The Banter Long Read: In the wake of the 2016 election, stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt wrote a sobering status on Facebook that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Oswalt (whose new special, Annihilation, is streaming on Netflix now) has always been something of a polymath, ...read more
Legendary comedian Patton Oswalt penned a devastatingly insightful Facebook post about the current state of American politics and the monstrous presence of Donald Trump last night that deserves to be spread far and wide. After speaking with a therapist friend, Oswalt came to ...read more
It's said that those who've left us are the lucky ones, as they don't have to live with the pain of trying to go on without them. This is one of the reasons why we express condolences when someone dies: as a means of telling the people who loved them that we're sorry for the ...read more
There was a time when Salon was the go-to site for thoughtful, intelligent analysis from the left on subjects ranging from politics, to the media, to pop culture. That, however, was long ago; these days all that's left of that storied era are a few really terrific columnists ...read more
If you follow Patton Oswalt's career at all, you were waiting for this. Late last night, the comic who's become both a regular target for America's politically correct Outrage Industrial Complex as well as perhaps its most vocalcritic welcomed future Daily Show host Trevor Noah ...read more
How Salon fought the urge to headline its new interview with Patton Oswalt with the kind of thing you see above will be pondered for years to come. I'd say that it's a sign of progress, but then in a couple of hours there will almost surely be an angry follow-up piece posted ...read more
(Photo: Michelle V. Agins/NY Times/Redux) Us liberals, comedy is our best weapon, and if you’re going to take that away from us and make Margaret Dumonts and let the right-wingers be Grouchos, we’re completely fucked. I don’t want to sound like a supervillain, but I won’t ...read more
Firefly star turned professional troll Adam Baldwin is conservative Twitter's most accomplished bully. His online persona is so combative and so absurdly petty that you have to wonder if, upon his death, Andrew Breitbart's soul somehow transferred over to Baldwin's body. He's ...read more
It's rare that I do this sort of thing but I wanted to expand a little on something I wrote yesterday, not for the sake of clarification and certainly not because I'm fretting over negative pushback -- since I get a lot of that -- but more to explain my thinking. I write a lot ...read more
If you missed Patton Oswalt's good cheer and general mischief over the summer during his self-imposed social media sabbatical, you'll be happy to know that he's back. And when I say that, I don't just mean that he's returned to pen a legitimately interesting piece recapping why ...read more
Image: Jesus Diaz/Source: The Village Voice Four years ago feels like an eternity in internet years. Just two years before that MySpace was still the dominant social media site in the country and two years before that the notion of maintaining a popular blog had barely reached ...read more
In addition to being a damn brilliant comic, Patton Oswalt has made a name for himself lately thanks to the creative ways he's figured out to piss off the internet. You can make the argument that he's the ultimate Twitter troll, but his desire to use his own infamy in certain ...read more
As soon as Patton Oswalt began cleverly trolling Twitter last Wednesday afternoon, it was only a matter of time before Salon had a comment about it. Patton's little online experiment involved tweeting out apologies for past tweets he claimed to have deleted because they were ...read more
Happy Thursday! Time flies when you're having fun! Here's what's happening on the interweb: 1. Ukraine Crisis: Pro-Russia Rebel Vote to Go Ahead Pro-Russian activists in eastern Ukraine have said they will not postpone a referendum on autonomy planned for Sunday. The decision ...read more
If it weren't so hilarious it would be depressing. A little earlier this afternoon Patton Oswalt began trolling Twitter and the rest of the internet, trying to drum up outrage over nothing. Literally, nothing. What he did was simple: He started posting tweets that referenced ...read more
One of my biggest gripes with the extreme flanks of the political debate is this: neither the far-left nor the far-right appears capable of modulating their respective screeching. This not only self-marginalizes both wings, but all of the indiscriminate shouting tends to bleed ...read more
My girlfriend and I were lucky enough to recently catch Patton Oswalt at a tiny show he does here in L.A. every once in a while strictly for the purpose of testing out new material. One of the rough jokes we and the rest of the crowd laughed hardest at had to do with his idea ...read more
Several years back I wrote a book and at a couple of points in this book I indirectly referenced other works. I did this to pay homage to those authors and artists who had inspired me to write what I was writing; who created styles I loved and believed fit the tone of my own ...read more
Like any liberal arts-educated freelance writer and activist from San Francisco who values his progressive culture and identity, I'm a very strong supporter of Salon.com. The site has always featured some of the most thought-provoking and necessary advocacy journalism anywhere ...read more
This is my official favorite thing of the week, and it's only Tuesday. It's Patton Oswalt doing a phony commercial basically as Tommy Wiseau, indescribably weird creator and star of the indescribably weird -- and staggeringly bad -- 2003 movie The Room. If you have no idea ...read more
Here's what you should be reading today instead of worrying yourself with things like actually diving back into the work week. 1. No Justice, Still Peace A lot of news regarding the fallout from Saturday's not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman. First of all, ...read more
I'll try to make this quick since it's a Friday, I've been up working since 5:30am, and I'm eager to just get everything out of the way so I can pace the living room floor in a panic, contemplating how the hell I'm going to survive some sex yoga class my girlfriend has signed ...read more
Here's something that I think deserves to be seen far and wide. Last week on FX's Totally Biased, host W. Kamau Bell kicked off a new segment on the show that will, as he puts it, pit comics against feminists. While anyone who's read my stuff over the past year or so knows ...read more
Among the minor media ventures I've dabbled in over the past couple of years to keep me from being evicted from my apartment have been a few stints on reality TV shows. No, I don't fluff the ladies of Ru Paul's Drag Race or sell my soul by greasing the idiocy of The Real ...read more
Stop me if you've heard this one before: A popular comic is under fire in a heated controversy involving the use of rape jokes in stand-up comedy. This probably sounds familiar if your short-term memory goes at least as far back as last July, when Daniel Tosh faced a giant ...read more
