Patton Oswalt, Werewolves And Lollipops, CD

POSTED: Saturday, September 15, 2007, 6:48 AM

Filed Under: Comedy Album

22 tracks, (Sub Pop)

Wackity Schmackity Doo. Listen to Patton Oswalt's Werewolves and Lollipops and see if you don't find yourself uttering those seven nonsense syllables for the next week (or month, or more). It's Oswalt shorthand for "This is funnnnnnyyyy!" and the punchline of W&L's best bit, "Wackity Schmackity Doo," which skewers Hollywood (one of the hands that feeds him — he does punch-up work on scripts) while pushing the boundaries of whether it's okay to joke about, say, 9/11 or the holocaust. The putty-faced Oswalt has existed at the crossroads of cred for a while now. He's a renowned Comedian of Comedy. He was also Spence in The King of Queens. I'm not really sure where voicing the rat falls on that continuum. On W&L, Oswalt's first album on Sub Pop (which doesn't really settle anything), Oswalt kills, skewering such American idiocies as racism, KFC Famous Bowls ("A failure pile in a sadness bowl"), the executive branch as the Dukes of Hazzard ("And they fuckin' jump the Gereral Lee over the bill of rights…") and cleaning up dirty jokes for family TV ("I'm gonna fill your hoo ha with goof juice!"). Yet he does this without coming off cooler-than-thou, throwing in jokes about his Star Trek/Star Wars geekery and penchant for overeating to remind you that, hey, he's not David Cross, he's a regular guy. Yet through it all, Oswalt's pushing boundaries. His characters and voice-work — such as when he gets a time machine and goes to kill George Lucas — are vivid. He'll tackle any subject, from 60-year-olds giving birth to the long-delayed release of "Death Bed: The Bed that Eats People" with bald, blunt honesty. Perhaps the best moment is when Oswalt goes off script: Interrupted in the middle of a slow-building story by an audience member who's compelled to break the tension by yelling out "Wooo," Oswalt goes into a tirade, concluding with "You're gonna miss everything cool and die angry!" Which is about as poignant a rip on the sort of douchebags who yell "Woo" in the middle of quiet rooms (and most of the guys I went to high school with, for that matter) as you'll find. Wackity Schmackity Doo, indeed.

Jon Solomon

Posted 2007-09-20 17:39:20

Funny, I always thought hoo-ha was hyphenated.

Posted by Brian Howard @ 6:48 AM Permalink | Post a comment

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