Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Patton Oswalt: We All Scream’ On Netflix, A Comedian On His Struggles To Age Gracefully

In his eighth solo comedy special, and fourth for Netflix, Patton Oswalt also makes his directorial debut. Although he has titled this hour “We All Scream,” there are, spoiler alerts, no jokes about ice cream. Plenty about clown pubes, though. Buckle up!

PATTON OSWALT: WE ALL SCREAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Now in his 50s, Oswalt bruises far too easily, at least physically. And he’ll quickly make jokes about that, as well as how generations feel increasingly hurt and angry as they grow older and out-of-touch with the latest progressive notions of the youth coming up behind them. It’s easy to put the Baby Boomers in perspective as having one last temper tantrum, both politically and culturally. How might Oswalt reflect on this regarding himself and the rest of Generation X? He’s willing to ask the question, but not before taking more than a few minutes to find out what his audience members in the front row from Colorado do for a living.
What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: So many of Oswalt’s comedy contemporaries from Gen X also grapple with the idea of staying hip, or “woke,” as it were, and whether to mock them or get with them. Bill Burr also filmed his 2022 Netflix special in Colorado, even.
Memorable Jokes: Oswalt’s two biggest bits offer the most potential for laughing and quoting, as well as for constructive deconstructing.
The first of these, when he describes something as “crazier than a barn full of clown pubes,” then proceeds to dig into the metaphor he’s just sculpted for us, chipping away at each of the words to see what it all really means. For instance: What constitutes a full barn, exactly? Or should we think of “barn full” as a euphemistic substitute for an amount such as clump, thatch or handful?!
The second bit turns Oswalt’s observational focus on SiriusXM radio’s music stations that are organized by decade, and how they’ve been reorganized by sending fans of music from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s “to the outer rim” of SiriusXM’s channels, and renaming them accordingly. Or perhaps not accordingly enough. So Oswalt has some suggested music channel names for the satellite radio giant to consider.

Our Take: In case you thought Oswalt just wanted to shock you by putting a graphic image with that barn metaphor, think again. Because he also reveals that the bit itself is a metaphor for welcoming comedy fans into his mind and his point of view, telling us that the jokes are his way to open the barn doors both comedically and creatively. So. What’s in his barn? And how full is it these days?
Sadly, not as full as we might have hoped. Him, too. He sets us up for diminished expectations even earlier in the hour, reflecting on how the idea of a month off to get your act together (figuratively, if not also literally in Oswalt’s case) met the grim reality of the pandemic, which called all of our bluffs.
When Oswalt shows us his hand, so to speak, it feels like he would’ve been better off folding.
For as funny as it may be to watch him dissect his clown barn metaphor, or for that matter, his pitch for “the saddest Pixar movie” featuring the voices of Harvey Keitel, Timothee Chalamet and Frances McDormand as his various pieces of exercise equipment, there’s not enough here for a full hour. And he knows it. Why else would he spend several minutes asking the most basic questions of his front-row audience members? Because there’s lying down on the job, and then there’s actually lying down on the job, which is what Oswalt winds up doing, even after calling himself out as the director for allowing his chosen poses to happen. “Quiet quitting” is having a moment in trendspotting, and crowd work can be the quiet quitting of stand-up comedy if the interactions aren’t going to lead anywhere meaningful. It’s just a time-killing diversion that might please the specific audience members involved, giving them an extra-special memory (especially if it’s documented on film). But for the rest of us? We may enjoy it slightly more if we’re there in the room, otherwise it’s a regular you-had-to-be-there moment.

Oswalt does wonder about how the moment eventually passes us all by. Even the wokest among us will fall behind the times. He imagines himself winding up on the wrong side of a cultural trend, then doubling down defensively. Only we don’t need to imagine that when we see several of his comedy peers already doing just that.

And when he extrapolates from past generations vaulting the likes of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump to the White House as last-gasp whines, wondering whom Gen X would catapult to the presidency, he lands upon Janeane Garofalo. Which could be cute, given their comedic and cultural proximities. Although he confusingly puts a potential President Joe Rogan alongside President Logan Paul as the political legacies of Gen Z. Even weirder, Oswalt decides to let Rogan off the hook as merely someone who “has gone off the rails” because “someone gave him a hundred million dollars.”
All of which just makes it seem as though Oswalt didn’t write enough material in lockdown, but wanted to or felt he was obligated to deliver another special this year, so here we are.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Unless you’re a die-hard Patton Oswalt fan, in which case you’ll STREAM IT, lovingly enjoy the best parts and forgive the rest anyhow.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.