Patrick Hastie

Patrick Hastie stands on stage looking like a guy you might run into at an Iowa hardware store, but he talks like he has three minutes to explain an entire movie. He will barrel through a memory about burying a dead pet lizard in a tinfoil box, dropping a half-dozen jokes along the way and rarely stopping for the audience to catch up.

If a punchline only gets a polite chuckle, he doesn’t pause to fix it. He is already three sentences into the next premise.

He spent over a decade grinding through New York open mics and basement shows, and his pacing reflects that exact ecosystem. He is built for a crowded, low-ceiling room where momentum dictates survival. Early in his career, he tried the slow, deliberate pacing of a deadpan comic, but eventually realized his actual strength was velocity. His 2023 special I Will Fight All Of You relies entirely on that speed, skipping over standard setup-and-punchline rhythms to keep the narrative moving.

His material comes from his upbringing on a farm in Southwest Iowa, framing the strange isolation of agricultural life through the perspective of a former punk kid. He will describe the grim logistics of livestock disposal or the teenage desperation of setting a middle-of-the-night alarm just to masturbate with the same breathless clip he applies to navigating Brooklyn. He doesn’t stop to let the room marvel at the contrast. He just keeps talking, trusting the crowd to hang on until the story ends.