Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Promotional art for I Love Everything
Cover image credit:

Source

I Love Everything

Patton Oswalt

Netflix · 2020 · 67 min

A happily remarried comic takes on the quiet horrors of turning fifty.

Watch on Netflix(opens in a new tab)

Patton Oswalt spent his previous stand-up hour working through the sudden death of his wife. By the time he walked onto the stage at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, he was fifty years old, remarried, and dealing with the less tragic but still agonizing realities of domestic stability. The resulting set is a lighter, more relaxed hour that trades existential grief for the minor indignities of middle age.

The writing is strongest when Oswalt turns his loquacious frustration toward the banal. He describes healthy adult cereal as tasting like ‘an unpopular teenager’s poetry,’ contrasts midlife sex to working an understaffed shift at McDonald’s, and spends a long, memorable sequence on a home renovation nightmare dominated by a painting subcontractor named Kirby. There is a brief, weary acknowledgment of political comedy—specifically the futility of trying to joke about an administration he compares to an 18-wheeler full of monkeys on PCP crashing into a train of diarrhea—but Oswalt is far more interested in smaller, domestic struggles. That includes a classic bit about his daughter begging to visit Denny’s, a restaurant he describes not as a deliberate choice but as a place people only end up after a series of terrible life decisions.

Released on Netflix in May 2020, the special found Oswalt in a warmer, looser space. It lacks the heavy thematic weight of his previous work, but the trade-off is a comic who seems genuinely happy to be on stage talking about wallpaper.

The set list

6 bits
  1. The closer (spoiler). Show it

    Reflecting on existential dread and the kid's menu characters at Denny's after a father-daughter date. closer

    Frames Denny's as a self-aware neutral crossroads for people at personal extremes, imagining detailed tragic backstories for the animated menu items.

  2. The stultifying adult breakfast cereals required after turning 50.

    Satirizes the long-winded hippie origin stories printed on cereal boxes, imagining that the organic cereal founders run a murder cult farming bodies for fertilizer.

  3. Hiring subcontractors to renovate a new home.

    Describes a wallpaper installer who yells all day at an imaginary assistant named Kirby.

  4. Attending his daughter's second-grade art show.

    Laments that attending the school function cost him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to board a full-scale Millennium Falcon.

  5. Middle-aged exercise and hiking.

    Describes hiking in middle age as walking 'little doom ovals' while listening to podcasts.

  6. Explaining why he does not tell Trump jokes.

    Contends that the political climate is an absurd spectacle like an 18-wheeler full of monkeys and PCP crashing into a train full of diarrhea.

How it plays

Tone
Witty, irreverent, sunny-side up, and warm with existential flourishes.
On stage
Amiable, generic dad figure and singer-songwriter style low-key storyteller who splits himself between a comfortable everyman observer and an imaginative conduit for bizarre characters.
Pace
Low-key, frothy, brisk, and measured.
About
turning 50 and aging, healthy adult breakfast cereal and ancient grains, buying a home and dealing with strange subcontractors, fatherhood and parenting, remarriage and finding love again, Denny's diner culture

What the critics said

Critically acclaimed as a solid, witty, and writerly hour where Oswalt's knack for vivid wordplay and eccentric character portraits shines.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: rottentomatoes.com, metacritic.com, vulture.com, decider.com, theguardian.com, chicago.suntimes.com, en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, ew.com.

Backstory

Reflecting on turning 50, buying a house, raising his daughter, and finding love again following the 2016 death of his first wife Michelle McNamara, having remarried actress Meredith Salenger.

Details

Released
Taped
2019, Knight Theater, Charlotte
Runtime
67 min
Where
Netflix
Director
Marcus Raboy
Honors
Emmy Nominee
Topics
Before
Annihilation (2017)
After
We All Scream (2022)

More from Patton Oswalt

If you liked this