Patton Oswalt’s latest hour-long special We All Scream (released on Netflix last week) really is deceptively titled. On the one hand, a self-described ‘woke comedian’ like Oswalt is always interested in individual and collective expressions of distress. For example, Oswalt didn’t deal with (the pandemic-induced) lockdowns very well at all, as he describes in We All Scream. Most of us will probably find some common ground there.
But We All Scream is even more curious with its displays of extraneous enthusiasm; a scream of delight in situations where a nervous chuckle would be far more appropriate. Where did the faux-delight come from and what is it masking? Luckily, Oswalt is up to the challenge of deconstructing these moments. Throughout this very impressive special, the deconstruction happens in constantly surprising, even surreal ways.
For example, Oswalt describes the alacrity with which Americans are returning to buffets and cruise ships; apparently, there isn’t a cruise ship to be booked for love or money up until 2028 (“all aboard the plague barge!” as Oswalt says). Part of this has to do with people feeling cooped up these last few couple of years, of course. But the loudest screams of delight are coming from what Oswalt rightly calls “own-the-libs glee”. Amidst all the fearmongering about vaccines being filled with toxins or government trackers, amidst the lies-for-profit Alex Jones-adjacent media landscape, a demographic has emerged that seems to exist only to score humiliation points. (Oswalt mimics an anti-vaxxer business-owner here: “Come on down to Captain Covid’s Alpha-Males-Only Buffet!”).
The part that really drove the point home for me was when Oswalt shifts the spotlight to the 1950s, as America successfully eradicates polio from the country. Artfully, the comedian both gives an earlier generation a certain baseline credit and in the same breath, condemns them for their well-documented failures. It’s a delicate balance and he does so well to maintain it here.
“In 1955, the polio vaccine came out. We were two years away from satellites. There were no satellites! And America could not have been more backward, racist, homophobic, sexist and these non-satellite-having racist dipshits lined the fuck up to get their fucking vaccine! ‘Gimme that shot, I can’t police those water fountains from a wheelchair! I can’t beat up queers inside an iron lung! Give me my science! What am I, a caveman?’”
To pull off something like this onstage, you have to be supremely confident in the oddities your brain cooks up, and Oswalt certainly is.
Oswalt is similarly intuitive about generational clashes (“progress will always fucking steamroller you”), the physicality of being in your mid-50s (“everything is potentially fatal”) and the domino effect of temper tantrums (“I won’t be here to see what Gen Z puts in the White House… President Logan Paul. President Joe Rogan”). I love his technique of latching on not to the punchline of a three-line joke (as is de rigueur), but the very foundations of the underlying idea. Towards the beginning of We All Scream, he ends a joke with the phrase “crazier than a barn full of clown pubes” and then devotes the next 7-8 minutes investigating what that could look like and the ethical and logistical concerns around making it happen. To pull off something like this onstage, you have to be supremely confident in the oddities your brain cooks up, and Oswalt certainly is.
This confidence is why We All Scream is (almost) overstuffed, with daring leaps of narrative logic. In the middle of Oswalt describing his abortive attempts to stick to a workout regimen, the comedian invents two characters: the enthusiastic new ‘rebounder’ (a mini-trampoline meant for home gyms) and the old, weather-beaten elliptical trainer, which had the Internet and a screen attached. The rebounder is characterised as the rookie cop, full of big ideas about police reform and conscientious policing and community outreach. The elliptical trainer, however, is the proverbial crusty old dog, a homicide cop whose cynicism is beyond repair. Look at the scene Oswalt paints here with nothing more than his words and his wonderfully malleable voice (not for nothing is he one of the most in-demand voice actors going around).
“The old homicide cop. Eight bullet holes in him. Eleven colostomy bags. He’s having his seventh Viceroy of the morning. Looks at the little rookie rebounder (mimes a weary cigarette-drag). ‘You’re gonna learn, kid. You think I didn’t have dreams when I came here? I was top of the line. You could stream movies on me, TV shows, mountain programs, everything! I was gonna turn this house of fatties around.”
Of course, Oswalt doesn’t stick to the elliptical trainer for long (“Thought he was gonna go the distance. He didn’t make it past the first Blue Apron ad.”) because life is unfair, disappointment is mandatory, your favourite snacks are poison and all the music you like is problematic. But this is always part of the fun in a Patton Oswalt show: despair and the impulse to kick its teeth in are never too far away from each other.
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