Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
By Patton Oswalt
Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle
Scribner
Release Date: November 8, 2011 (paperback)

It was the summer of 2004 when I truly discovered the comedy of Patton Oswalt. What little I knew of him came from his acting work on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens and occasional guest appearances on shows like Seinfeld and bit parts in movies like Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 California dysfunction epic Magnolia, but it wasn’t until I caught a few minutes of a solo stand-up performance on Comedy Central one day that I realized he started his career honing his special blend (much like Starbuck’s coffee) of comedy on stage in front of crowds ranging from open and appreciative to drunk and rowdy to sparse and depressing. Then came the release of his first comedy CD Feelin’ Kinda Patton, and after listening to it at least ten times that first day I was a full-blown Patton fanatic.

Three years later he released his second CD, Werewolves & Lollipops, and it managed to outdo the first in terms of pure hilarity. By the time Oswalt’s third comedy CD, My Weakness is Strong, hit the stores, the short, stout funny man had staged a successful miniature invasion of nearly every area of popular culture. He was lending his voice to Pixar’s 2007 animated hit, the delightful Ratatouille, starring in the terrific independent drama Big Fan (one of my favorite films of 2009), writing hilarious blogs, and popping up in almost every TV cartoon, sitcom, and sketch show and big screen comedy (regardless of quality). He had conquered every other area of the media with the exception of the book world, but Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, his appropriately-titled first published work, changes all that.

The genius of Oswalt’s comedy, strongly represented in his book, is his ability to merge his vast knowledge of pop culture and the mundane yet oddly humorous details of ordinary life into a gut-busting fresco of hilarity with the improvisational mastery of a gifted jazz musician. He’s been developing his craft since he started out as a stand-up comic in 1988, a time when the stand-up comedy circuit was (even by Oswalt’s own admission) a pathetic sight as it seemed all wannabe comics were merely spinning their wheels before some desperate and unimaginative television network offered them their very own shit-com. Now, after many years of hard work, humiliation, and opportunities that went nowhere, Patton Oswalt can be considered a true master of the comedic form. Oswalt is also known as a world-class geek (currently ranked #2 on Topless Robot’s “11 Awesome Celebrity Nerds” list) and his supreme geekery has become a prominent theme in his comedy. For anyone who has devoted some part of their life to devouring every movie, book, or piece of music they could get their hands on Oswalt is more than a comedian; he’s a magical weaver of words, turning comic monologues overflowing with references to obscure comic book characters and R.E.M. B-sides into pure poetry.

But Zombie Spaceship Wasteland isn’t just a collection of arcane references and dick jokes, as the films of Kevin Smith mostly are. Oswalt deserves a great deal of credit for crafting a highly readable book that blends his unique sense of humor with some personal memories of growing up and trying to maintain his individuality in an entertainment industry adrift in a haze of material obsession. He talks in great detail about working the ticket booth at the local movie theater in the small Virginia town where he grew up (“Ticket Booth”), playing Dungeons & Dragons and building snow forts with his friends (“We’re Playing Snow Fort”), and reminiscing about spending time with his relatives (“Peter Runfola”), all complete with hilarious observational humor and multiple callbacks to the films and literature that helped shape Oswalt’s world view. But he also takes a few pages to poke fun at wine snobbery (“Wines by the Glass”) and ridiculous fantasy fan fiction (“The Song of Ulvaak”) with a sweet reverence for both that is easily betrayed if you’re familiar with his humor. Patton Oswalt doesn’t resort to elitist snark when he talks about the minutiae of superhero comics and zombie horror movies; he knows who he is and what he is and doesn’t give a damn who knows or how that makes them feel.

“Zombie Spaceship Wasteland,” the chapter that gave the book its title, is a lengthy breakdown about how the three things in that title played key roles in the majority of genre fiction, on screen and on the page. It’s Oswalt indulging his geek love going on a near operatic scale and it’s pure joy to read, even if it’s one of the book’s shorter chapters. Despite its occasional lightness of tone the book is not short of darker passages that would be real drags to read if it weren’t for Patton’s humorously-skewered perspective, which is often to best way to remember the most depressing moments of your life. In “The Victory Tour” he recounts the time when he appeared over the course of several evenings at a low-rent comedy club in Vancouver and the various loathsome people he encountered, including the sleazeball manager Reed. It’s the kind of cringe-inducing passage that would make for a few amusing scenes in a run-of-the-mill big screen laughfest but Oswalt describes the experience as a slow-motion journey through a comic purgatory, playing every nights to sparse crowds of surly Canadians whose idea of comedy would surely earn them a special place in Hell’s waiting room watching reruns of The Nanny and My Two Dads for all eternity.

“I Went to an MTV Gifting Suite and All I Got Was This Lousy Awareness of My Own Shallowness” seems pretty self-explanatory but in the span of a few pages Oswalt provides a caustic dissection of a hopeless celebrity-obsessed culture that believes the worth of a person depends on how much stuff they have. The “gifting suite” in question is a house where each room is packed with expensive goods given away to celebrities and the even more pathetic individuals who believe they are on the same level of accomplishment as celebrities. The idea of being offered free goods with absolutely no strings attached is an opportunity Oswalt couldn’t pass up, and most of us would definitely feel the same way if we were also offered such gratuities. There’s nothing at all wrong with that. But as he discovers upon arriving at the gifting suite most of the people who go to these places are the same kind of lifeless parasites who did nothing to get where they are at and will continue to do even less as long as they exist. Plus some of the material goods on offer are either dreadful or being forced on Oswalt by some of the most disgusting people anyone would ever hope (or not hope) to run into. The entire chapter could be inserted verbatim into a Bret Easton Ellis novel and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I hope for his next book Oswalt gives us a work of fiction; there’s more than enough evidence on display in Zombie Spaceship Wasteland that he has a great American novel in him, maybe more than one.

I’ve read many books by stand-up comedians in the past. The quality in each one varied, but the best books were typically the ones where the author just let loose with jokes and extended comic passages and spared us the details of what their childhoods were like. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I am interested in learning more about the people I admire, particularly my favorite comedians, but just because I’m interested doesn’t mean they’re interesting. For my money the best book ever written by a comedian remains Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, but there have been books by Woody Allen, George Carlin, and Steve Martin that came very close to taking Bruce’s title, and Richard Pryor’s Pryor Convictions is the best pure autobiography of a comedian in existence. Patton Oswalt’s first stab at a book isn’t about to dethrone Bruce’s book either but it’s a worthy effort easily ranked among the finest literary tones by stand-ups. Besides, if anyone is up to the task of writing the funniest book ever published, I’d put good money on Patton any day of the week.