Has Patton Oswalt assaulted any women, disparaged trans people, made stupid comments about the IQ of black people, or clubbed any baby seals? Just asking, because atheist celebrities seem to have a penchant for flaming out in the most horrible ways possible, and I rather liked this routine. He’s still an OK guy, right?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
He has used ‘SJW’ unironically on Twitter which suggests some degree of sympathy for the ‘anti-PC’ crowd. But I’m recalling that from a couple of years ago so he might have matured on that front.
he’s about as progressive as entertainers get.
has been for a long long time.
Well, there was the time he wrote some masterful tweets…
https://news.avclub.com/patton-oswalt-wrote-53-masterful-tweets-welcoming-trevo-1798281175
It’s taken a while since then to for me to start taking him seriously again but he hasn’t stepped in it that bad again since. I’m not above still throwing shade at the AV Club for their use of “masterful” though. (I’m Minimum Maus at the site, wanted to try a different name there any never changed it to my usual alias.)
Patton seems to be one of the good guys. He’s in support of gay marriage, he’s very critical of capitalism, he clearly has views far to the left of the Democrats. I don’t know if I’d call him an outright leftist.
A good example of his work is when he pointed out that he’s an old man and it takes time for him to adapt to pronouns. That might be a little wince-worthy, but he then went on to use that to make an insightful point. First, he put the problem of pronouns entirely on him. He centered the conversation implicitly on the failure of the majority to adapt. Second, and more importantly, he pointed out that in the concern over proper language one can allow some bad people through. He contrasts a person saying with very little skill that everyone has the right to be who they are against a person using phrases like “cis-gender” in order to overtly shill for heteronormativity and cisnormativity. This is a really important tactical point for the Left to remember, especially because if we don’t it enables people like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro who come off just informed enough to suck in people in the middle that we’ve inoculated against the most overt bigotry.
Well, he’s a) human and b) has been around a lot of other humans. So it’s very possible that he’s made mistakes, or had egregious miscommunications with other humans, or y’know, genuinely been a creep from time to time.
I think there’s gotta be some wiggle room for forgiveness for everyone, as long as they are genuinely contrite and are willing to pay their dues, with jail time or loss of privileges if necessary.
Forgiveness is a hell of a virtue, but it has to come with atonement.
Tabby Lavalamp @ 3;
That whole sequence of Tweets was decidedly odd. I find it very unlikely anyone would take particular offence to his hypothetical ‘butter fly’ joke, and if they did, especially on the terms he describes, you could justifiably respond that they might be reaching a bit. That is all it would take. His weird, extended hypothetical seems to be an exercise in whining about how some people get tired of always being the butt of jokes based upon an aspect of themselves they can’t control. Given his own appearance (and I am no oil painting myself – if mirrors could run, they would flee from me for self preservation purposes to avoid spontaneous cracking), I wonder how he might feel if people made jokes about his height and his weight wherever he went, every single day of his life, acting all the while as if those two things were the only aspects of who he was that mattered in the slightest. Maybe he might start to get tired of it too. Innocuous word play jokes about butter and butterflies are hardly comparable to jokes that trade on bigotry in order to raise a laugh, especially where the bigotry being employed as grist for a humour mill also manifests as violence or oppression.
Why do professional funny people have such difficulty grasping the notion that, If you can’t be funny without punching down the social power gradient, maybe you just aren’t a very good comedian?
Gregory Greenwood @6
So does he. It was a deliberate choice of an innocuous joke that he could then go on to mock the concept of people being offended by jokes, that they should be immune from offending people.
That was then though. I do think he has grown since then and while he may still feel that offensive jokes are still somehow different from other offensive speech, I don’t think he’d do something like that tweet storm again.
He gets my vote for his views on “respecting other people’s beliefs.” You can say that you respect someone’s right to his belief, but that his belief is stupid bullshit.
Another saying I hate is, “Let’s agree to disagree.” What mushy claptrap. Bothsiderism at it’s finest.
Bothsiderism? To me “we’ll agree to disagree” has always meant “I don’t agree, but I’m not going to keep arguing it with you,” and that could be from fatigue, boredom, respect, or simply reluctance to engage with a fathead.
Kip T.W. @9
We’ll agree to disagree.
You’re so mushy.
Kip T.W. @9
Sorry. It was too easy. You’re right.
Aw, I just can’t stay fatigued/bored/respectful/reluctant when you put it like that.
It was respect! It was respect!
specialffrog wrote:
To be fair, it didn’t always mean exactly what it means today. There’s always been a certain species of left-wing person who spends more time trying to boost themselves by bringing sinners down than lifting up those who need to be elevated, but like practically any term that gets used by the shitlord set, it’s been diluted into irrelevance.
Tabby Lavalamp @ 7;
It was a while ago, and he seems to be on the right side of most issues these days, so I think you are right – it is fair to extend the benefit of the doubt.
He had a special not long ago where he had a whole bit that consisted entirely of saying that some people claimed RuPaul was transphobic, then just laughing and laughing and laughing.
Of course, the people saying that were and are trans women who know he is, based on the incredibly shitty things he put in his show for the first 5-6 seasons. So that wasn’t great. Which su-huh-huh-hucks because I really really want to like Patton Oswalt. I have loved most of his standup, I loved how when he got less edgy his comedy got BETTER, “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” is one of my very favorite books.
Whether he changed his position on that since then I have no way to know. It’s not like I can go ask him.
So… I just sort of take it as read that this isn’t even something to bother judging a comedian about. We’re punchlines, always were, always will be, yay Patton… :(
@15 ck, the Irate Lump
The term “SJW”, like “virtue-signalling”, “race-hustler”, and so on, are, and have always been from their inception, terms to denigrate the sincerity of people who care about social justice. They were never only meant to apply to actually insincere people, and acting like they can be used that way, or ever were, is absurd. Don’t be a sucker.