How Not to Interview Patton Oswalt

Interviewing your heroes is a tricky task. As the interviewer, you are not only trying to ask interesting questions, but you are also trying to not come off as a geeky fanboy or as a colossal twit. It’s difficult - you have, what, twenty questions with which to pick the brain of someone you admire? A short conversation in which to be scintillating and witty (this is someone you look up to after all). Add to this the fact that the person you are interviewing has gone through countless interviews already - perhaps they are even involved in doing days and days of press for their new project - and have been asked the same questions over and over, and has very likely grown tired of the same repeated queries. So, one wants to 1) not bore the interviewee 2) not bore the eventual readers 3) delve into the interviewee’s mind in ways that may not have already been done. I seem to have a much better grasp on the theory than I do of the actual interviewing. The story goes like this: many people may know Patton Oswalt from his supporting role on CBS’s King of Queens, a sit-com with a rather charismatic cast that unfortunately suffers from the usual network sit-com pitfalls (I must admit that the cast’s comedic timing is pretty great though). However, there is more to Oswalt than just an every-third-episode appearance - he is also one of the best stand-up comedians working today. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes his comedy so great; he’s got good stage presence, he’s affable, he’s material is creative and interesting and he’s not afraid to go on absurd tangents, but the more I contemplate it, the real thing that sets him apart is his enthusiasm. Every joke, every punchline and story is punctuated with this love of humor, of stand-up, of performing, and Oswalt is great at transmitting this love to the audience. While that sounds hokey, and perhaps my phrasing isn’t the best, you probably get what I am aiming at. Oswalt is able to get the audience excited and to really feel what he is feeling not through material that plays off of common themes (like the droves of comedians that attempt communion with the audience through shared experiences) but through the creation of a conversation. Listening to Oswalt’s stand-up, it’s not like a one-way, comedian-talking-to-the-audience experience but rather, more like having a conversation with an excitable friend, a friend who really wants you to understand his inner world and tries to draw you into there so you can experience what he does. Oswalt is a comedic hero of mine, and when I got the chance to interview him, I decided to follow the strategy I outlined above. I gave myself certain constraints - Don’t ask about comedy, don’t ask about his history and don’t ask stupid, snarky questions (like, “What if you could find out the day you were going to die, would you want to know?” - you know, stupid, fake questions meant to engender either silly answers or are just there to waste time. Heck maybe interviewees don’t mind these questions, but they just seem kind of empty.). Oswalt was in the middle of doing days and days of press for his new album Feelin’ Kinda Patton, and I didn’t want to ask him the same questions he’d been asked ad nauseam. This left me with a few topics that I though would be of interest: Hollywood, politics, and comics. However, as I got the first wave of questions back (the interview was conducted over e-mail), I quickly realized that in limiting the questions I asked, I had only asked what was on my mind - what Hollywood looked like to a guy in Pennsylvania, for instance - and not necessarily what Patton would be interested in talking about. The second round fared a bit better, although most of the questions deal with me feverishly trying to articulate myself after realizing that the first round questions were completely inadequate and hoping that I could give Patton something, anything, to ruminate upon that wasn’t completely stupid. The results are such that what I ended up with was more an examination of my psyche as I struggle to grasp a more mature view of art with Patton along for the ride as a kind of gently-chastising, older brother figure. Perhaps what follows is useful as an experiment, perhaps there is indeed something interesting, or maybe it’s just a train wreck. Welcome to my neuroses.

fakejazz: I thought maybe talking about books or movies for a start might be interesting. Like, what have you been reading recently?

Patton Oswalt: A pile of stuff. Alan Moore's Complete Halo Jones Saga, plus How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan D. Spence, plus Kyle Baker's The Cowboy Wally Show and Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass.

Not that the books you're reading are indicative necessarily of what you studied in college, but were you a history major?

English.

Where did you attend college?

William and Mary.

How about movies; seen anything particularly interesting lately?

Mario Van Peebles' BAADASSSS (I hope I put enough a's and s's in that title) was incredible. And SPIDER-MAN 2 fucking ruled.

Oh man, I cannot wait to see Spider-Man 2 tomorrow. The last few years have been really good for comic book movies: X-Men 1 and 2, both Spider-Mans although I couldn't take The Hulk. Do you think Ang Lee did a good job with that? I like how he tried to approximate the feel of a comic book, but the rest of the movie seemed really off, acting-wise, plot-wise.

Yes, and it's going to age really well and become a classic.

I know you’re a big cinema fan, so do you think the Hollywood system is getting better or worse as time goes on (I guess I’ve heard that its been downhill since the advent of “summer blockbuster”, but that could just be the opinion of film snobs)?

I dunno. Even the purest indie filmmaker hopes his or her film is a blockbuster, don't they? I just like good films. I could give a shit who makes 'em -- studios or independents. I'd rather watch ANACONDA than SLIDING DOORS any day.

Yeah, definitely, I didn't mean to turn it into an indie vs. Hollywood kind of dichotomy because pound for pound, there are just as many horrible independent movies as there are big Hollywood films. Probably a better way to phrase this would be: As time is going on, the trend in mainstream artistic mediums seems to tend toward the lowest common denominator (e.g. reality TV as the dominant medium in television). And I'm not saying this stuff is bad - for christ's sake, I watched The Real World this season - but with the increased focus on profits as the only factor in America these days, how is that affecting Hollywood? Is it indeed that good, albeit expensive, ideas are getting passed up in favor of shitty inexpensive ones or shitty ones that will definitely make a lot of money more than they used to? I mean, I have no clue how embedded you are in the movie making system besides acting and writing, how much you know or care how the decisions are made, but I thought it might be worth asking. Jesus...this reads like a fucking final exam question. Fuck. Also, Sliding Doors is a pretty good meta-movie, but then again, I have a hard-on for meta-texts. And Gwynneth-Paltrow. And hyphenating things.

Again, I think the only focus has ever been on profits. Even the so-called “Silver Age” of early 70's Hollywood only came about because those personal, experimental films were the only things making money, so Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon.

Is it difficult to get funding for your own projects?

Yes.

What kind of rigmarole do you have to go through? Is it just a lot of bullshitting and schmoozing? Are there a lot of compromises?

It's endless. I don't need to explain it -- enough movies and books have been written about it. Go see BAAADASSSSS!

Do you ever get to a point where what you want to do isn't worth it anymore because of the bullshit? Or is the hope that you can get your creations out in some form always there? Is making something in Hollywood all about trying to balance executives' concerns with your own vision? Sometimes reading the things you and Louis CK write on aspecialthing.com, I can't help but think of Oulipo. I don't know if you know about them or not, but they are a French group who are dedicated to writing works of fiction using constraints. The idea is that the constraints force them to be more creative, more so than if they could just write anything at all - the most famous example is Georges Perec's novel A Void which is a three hundred page novel written without the letter 'e'. The idea was to write something that read normally but had that constraint. I know I'm probably intellectualizing it more than it needs to be, but making a movie seems like this to me, that is, does having these constraints make you write differently or does that fact that I am a rube from Pennsylvania with little knowledge of how Hollywood works mean that I am asking nonsensical questions?

No, it's just that you already know the answer to all of this, and it's a drag to talk about it, so why bother?

This might be really dumb, but is White Chicks the lowest point popular cinema has hit?

Not even close.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a trailer that was infested with more stereotypical, ill-timed and badly done jokes; it viscerally horrified me.

I love being horrified.

I know it’s really easy to pick on White Chicks, but it represents to me just what kind of shitty things can get greenlit. Is that frustrating at all, to see the amount of garbage that is churned out by Hollywood?

No. 90% of every art form is garbage -- dance and stand-up, painting and music. Focus on the 10% that's good, suck it up, and drive on.

That's really good advice. I'd even up the percentage to 95% or higher since I'm an elitist prick. Did you always have this opinion or did it take a lot of work to get to the point where you ignored the garbage and concentrated on the positive things people were doing?

It took a lot of work. As you get older, and want to stay creative, you realize it's wasted energy to hate bad shit. You can spot it, wipe it off, and get back to work on your own shit. Thank God.

Do you have a pragmatic view of art, that is, all pieces of art have their place, even the kind you and I might view as bad?

Yes.

I continually strive to hold this view, but the constant inundation of what I see as bad art sometimes cripples that intent.

Only if you let it. It's your fault for not being busy and focused enough on your own stuff that you're letting it get you down. White Chicks sucks? Tell me something I don't know. Where's your better movie? Once I started asking myself those questions, it saved me a lot of time, and freed up a lot of psychic energy to work on my own shit. I don't even hate or get mad at bad comedians anymore. Get mad? What the fuck good does that do? Don't get mad, get funny.

When you write comedy, do you write simply what you think is funny or are you concerned about what the audience will think?

Just what I think is funny.

Is the goal of writing material, in your view, the goal of making what you think of as a good piece of art or is it the goal of making what others will see as a good piece of art, or probably, both? Or is the hope that in making something you find to be good that others will also find it good? Is it self-indulgent to create a piece of comedy that you really love but that your audience might hate?

Make it funny. Art isn't my department. If you truly love it, then others will, too.

Have you seen Fahrenheit 9/11?

Yeah.

What’d you think?

[I] loved it despite its flaws. I'm glad that he took a lot of disparate facts, facts that have been scattered across a dozen books and scores of websites, and put them together in an easy-to-follow-, connect-the-dots whole. But I still hate his ambush tactics, and his hypocrisy (his montage of the Coalition of the Willing used the exact sort of racist, dimbulb images that conservatives use). His heart's in the right place, but he gives his detractors too much easy ammunition.

Do you like Michael Moore?

Not personally. But I like his work.

Did you get to talk to him when the both of you were on Conan together?

No. I could tell his brain was fried, so I left him alone.

It's weird (not really) how he's become such a symbol more than a man - on the right, he represents simply a propagandist and on the left, some see him as a loudmouth who is only in it for personal aggrandizement. Yet his constant pleas on every talk show I've seen that we not send our young to die for an unnecessary cause should resonate with anyone who is human. How can these pundits, on both sides, be so alien?

Because they had an idea, and now their idea has them.

Do you think the radical Right or the neo-cons as a whole are beatable or is the best we can hope for simply a defeat of Bush come November?

Anything is beatable. There is no Them. The only "Them" is your fear.

Yeah, definitely. It just seems that as time goes on, even though society progresses, the Right continually learns from their mistakes, like the Terminator or something like that to use a retarded metaphor, but the left learns and forgets in fits. And on top of that, the Right - the radical Right, that is - is willing to use such dirty tricks - mass amounts of voter fraud, Diebold - to attain their ends, things the left is not willing to engage in, that it seems hopeless in the long run. While Bush is definitely beatable, it makes me wonder what our hopes are in the end. Do you watch Angel? Not that I advocate culling your political perspective from a fantasy show, but the final episodes were full of Wild Bunch allusions, about fighting against the odds not for what the fight will bring about, but because fighting against these people is the right thing to do. I wonder if society would be better off if we were to take this perspective, that is, it's our moral duty to fight against The Right rather than, we fight against the Right for some utopian ideal. If we get rid of that utopian hope for a better future, does that take away a real part of what it is for us to be human?

That's a good question. A lot of the problems I have with the left are exactly what you just outlined. We are not progressing, while the Right is not only progressing, they're surging forward like a cancer. Scary. I don't watch Angel.

How have the Concerts for Kerry been going?

Great. I've got one at the Knitting Factory on July 7th. Great line-up.

If Kerry is elected do you think the Left will go back to sleep?

I hope not, but yeah, it probably will.

Do you read a lot of political news online? Any blogs?

Yeah. Alternet.org, commondreams, slate, buzzflash, all the major papers, plus I have a subscription to The Week. Daily Kos sometimes.

One thing about King of Queens: In the Suicide Girls interview, you talk about how Doug and Carrie are horrible people, and it got me thinking about sitcoms. It seems in general, most characters in modern sitcoms are horrible people. Is this off-base?

Most good comedies are about horrible people.

Why is this so?

Nice people are boring.

On an episode of Friends I saw yesterday, Rachel and Ross were hoping some old woman would die so Rachel could get her apartment. In an episode of Frasier right afterwards, Frasier convinces his dad to keep dating a woman he is not interested in so that Frasier can get her to donate money to some cause. Out of the five minutes I’ve seen Will and Grace in my lifetime, the characters have showed callous indifference to each other. Do we enjoy watching jerks for entertainment? If so, what is it about watching assholes that entices us?

I guess it's a way to blow off steam.

It is strange though how there are so many comedic tacks one could use for a premise, yet continually, on network comedies at least, mean-spiritedness seems to win out. I was trying to wrack my brain to see if it had always been this way, and I guess it has been from the start - The Three Stooges, The Honeymooners (for christ's sake, he's constantly threatening to hit his wife) - why do you think Americans have embraced varying degrees of cruelty (mostly in an unironic fashion it seems) as a sit-com archetype?

Because we are descended from cruel, crazy, dissatisfied people. The whole basis for the American Manifest Destiny was dissatisfaction.

And the British too (Absolutely Fabulous for starters, although I am only familiar with what I can see on BBC America, so I don't really want to go abstracting a theme for their whole culture). Are these kinds of people simply what network executives think entertain us and because that's all that's on, we watch it? Is it a function of the pervasive cruelty of our government seeping in to other areas of society? Or are the characters just clowns? Once again, I'm probably over-intellectualizing this...it's just weird that so many mainstream comedies have such horrible characters in them that you (me) begin to wonder why that is the dominant sit-com structure.

It's what writers and creative people usually come up with.

Lastly, about comic books: How did you get to write for DC?

I had a lot of fans there, and a guy asked me to pitch a story, so I did. I wasn't very happy with how it came out -- I was clearly an amateur.

What’s the editorial process like?

There really wasn't one, which was both a blessing and a curse.

How about Marvel completely fucking up the X-Men now that Morrison left?

X-Men post-Morrison: have they fucked it up? I think Vaughan's doing an interesting job so far. We'll see. Bendis is on Ultimate [X-Men], so I don't see how they're fucking anything up.

I love Vaughan's Y: The Last Man and he'll probably do a good job on Ultimate before Singer takes over, but I was talking about how they are undoing everything Morrison did the normal universe titles. Magneto has been brought back; Xorn is actually another mutant - it seems like they took zero time to destroy all the themes and plot points Morrison tried to bring out in his two and a half years. The only one so far that I've really enjoyed was Astonishing X-Men, and that's mostly because I'm a big Joss Whedon dork.

Well, every writer wants to stake his own claim. If you read the Arthurian cycles, each successive writer made a big deal of up-ending whatever the "favorite" knight from the last cycle was. Sir Kay was the original ass-kicker, who gets replaced by Gawain. By the time of Le Morte d'Arthur, Lancelot (a completely new creation) is the new Wolverine, while Gawain is a sidekick, and Sir Kay is literally the Rob Schneider, comic relief of the cycle. Comics are the same way, I guess.

Once again, Patton, I have to thank you for taking your time to read my bullshit questions.

No, it was fun. Thanks!