Patton Oswalt is kind-of everywhere right now. Sadly, I haven’t heard about him reprising the Constable Bob role in the upcoming Justified offshoot limited series, but he’s soon appearing as the voice of Matthew the Raven in Netflix’s series adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. He’s also starring as a catfishing parent in I Love My Dad, and he’s been doing the stand-up comedy thing, for which his fourth Netflix special (We All Scream) will arrive in September.
To promote his nonstop schedule, Patton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter, and naturally, the subject turned to cancel culture because it so directly affects the comedy sphere. And he taking it all in stride, it seems, which isn’t unlike Seth Rogen’s on-point observation about the usefulness of comedy and how some people should accept that their jokes “aged terribly.” Patton skews a little differently on the subject, and while stresses that context is always important, comedians should realize that “wokeness” really isn’t a new invention:
“[P]ushing the envelope doesn’t mean digging your feet in while the envelope moves forward — you should be ahead of that envelope, that’s how you should be pushing it. And again, the whole battle over wokeness, it’s nothing new. This happened in the ’80s, it happened in the ’90s and it’ll happen again in another form. That’s what I was talking about [in the special]. I do a joke about in the future, what am I going to be canceled for? And you don’t know, but you want to at least try to keep progressing.
From there, Patton also expresses the belief that the truly great comedians (like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce) all “found clever, brilliant ways” to kick around their existing restrictions, which made their sets “fun and thrilling” to witness. Holding back from punching down is also important! That last part is my version of events, but the full Patton Oswalt interview is well worth reading and can be found here.
(Via Hollywood Reporter)