Tea & Scotch

Patton Oswalt spent his 11th stand-up special stripping away the polish of theater tours to record in a cramped Wisconsin basement. After decades in the industry, he steps away from massive streaming giants to regain the tight, high-friction energy of a traditional comedy club, bringing his anxieties about middle age, technology, and parenthood to an audience mere inches from his microphone. The setup allows him to pivot cleanly from the mild embarrassment of phone-banking for a presidential campaign to the genuine obsession of watching endless yard-cleaning videos on the internet.

Taped at Comedy on State in Madison, Wisconsin, the hour marks Oswalt’s first self-distributed release, premiering on Gorilla Comedy+ and YouTube in mid-2026. Rather than relying on the algorithms of giant platforms, he chose the club environment to capture a set of personal stories that feel both cozy and desperate. He talks about three decades on Prozac, a house cat convinced it can see ghosts, and the indignity of showing his teenage daughter John Carpenter’s Halloween, only for her to pick the horror classic apart. His material balances his routine anxieties with broader observations on religion, artificial intelligence, and our collective addiction to satisfying internet videos of strangers cleaning yards.