The new Patton Oswalt album has jokes about air travel and childbirth and unused exercise equipment. The comedian who once railed against the tedious self-satisfaction of AA members and new parents talks about how he's going to cut down on drinking and drugs for the sake of his soon-to-be-born child. He even opens My Weakness Is Strong with a funny but relatively low-key observation on the pitfalls of text messaging auto-complete features, wherein he recalls a moment where he responded to his wife's message of "I love you" with the accidental deployment of what he claims is his most-used sentence-starter, "I hate". For a man who closed Feelin' Kinda Patton with the most surreal tableaux of Robert Evans-narrated 1970s Hollywood sex imaginable and wrung a Terry Southern-rivaling amount of morbid, horror-struck comedy out of the mere existence of KFC's Famous Bowl in Werewolves and Lollipops, this album seems like a wary step towards maturation.
At least until you remember that "maturation" is typically most useful in comedy terms as a euphemism for "becoming complacent and unfunny," which My Weakness Is Strong is all kinds of not. Everything that made Patton Oswalt the funniest stand-up comedian of the last five years is still present and accounted for on his latest album, and it'd be missing the mark to shortchange it under the assumption that he's softened. There's moments of giddy enthusiasm and bewilderment that occasionally temper Oswalt's finely-tuned sense of bitter, aggravated disappointment with himself and the rest of society; the most memorable bit of unbridled optimism is when he brings up the exquisitely nerdy realization that the election of Barack Obama means he doesn't have to go that far back in time to blow his younger self's mind. But when he ties the introduction of "grocery robot" technology to the downward spiral of a cashier's meth-addled life or frames his battle with depression in the context of being used as post-apocalyptic sex-currency, you can still feel all the serrated edges in his comedy digging into you.
The thing that's always made even the harshest and bleakest moments in Oswalt's comedy into repeat-listen material is his almost supernatural knack for warping the most uncomfortable concepts into perfectly pitched linguistic absurdity. Some comedians might stop at the evocative-enough concept of stumbling into an aborted orgy in the process of house-hunting, and Patton's eye for ridiculous detail-- the awkward teenage "Craigslist hookup" wearing the hastily-procured girls' "Juicy" sweatpants backwards, and his subsequent awkward exit out the back into an endless expanse of Hollywood Hills foliage-- serves it well, but it's the way he describes the house's atmosphere as "fogbanks of twat mist" and the forest-bound teenager as "Fucksquatch" that makes it stick in your head like a particularly memorable guitar riff. With Oswalt, it's not just his demeanor or his geeky obsessions that define him, it's the way he unspools these phrases for maximum rhythmic effect; I don't think I've come across any song lyric this year as inextricable from my skull as Oswalt phrases like "Uncle Touchy's naked puzzle basement" or "free government blowjob robot."
And while Patton can get a ton of mileage out of his unexpected detours into deconstructing the Christian/Pagan symbolism in Lucky Charms or going on one of his now-characteristic descriptions of horrifying fat-people foodstuffs, it's his ability to draw inspiration from tilled-to-death comedic soil-- like his air travel/baby/treadmill bits-- that reveal Patton as a bottomless well of cultural enthusiasm. And not just pop culture, though he's pretty damn near encyclopedic in that department, but something greater-- an observational sharpness that pushes his work above mere didja-ever-noticeisms. Oswalt's previous release, Werewolves and Lollipops, is a hard act to follow-- it's the one album I want to preserve for a disapproving future cruelly awaiting to pin our era's comedy on LOLcats and "edgy" ventriloquists-- and My Weakness Is Strong doesn't quite boast its predecessor's relentless momentum. But the safe, boring dad that Oswalt once threatened to become in order to make sure his kid would grow up to rebel? There's no sign of him anywhere.
