towns, was arrested in connection with the crimes.
“It’s bittersweet,” Oswalt said. “I was happy that he was in jail because of all the pain that he caused, but a part of me would have wanted her to experience that feeling of justice for a lot of the victims that she interviewed, because she got intimately involved with them and really cared about their stories.”
PATTON OSWALT
>> Where: Hawaii Theatre
>> When: 8 p.m. Saturday
>> Cost: $45-$65
>> Info: 528-0506, hawaiitheatre.com
