Funny / Patton Oswalt

• Perhaps his most famous bit is his KFC Famous Bowls routine. He even ended up creating an entirely separate routine years later about the response to it, including KFC creating a bobble head doll of Patton and sending one to him. Patton himself notes the Magnum Opus Dissonance with the bit.
  Patton: I've tried to do material about deep, introspective, real stuff... and that's the one that got away from me.
  • The second bit has him stop himself after saying "I don't know why" he's tied to the product, immediately hanging a lampshade that there's a very good reason he's associated with it, and calls himself out for being disingenuous about it.
    Patton: Wait a minute, did I just say "I don't know why"? I do a 10-minute bit about it. Fuckin' ass- "I don't know why that happened! Beh! Maybe I shouldn't have spent all that time writing the bit with the pen and the paper! And then saying the bit in the microphones on TV. Perhaps that was my error."
• Patton scored his first leading movie role in Ratatouille when director Brad Bird heard his Black Angus Steak monologue, in which he imagines an aggressive meal experience at the budget steakhouse where the customer is force-fed mountains of food.
  • “Bend over, Abigail Mae, because HERE COMES THE GRAVY PIPE!”
• Patton tells the story of his one-nighter opening for a comedy-magician in a sports bar in Kentucky, where both he and the magician were shorted five dollars. The magician "hate-fucked the crowd with magic for ten minutes".
  Patton: AND! Let's review! What invoked the wrath of the wizard?!? Five dollars! I thought that to piss off a warlock you had to burn down his village or kill his familiar, something. No, all you have to do: steal five dollars from him. Twenty quarters! Twenty games of Galaga, and he will invoke a thorny doom from beneath the crust of the Earth—OKAAAAAAAY!
  • And Oswalt, for his part, is laughing his ass off at this, leading him to wonder how confused the poor audience was.
    Patton: After a while, the audience would watch the magician... then they'd look back at me... then they'd look back at him. Trying to piece it- (he affects a Southern drawl for this) "Is this some kinda avant garde, German theater bullshit where a magician goes up and yells at us, and then they dress a lesbian in boy's clothing in the back of the room, and she sits cackling in the darkness like a half-remembered nightmare through a cracked mirror of regret? 'Cause if that's what the fuck this is, I seen it done better, that's all I'm sayin'."
• Patton destroys the song "Christmas Shoes." Animated for your viewing pleasure.
  • "Christmas Shoes" is sung by a group called NewSong; Patton notes that this comes across as the setup for a third-rate Who's on First? gag:
    Patton: Song is called "Christmas Shoes", and it's by a Christian group called NewSong, which, I dunno why, why would you name your group "NewSong"!? You're just gonna be livin' in an Abbott and Costello routine for the rest of your life. "Yeah, we got a new song." "By who?" "Exactly." "What!? It's- oh, fuck this..."
  • According to Patton, the song's second verse makes the kid in the song sound like a character from a different Christmas story:
    Patton: "His clothes were worn and old, he was dirty from head to toe," so he's like a Dickensian street urchin! In a world full of hand sanitisers, he's [fake Cockney accent] "Have you got a ha'penny, sir?... Then how about a smile?"
  • The real crowner comes when he puts on a Paul Lynde-esque singsong to mock the song's bizarre idea of Jesus caring about what shoes the kid's mother has on when she meets him:
    Patton: I missed the part of The Bible where Jesus was really bitchy and catty about people's footwear... when they get to the pearly gates: "Oh, you're not getting into Heaven in those, honey, no, I'm sorry. I died for your sins, but those pumps are unforgivable!" Turned into Paul Lynde all of a sudden...
  • The bit where he reimagines the father of the boy as a psychotic Vietnam vet who ejaculates on shoes his son has tricked people into buying. "That's what Vietnam did to me!" Also, Patton interprets the store clerk as a Jerkass who refuses to let the kid have the shoes because the mere six cents the kid was short would be deducted from the clerk's paycheck.
• His bit about NPR being unlistenable:
  Play some Zeppelin for God's sake. "It's our pledge drive, here on NPR, and we have a 20 minute field recording of a tumluku, which is a Bosnian instrument that can only be played when you have a pierced scrotum and three kids who've been killed by a landmine. (mimicks an instrument) The Tibetian practice of scream-singing rightfully died out in the 4th century BC, but two Berkeley trust fund students revived it, and here's a 40 minute sample: AAAH AAH AAAAH!"
• Patton describing what happened when he went off Prozac and allowed his depression to race through his body "like a happy puppy" is darkly comedic, especially to people who actually suffer from depression and know exactly what he's talking about:
  Patton's Depression: (excitedly) Put on your bathrobe for eight days straight! Watch The Princess Bride eleven times in a row!
  Patton: Oh, depression. This is the best day you've ever had.
  • Speaking of his depression, his description of how it had learned to pick its spots since his daughter was born, as described under Driven to Suicide on the main page. Following this was something even sadder: finding a Lean Cuisine he actually wanted with the initial thought of "OOH!" Only to change his mind and pick one he didn't want because the first one had too many steps.
    Patton: That's what I'm having for dinner is lack of effort. That is what I'm going to eat, a big steaming plate of lack of ef-fort.
• "I WANT ALL THE HAM."
• His impression of Daniel Plainview. Particularly when he sings "Milkshake".
• The Death Bed: The Bed That Eats routine, especially when Patton announces the sequel: "Rape Stove"!
• The Star Wars filibuster, done while filming a guest spot on Parks and Recreation.
• While his defense for Ben Affleck as Batman was mostly heartwarming, there is one funny bit in at the end: with the implication he's going to suggest himself for The Joker.
• Patton and his brother go see Jerry Maguire on Christmas Eve.
• Describing his college course "Physics for Poets," designed to get the liberal arts students through a bare minimum of science credits, and taught by the head of the department whose hatred for them was palpable. During the final exam and in a last-ditch attempt to reach out to the class, he put a Star Trek-based distance and velocity problem up on the board that involved Ensign Chekov firing phasers from the Enterprise at a Romulan ship. Cue Patton angrily confronting him about the problem in hushed tones. He describes it from his friend's perspective, who saw this unfold.
  And then you walked away, and the professor's head just dropped, and he stood up, and said: "Uh... I've just been informed that Sulu fires the phasers on the USS Enterprise. Uh... if this made the question "impossible to solve," I will change the name of the crew-member. Give your blue books to my TA. I'm gonna go home, sit in a hot bath, and open up a couple of veins. Fuck all of you, I- I don't want to live on this planet with you anymore.
• During Netflix special Talking For Clapping, he takes a moment to dab the sweat off with a towel, then puts it down after a little riffing. Not five seconds after he puts the towel down the producers flash a light from the back asking him to do it again.
  Patton: I know how sweaty I am, goddamn it!!! Yeah, stop flashing it! Fucking Jesus! I just dabbed! Maybe we should keep- shouldn't I leave the sweat on? It'll have this kind of a James Brown effect, like "boy, he's really working up there!"
• In one of his earlier albums, Patton recounts going to New York City and being sad when he got back to Los Angeles, because New York seemed way nicer and more authentic in a way that made L.A. seem even more fake. However, he qualifies it with "I know if I lived there, I'd probably hate it." Years later, the closing bit on his special Finest Hour is a 7-minute recounting of what a hellhole city New York is (as he moved there for a month). Aside from being Hilarious in Hindsight, the bit itself is fantastic.
  Patton: ...and by the way, New York is a great place to visit. But if you live there full time, it turns your skull into a cage, and your brain into a rat, and the city is just a stick poking the rat all day. Until you're finally like, I want someone to be sad, and I WANT TO KNOW THAT I'M RESPONSIBLE!!!
• Anyone worried that his wife's death would kill his ability to be funny should be assuaged by his routine about the "Polish woman of doom" who ruined his attempt to keep his daughter's mind off it during Mother's Day weekend two weeks later, and who he's now worried is going to surprise them during other holidays to rant some more about how horrible it is.

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