I Love Everything

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.