Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
If you’ve been watching any sort of late-night comedy this week, you’ve probably seen Patton Oswalt show up on TOUGH CROWD WITH COLIN QUINN or, most memorably, on LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O’BRIEN, where he managed to say “a necklace made of vaginas” enough times to make Conan faint. I Tivo’d both appearances. I just finally got a Tivo here in the Labs about three weeks ago, and if it were legal to marry a digital video recorder, then I’d be a bigamist by now. It’s the single greatest invention of Western civilization. Fuck penicillin. Forget the automobile or air travel or even STAR WARS figures. All of them pale next to the grandeur of Tivo. And Patton knows all about it. He was the first one I ever heard preaching the good word in his stand-up act about three years ago. Thankfully, that bit made it to his new Superego Records CD release, FEELIN’ KINDA PATTON, which hits stores this Tuesday, along with much of the material that his fans have seen him work on over the last few years.
I’m a total nerd for comedy albums. I still remember having my Richard Pryor records confiscated by my parents when I was young, and having to hide Cheech and Chong records inside the sleeves for more innocuous albums. Bill Cosby’s early work still stands as a benchmark for just how good stand-up can be. Anyone who was young in the early ‘80s remembers how many times they heard Eddie Murphy’s COMEDIAN. That was the soundtrack to an entire summer for me and my friends. These days, I still find myself buying a fair amount of comedy on CD, not only replacing older stuff (that Warner Bros. box set of Pryor CDs is absolutely fucking essential listening), but also adding newer things. The fact that the Bill Hicks albums finally came out delights me to no end. Mitch Hedberg’s CDs are pretty damn funny. David Cross has put out two pretty sinister pieces of work in the last two years, SHUT UP YOU FUCKING BABY (always fun to ask for in a record store) and IT’S NOT FUNNY, both of which are well worth picking up.
Patton’s new CD was recorded last year at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA, and we mentioned it then. Don’t know how many of you actually made it to that show, but now you can finally hear what happened that night if you weren’t lucky enough to be there. A two and a half hour set got boiled down to about 85 minutes, and it is one of those things that just never lets up. There are some awesome bits on here involving Tivo, shaving your balls, midgets, the Armageddon, Gay Pride parades, Carvell ice cream stores, porn spam e-mails, and my personal favorite, a bit about Alvin and the Chipmunks that forced me to pull my car over and stop driving because I was laughing so hard the first time I heard it.
If you want to know more about Patton, you can visit his official website, where his diary is a whole stack of funny, or you can read some of his pseudonymous writing on bobanddavid.com if you can figure out what it is. Keep an eye out for him later this year in BLADE: TRINITY, where I hear he meets a particularly gruesome end, something that seems to delight him enormously. And if you’re in LA and you want to have a blast on Monday night, make sure you head down to Amoeba Records on Sunset, one of the single greatest places in this entire city, where Patton’s going to be celebrating the release of the CD. I’m sorry I’m going to miss it, but hopefully I’ll see him at one of the dozen other upcoming gigs this insanely hard-working guy’s already got booked.
"Moriarty" out.
