My Interview With Patton Oswalt

[Jason Anfinsen]

hey old friends.

i recently interviewed patton oswalt for a feature on thetripwire.com/

patton oswalt - from atrocious to competent in under a decade

here it is. let me know what you think. thanks for reading.

http://thetripwire.com/features/2007/10/10/interview-patton-oswalt-from-atrocious-to-competent-in-under-a-decade

JA

[Telfer]

Nice! Did he forget the name of his own album (Sunshine and Werewolves) or was this interview pre-release of the CD?

[goody]

Nice, Anfs.

Now get out of here.

[Still Just Visiting]

Clicking the link, Mission Control of my second-rate Web browser launches a new window like a Soyez rocket. The page is titled simply "The Tripwire" which seems appropriate considering the IED of knowledge I'd just inadvertently detonated. I quickly surmise that the subject is a comedian called Patton Oswald about whom I knew nothing and cared to learn even less since I rarely exhaust my metric hours on people with two last names. Really, how amusing can someone be while their moniker consists of one part slap-happy pawn of Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex and one part obscure Batman reference?

Gently setting these reservations on a shelf I jokingly purchased at Ikea and hadn't properly assembled, I forge ahead up this Kilimanjaro of an online interview. Every sentence is an unsteady slab of hardened geosphere barely large enough to support my size 10 non-leather hiking shoes with recycled hemp laces. Tedious effort rewards me with a glimpse sight of the summit where I might glean eternal from this co-star of a syndicated sitcom. Then, as if Max Baer narrowly edged out Mike Tyson to personify the role of Capitalistic standards of success, the interview catches me with a solid uppercut and soon devolves into a interrogation that adjusts its zoom lens to focus on comedy tour success, DVD sales and the obscenely immoral profits of film projects starring animated urban rodents who pursue the culinary arts among our more diplomatic allies in France.

Soon, subdivisions of disappointment materialize in the metropolis of my soul while excited anticipation escapes to the outlying suburbs. This online interview was not the Genie brand automatic garage door to Narnia for which I'd hoped. Were my expectations were set unfairly skyward subsequent to my viewing of Patton's convivial assessment of the phenomenon surrounding KFC's popular "Famous Bowl" menu item (available for viewing by my fellow Proletariatrons on The You Tube Site (http://youtube.com/watch?v=tfan5MacmsI))? Perhaps.

[Still Just Visiting]

Also -- and this just me spraying a little Glass Plus to clarify the grime of confusion without leaving a streak -- it was not Jerry Seinfeld's father who deigned to appear on that situation comedy about the obese slob with the hotbox wife. You're thinking of Ben Stiller's real-life father Jerry who, yes, played another character's patriarchal putz on Seinfeld.