Patton Oswalt at the Majestic Theatre
No one can hold a magnifying glass to everyday life and exhume its grotesque details like comedian Patton Oswalt, and his 10 p.m. performance at the Majestic Theatre on Saturday night was no exception to the rule. Oswalt kicked off his set by describing his bafflement over a discovery made on his drive into Madison from O’Hare airport in Chicago.
“I was looking at the exit signs and found a restaurant called... Beefaroo?” Oswalt said in awe. “There’s a place to go buy food that they’ve named Beefaroo. It sounds like something a morbidly obese guy would shout when he’s hungry—Beefaroo!”
Oswalt expertly adjusted his set to Madison, whether he applied his old joke about Athens being a “bubble of sanity, surrounded by shit,” obsessed over the word “Madisonian,” or picked out random audience members to chat about their lives, like a server from The Weary Traveler and regular Comedy Club On State comedian Nate Bjork. Delighting the crowd with his off-the-cuff riffing, Oswalt asked the server if The Weary Traveler was “all hippified” and if it had “French fries made out of mung beans” and then offered this nugget of encouragement to Bjork: “Good luck to you, it’s a horrifying career choice.”
But not all the audience participation was so cordial, like when he verbally annihilated a woman that thought it would be a good idea to shout “Lisa Lampanelli” in the middle of a bit about opening for an angry magician humorlessly making balls disappear. The heckler suggested Lampanelli “handles a lot of balls,” and Oswalt immediately responded, “Oh, I get it. You linked something I said earlier to testicles and nobody laughed.” After the sarcastic scolding, the woman blamed her intrusion on “alcohol.” “Okay, I guess that pretty much clears things up. People don’t know how to heckle these days. I’m not saying that I like hecklers, but if you’re going to do it, do it right. Learn from the Irish.” He followed this up with a story about being heckled in Dublin.
Oswalt closed with a massive rant on why he hates New York City. The tirade culminated with a story about walking his French bulldog into a filthy service tunnel to defecate and stumbling across “two crackheads about to blow each other—for crack.” Apparently, one of the crackheads wasn’t okay with Oswalt’s dog taking a shit in the garbage-coated tunnel and offered a disgusted, “Nice.” “I’m sorry, did I ruin your lovely Manhattan evening?” After imagining how he was probably a conversation piece for the angry crackhead later that night—“Then this freshly-showered asshole and his well-groomed, friendly dog come in…” Oswalt thanked the audience and walked offstage, only to reemerge a few moments later to take a request for one last joke that ended up being his classic “Dr. Pepper” bit about a heroin-addicted comedian—named Dr. Pepper—who kept nodding off during his set.
