Patton Oswalt joins Joe Rogan to dissect comedy’s pandemic struggles, from lost live performances to comedians avoiding COVID material due to its lack of uniqueness—except for outliers like Michael Yeo, who survived severe illness without a ventilator. Oswalt links the virus to historical pandemics and processed-food-driven health declines, while Rogan defends creative freedom amid criticism of Scorsese and Trump’s divisive, tone-deaf leadership, like mocking POWs or pushing unproven treatments. They contrast comedy’s cyclical resilience with corporate growth obsession, celebrating Carlin’s fearless legacy and Oswalt’s upcoming Netflix special I Love Everything, where he explores hatred as a luxury and childhood influences on flawed figures like Trump. [Automatically generated summary]
But the positive side of it, I appreciate everything.
I appreciate comics.
I appreciate just being able to talk to you.
I appreciate just having my friends that I can communicate with and just talking shit to each other and making each other laugh and saying horrible things over text messages.
if this comes back, if we get to do stand-up again ever, I just feel like comedians are going to be so much more social and just happy to be with each other and appreciate the being around people where you can run jokes and they're honest enough to either tag something brilliant or tell you, dude, I know I just feel like comedians are going to be so much more social and It's so lame.
Don't run down that road.
I miss that show because I'm trying to sit down and write every day.
I don't know what your process is My process is to write general ideas And then work them out on stage And then work them out with friends Just sitting and actually writing it No matter how detailed I make it I don't know if it's funny or not To get it up there Yeah, it's a weird disconnect, isn't it?
Yeah, and I also miss the deleting of stuff where you write something down and then your mind is awesome and you go up on stage and the beginning part's great and the end part's great and you're like, this whole middle section I thought I was going to be George Carlin and I could lose all of that this bit and this bit and that's what it is.
Dan, who is Tim Dillon's producer, he had a false positive.
So we had to give him a second test and we gave him a nose swab and it turned out he was negative.
It's iffy stuff, you know, until we really can tell.
And then what are you going to give up for them to know?
Are you going to give up contact tracing?
Are you willing to do that?
Are you really willing to have something on your phone that shows who you've been in contact with and who your phone has come near and whether or not they're negative or positive?
When you do an antibodies test, there's one line that shows whether it's an active virus, and there's another line that shows that it's just the antibodies of a virus that you got and recovered from.
And a lot of people that recover from it, apparently, they didn't even know they had it.
Again, we're talking about this now because we're going through this.
I just feel like...
And again, I don't like to predict the future.
If we do get to go back to doing comedy, I just feel like I'll never talk about this on stage.
The last thing people are going to want to see on stage is my funny COVID story, which is going to be just a variation on everyone's funny COVID story.
Yeah, I think it's one of those things that's going to be a real problem for comics.
I hear what you're saying, but...
On the other hand, someone will come along like a tell, or someone will come along and have the perfect take on it, and you're like, oh, well, there it is.
Or on the other end of the spectrum, Joey Diaz will come up and do the rawest, most personal, uncomfortable, but also brilliant take, where you might actually have a unique story, but after hearing Joey, you're like, yeah, I don't need to share mine.
Yeah, he actually was here in studio the week before he went to New York.
He was burning the candle at both ends, flies to New York with no sleep, does radio, does all the promo shows, does everything, does stand up at Gotham, flies back with no sleep, drives the next day to Vegas and home from Vegas in the same day with his family, kids drives the next day to Vegas and home from Vegas in Then he has auditions for the next two days, stressed out, burnt out, boom, then it hits him.
And when it hit him, he felt like shit.
Then his friend, while he was suffering, one of his friends who was a doctor told him to take Advil because he said he had a headache because he gets migraines.
He takes Advil, boom, it goes off the deep end and then he gets it real bad.
And he was in the hospital for a week and the doctor, you know, they were talking about putting This is the early days of the disease, very early.
This is like beginning of March.
I think end of February?
End of February, beginning of March?
I think somewhere around there.
But early, early, when they didn't really know.
His doctor's wise.
His doctor says if we put him on a ventilator, his lungs are just going to give up and he could die.
So they don't put him on a ventilator.
Then it turns out In New York City, and they don't know if this is a correlation or causation, obviously, but 80% of the people they put on the ventilators wound up dying.
What?
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Could be that they wound up dying because they were so far gone they were going to die anyway.
Could be they were going to die because of what this doctor said.
Because if you put people on a ventilator when their lungs are working and then their lungs don't have to work anymore, they give up.
That's what his doctor was essentially saying.
It was going to happen to him if they put him on the ventilator.
So they didn't put him on it.
They put him on that hydroxychloroquine shit and he didn't react well to it.
It made him feel worse.
So he got off of that and then slowly got back to feeling better and better.
And to this day, he's been out of the hospital I think a month.
And he can only do like two chin-ups.
He's a really strong, active, like really healthy guy normally.
He can only do like two chin-ups.
He's listless.
He has very little energy.
Just still feels like he's still struggling.
He came in.
He looked great.
He looked totally normal.
I would not know if he didn't tell me, but he still feels like he's got fatigue.
I I didn't know about that until after I did a podcast with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, and she was talking about studies that have been done in New Orleans and Indonesia and several different studies.
One of the things they've shown is the people that are in critical care or in the ICU, there's a large percentage, in some cases over 80% of them are vitamin D deficient.
Versus the people who have sufficient levels of serum vitamin D in their body, those people, it's less than 5%.
So it was 4% of them that were in the ICU, the people with sufficient vitamin D, and more than 80% of people with deficient.
And vitamin D is not just a vitamin, apparently, according to her.
It's actually a hormone, and it regulates many things in the body, and most people are deficient from it.
And in the United States, More than 70% of people have insufficient levels of vitamin D, and 29% are deficient to the point where it actually can cause medical issues.
I reread Guns, Germs, and Steel about the Spanish flu and the way that diseases rewire and reboot your body to benefit themselves and stuff.
It seems like we're making the same mistakes at the beginning of the Spanish flu epidemic and that there's going to be an insane spike, which is where all of the real death and destruction happen with that.
If that spike is coming because of all of these half measures and all of these, I'm not wearing a mask, that defiant, I'm going out.
And we have to brace ourselves for this other spike that's coming.
We could get an education on how to boost your immune system.
I mean, one of the things that's really driving me crazy about this is there's nothing proactive about what we're being asked to do.
Everyone's being asked to shelter in place.
But somehow or another, it's okay to go to the grocery store.
It's okay to go to Target.
It's okay to go to a lot of places.
But it's not okay to go to some places.
And I feel like people need to have the ability to take their own chances and need to have the ability to protect themselves.
Like, you need to give people the opportunity to work.
Especially in situations where you're dealing with people who their entire life could fall apart over these couple of months where you tell them they can't work.
And there is a way to test people.
There is a way to sanitize.
There is a way to be safe.
There is a way to be smart about this.
There is a way to keep your immune system strong.
And we're only looking at keep away.
We're not looking at the whole spectrum of possibilities that we can do here to move on.
Obviously, anyone could In this case, in this scenario, you taking your own risks tips other people who might not want to take that risk into those areas.
And I absolutely understand that someone's life can fall apart in two months if they don't work.
I think that's more of a symptom of there not being the social safety net that we have to have out there for these kind of situations.
We're sort of seeing that in a very stark way.
But what I'm saying is, if we don't follow these harsh...
The way we got over it is it kind of just burned itself out.
And we need to burn it out of the population that way.
And it sucks that that's right now the only way we have to do it because we clearly don't have the testing capacity that we need.
Well, we don't have the stuff to implement what I'm saying right now, but we do have the information as far as things you can do to boost your immune system.
Make sure you get better sleep, don't eat this, don't do that.
But then you've got people that, look, you know how many kids relied on school for food?
It's a huge problem.
Right now, that's a giant problem.
Because there's a lot of poor kids who literally relied on school in order to get their meals in.
And now their family has to scramble and figure out how to come up with more money to feed these kids when they can't work.
Shelter for a safe space to actually talk to a responsible adult.
Some of them come from very bad home situations.
Again, all we do is cut money for schools, which is where such a big part of the population is alive because of what the schools provide.
I don't think it should come down to a billionaire's whim of what they want to give money to or not, or your local church.
church there should be some kind of structure so that people can have some dignity and not have to beg yes and there's also stress that goes on to the living under the stigma of oh he's got to get the free lunch or oh they've got to get like they're still we're so anti-poor in this country we treat poor people like they have a disease or something or they or that they've done something wrong and that can really fuck with kids psychologically growing up It really can.
And one thing that I would hope out of this is the shock of all being so vulnerable.
It will make people a little bit more humble.
And hopefully dash some of the flames of materialism that have gone through our society during these soft times.
And people are just getting really into shiny bullshit.
And just recognize, like, boy, we live in a very finite state.
We don't have much time.
And very fragile.
Very fragile.
Yeah.
And we're waking up to that.
We existed in a Goldilocks period in this country, from World War II on to here, where there's an Instagram page, History, and they had this...
This really sobering post about imagine if you were born in the year 1900. And then it goes on to what would happen by the time you're X years old, the Spanish flu starts.
By the time you're Y years old, World War II. And it just goes on and on and on and shows how fucking horrific it was for people who were born 120 years ago.
We got lucky.
We hit a nice sweet spot where the Waves weren't there.
Except it feels like now, especially Gen Z is repeating a version of what people born in 1900 went through because a lot of them remember, oh my god, it was 9-11 and then now this.
And that's going to start becoming typical summers.
That is going to become the norm if a radical, drastic change isn't made.
But maybe, you know, you were talking about how, what if there was a shift in consciousness in terms of knowing how fragile and how precarious everything is?
I think it'd be really cool if America switched to, I don't mind America flexing its might and saying we're It would be so cool if we change that flex to the way a small town gangster flexes and he goes, look, everyone here, if there's some old lady that's about to get evicted, I pay for it.
Everyone in my five blocks is taken care of.
That's the brag.
Yes, he drives a nice car and wears a suit, but it's that brag of my flex is no one in this country goes hungry, doesn't get medical care, and that's what we flex to the world instead of flexing Look at our billionaires.
We have like 20 crazy rich billionaires.
It's amazing.
Instead of that, the brag should be that no one in America is in need and is desperate and is dying.
Well, one thing that we are realizing from this is that there's a lot of people that have that libertarian bent, let the market decide, we need a small government, this and that.
When something like this goes down, you realize, oh, you need structure.
You actually need a pandemic response team.
You need people to figure out a way to get food to folks.
I mean, again, visit any third world country after an earthquake and look at all the crumbled buildings with no rebar and go, do you really want no building inspectors and no regulations on it?
The inspectors are there to protect the people that are actually doing it correctly because a lot of times the people doing it correctly have got to go to subcontractors and subcontractors supply stuff.
And those people can be sketchy.
So if you don't have the inspector come by going, oh, this dude just ripped you off with substandard cement.
Oh, fuck, see, because that guy's got 900 things he's got to do every day.
So you need the guy in there checking stuff out going, just doing it so that shit doesn't collapse on you.
Well, the world is really complicated, and people love simplistic answers and less government.
government answer the left we don't need cops we don't need cops you know i'm an anarchist oh oh you've never been robbed i guess you've never been robbed you've never seen a guy with a gun like get the fuck out of here you We don't need cops.
Of course we need cops, stupid.
What are we going to do?
All get together and put out the fires?
We don't need firemen.
Let's save our tax money.
No, you need government.
You need it.
It's important.
It just has to be effective and good.
And sometimes, like all systems, it has to be tested for flaws.
And I feel like this experience has been a great test for our system.
And it's flawed.
It's fucked up beyond belief.
Especially with distribution of food.
The food supply chain is falling apart in front of our eyes.
They planned to make as much money as possible by selling as much food as possible every single week, and then they were basically spending all that money and investing all that money and distributing all that money.
They didn't have enough money for a couple of months off.
They don't have enough money for anything to go sideways.
At the end of the boom, there were a lot of comedians that, for a time, you could be not great and make $100,000 a year because there were clubs everywhere.
And these guys spent money like, I'm going to make $100,000 a year forever.
This will be my base.
And then suddenly, I was watching headliners getting cars towed.
I saw a guy get his house repossessed.
I came in and he had to go crash on someone's apartment.
And then I was told by a younger guy, Whatever you make, half of it you don't have.
Just save it or put it away.
Pretend like you're making half of what you're making and live on that.
I'm not saying you have to dress in sackcloth and have shoes made out of rope, but I'm saying dress nice, take care of your needs, not your wants, your needs, and then the baller move is, and I'm ready if shit goes south.
Well, sometimes the thing that makes you very successful in comedy is to still be in touch with being a child and being over-emotional and over-sensitive to things.
That's where some of the best material comes from.
Look, I still get all wound up about the new comic book releases or some viral things that's in line, just like a goddamn 20. But then I'm also like Alice, vegetables and then chicken and have a little bit of mac and cheese.
But you've got to eat all those first and then whatever you have.
There's still that.
And I think a lot of people end up being bad parents because they don't want to be uncool.
And being a good parent means you're kind of uncool.
It's tricky because you love them and almost they're like your little friends, but they're like, can I just do something?
Like sometimes my daughter has this cute little trick, she'll ask my wife first, and then she'll say no, but then she comes to daddy, because daddy's the big softie.
My wife Meredith is such a great mom, but she was raised With very responsible parents and very, not strict, but just like, if I say this will happen, she's consistent both ways.
If I say we're going to the beach on Saturday, it will happen.
I will not flake out.
If I also say no iPad for a week, you will not see that iPad.
I won't flake either way.
There's always consistency.
And I'm going to flake your one, so my daughter, just like you, my daughter knows to come to me and say...
And I'm like, I guess so.
And now, although now, she, to her, well, to our credit, she's done it so clumsily that now whenever she asks something, we text it.
Are you noticing that people are, through this nonsense, are at least taking a little bit better care of their health or recognizing that this is a real thing they need to invest in?
I've noticed it myself that, unfortunately, a lot of this...
A lot of the lockdown means you've got to eat a lot of processed food because it lasts longer and that's how you make your food dollar stretch in a lot of ways.
and you see the immediate effects of not having fresh food and organic stuff in your diet very, very quickly.
Yeah.
And what I also especially hope is that people, including me, who, again, sometimes I forget my fucking privilege, Yeah.
And you go, oh, this is how people who don't have a lot of money are forced to eat and live and maybe make things better for them.
And there'll be less stress and anger and depression across the spectrum.
I mean, that's what you were saying before about a flex for the whole, you know, like we're taken care of.
That is something that's really missing in this country in a big way, is that we'll spend a lot of money fixing up other places that we've blown up all over the world, but we'll spend no money trying to balance out Baltimore, or South Side of Chicago, or Detroit.
Whenever I'm supporting people now, I try to use my platform and not my voice.
I remember when I was at Sundance, When they had the Women's March, the day after Trump was inaugurated, I think it was January 21st, I was at Sundance, I was a judge on the short film panel, and I begged the organizers, I was like, please, please, please, don't have the march here in Park City.
Do not have photos of celebrities in front of the Vivian Westwood outlet in Park City, Utah, because all that is is going to be fuel for the other side.
Like, amplify the marches that are happening in Charlotte, in Tuscaloosa.
Because all those were happening, and half of the marches that got filmed were the ones where there were celebrities there.
But there's a generation of people putting luminol on people's online history that that will die out and it'll turn into, if it was something horrible a week ago, yes, let's talk about that.
If you dug up something someone did 10 years ago, everyone's going to go, yeah, you should see this shit, but that won't land the way that it is now.
Yeah, I think our expectations of people are different.
We don't, we're not under the illusion anymore that these aren't real people because we want them to be presidential or we want them to be a representative.
We're not under the illusion anymore that they, that they're not real people.
It's almost like when they had to admit that WWE was fake.
It's like, okay, now we can just enjoy it for what it is.
You don't have to have these arguments with your friends over whether or not it's fake.
They don't get nearly enough credit for it either, because while they were doing it, before the lockdown, they were doing it 250 plus days a year, traveling all over the country, throwing each other on tables.
My most conspiratorial thoughts are that this is AI, and that AI is slowly bringing us deeper and deeper into the hive, into the matrix.
And the way they're doing it is by disconnecting us from each other, making social distancing the norm, cover your face with a mask, don't touch anything, everything you're going to do virtually, and slowly but surely it's going to lead to this new way of life.
Where you're no longer at risk by going out there and making yourself susceptible to all these biological nasties.
I mean, I've had those arguments with people about there's a very strong case to be made for Cypher's character in The Matrix of like, no, plug me the fuck back into this.
Hang on.
So I'm nude with no muscles, acrophied muscles, hairless in a jagged wasteland of radioactive slag, or I could be in this world where I have a nice And I eat a steak and marry someone.
Can I just live in this?
I'm fine with it.
Like, Morpheus, who the fuck are you helping?
Are you dragging us out of these?
The machines aren't trying to kill us.
They're just like, look, you guys.
And by the way, the machines are like, You guys fucked up the earth.
We're doing the best we can for you guys.
We could have just let you all die in the wasteland, but instead, we found a way so that you can live.
Like, the machines aren't doing anything that nefarious.
People always miss that line where Smith says, you know, when we first did The Matrix, it was just flat-out paradise.
And you guys couldn't handle that, and you rejected it.
Like, we literally had you where probably the first version of The Matrix, everybody could fly, and orgasms lasted three months, and you could just eat all the chocolate you wanted.
Because I think it's still in our RNA or in our DNA that the ones who thrived were the ones who solved puzzles and pushed against adversity.
When you don't have that, you have a memory of dying if you don't do that.
if you don't do that yeah you crave that you know we need to have that a little bit or we go that's why i think um a lot of the people that are out protesting um yeah they're protesting because i don't have a i don't have a job i need money right now but also like what you were saying earlier let me decide to take a risk yeah like like like we will there's a part of us that will push against that even if it's deadly and even if it's selfish because it's part of what made our species
We do crave that.
We need to have that a little bit.
That's why I think a lot of the people that are out protesting, yeah, they're protesting because I don't have a job.
you know we took the risk i'm gonna flop out on land yeah well there's predators out there i just gotta push we're also deeply distrustful of people who tell us what to do because we know that when people have the power to tell you what to do when they didn't have that power before and that's what's going on right now in the state there's new power right The governor has the power to shut businesses down.
The mayor has the power to shut everything down.
When people get into that position of power, I know we don't ever want to think that, and we want to think that all of the reasons why they do things are altruistic, they're great people, they just...
But there's just human instincts.
Just like the human need to sort of overcome adversity, there's a real human instinct to control people.
I mean, it's the reason why cults exist.
It's the reason why we're very, very careful in how we give out power.
Even the way the mayor phrased it, something like, if we all wear masks, this is the way we can get back some of our freedoms.
I don't know who the fuck his PR guy is, but hey man, that's the worst thing you could say.
You don't have power over the general population's freedoms.
That's not in your fucking job description.
So when you say shit like that, we can get back some of our freedoms.
People are naturally going to get very upset Because it puts them in the position like, oh, I've seen this before.
I know what this is.
Now there's a person who's got power over me.
And so that's part of what these protests are.
It's not just simply like, I want to be selfish.
I want to put my grandma at risk because I want to be able to make a living again.
And I'd rather have the old people die off than lose my business.
It's also, hey, I don't like you telling me what to do because I don't think you're any different than me.
I think you're just a person.
And a person that has power and new power, like the power to tell people you can or can't do something, that's a very tricky position.
But it's so weird how those are the kinds of statements that we push back on, and yet there are other more blatantly controlling statements that we will absolutely accept.
If you would look at some of the stuff that Trump says to his audience, basically mocking them, like holding up a Bible going, boy, you people sure love this.
Like you would think they would go, I think he's making fun of us, but they're just like, yes!
It's just weird how what one person will push against, you would think, oh, that's a That's an interesting case.
You know, like, wait a minute.
You were so rightfully suspicious and cautious about that statement, and yet that one got no review from you, and you just went, great.
I don't know what you're talking about in particular, because I didn't see Trump do that, but the thing about him, like, mocking a Bible, even if it's offensive, it doesn't stop people from doing anything.
What these orders are, they're stopping people from making a living.
And how about the other family of the soldier that had died, and he had been in some sort of a dispute with the family, and openly dismissive about that situation?
One of the reasons that Trump has been able to stick around in office and he's going to have his full term and maybe have a second one is, as horrible as it is, it is a fascinating psychological study of a soul in torment that we get to watch for free every week when he gives an interview or does a rally.
There's something where you get to go back and watch this thing like, I've got to go look at this thing again.
You're basically representing bankers, and you've got a bunch of special interests tugging at you, and you've got your agenda, but the way he interacts with the press, he needs to be coached.
If he had a coach, someone who's very socially astute, maybe even a comic, someone who could say, look, man, you've got to show some humility.
You can't get a joke across.
There's a few guys that can get a joke across if they're cocky, like Dice Clay or someone along those lines.
Yeah, and then they had to stop doing it because we're trying to get a story about Biden, get some traction, and you keep taking all the air out of the news.
We need you to sit down for a couple days to get this going.
I'm not looking at this like, let's look at the positive side.
Because look, it's negative for a lot of people, particularly people that have lost people and people that have lost their own health.
But there's an opportunity for us that haven't to restructure and just rethink this thing and recognize what it really is because you just run around with momentum thinking, well, I'm in the business and I got to do this and I got to do that and hey, this is what I do and, you know, maybe not.
Like, I haven't been on the road in two fucking months and part of me is like, boy, I feel really healthy.
I feel like as good as I've ever felt.
And it's steady.
It's like the same every day.
There's not these big ups and downs when I come home on Sunday and I fucking crash and I try to get back to the thick of things on Monday.
It's like you're taking way less damage to your body.
Also, spending more time with my family, being around, just walking through the neighborhood.
And when you don't have to go anywhere, sometimes you just enjoy the moment.
Enjoy the moment of being alive, a human being in 2020, and being one of the fortunate ones that isn't sick.
There's some times where, honestly, in the first couple weeks, especially after a special, I'm like, boy, I might have hit the fucking bottom of the well.
it i miss it so much he stuck with it that guy had crazy highs and crazy lows he had all the highs of like you know occupation fool and class clown then i saw him in the 80s at the warner theater and he was kind of flailing a little bit like yes what's his way and then he he was trying out these new concepts some worked some didn't he ended with the seven dirty words because you know i got to end my show then he came roaring back with that um the one about the earth
uh the earth is not dying we are it was this you know because i think he thought maybe i'm done like maybe i'm a relic and no I got a chance to see him at Hampton Beach Casino.
And also, I think that he was a little bit freaked out by, you know, he had opened the door, him and Pryor, especially in terms of language and subject matter, and now here's people like Sam Kinison and Andrew Right.
Why do they need me?
I think there was a couple years where he felt like, am I John Wayne at the end of The Searchers?
I've rescued everyone, and I've helped progress the world, but I don't belong in the world, and then I'm just going to walk away into the desert.
There's always that moment of sometimes your bravery helps bring about a world that, ironically, you don't belong in anymore.
That's a I mean, I feel like that's what happened to Joan Rivers at the end of her career.
She broke so many goddamn barriers for women and for talking about certain subject matter, and then at the end of her career, she suddenly saw all of her stuff get parsed by this new generation that's like, this generation that's attacking her and parsing her stuff, you're enjoying the freedoms you're enjoying partially because of the shit that she did.
She laid down barbed wire so you could run across it and then point at her for not using the correct language.
At some point, there will be another wave of podcasters that won't understand the stuff that you and Maren and people like that did podcasting-wise, and will do it and look back at you guys like, what are you even talking about?
It's like, the reason you're doing what you're doing is because of the shit that we laid down.
And it'll happen to me as a comedian?
It's happened to...
Filmmakers, everyone's shitting on Martin Scorsese for going, not a fan of the Marvel films.
He never said, don't go see them.
He's like, they're not for me.
You motherfuckers!
You wouldn't have your Marvel film if Scorsese hadn't done his movies.
Because all those movies are what made the guys who direct your movies, you go, I want to do that.
Also, what's wrong with not liking certain things?
I have very good friends who like things that I think are terrible.
I still like them.
You're allowed that if you don't like...
I have friends who hate Marvel comic movies.
I fucking love them.
I love comic book movies.
And I have friends like, I'm not watching that stupid shit.
That guy's definitely gonna live.
Nothing's gonna happen.
He's the hero.
I'm like, listen, man...
I get it.
I understand how you feel a certain way, but the other thing about film to think about a guy like Scorsese, where he needs to be put in a much better perspective, is that when you think about some of the stuff that he did in the 70s, Movies had only been around for like real movies for like 40 years.
Like King Kong, like the 30s.
And then here you go, 40 years later.
You're talking about some of those Scorsese movies, or the Coppola movies, like Apocalypse Now.
Think about how crazy that movie is, when you really stop and think about when it was actually created, and what a short time films had even been made like that.
It's like, when I hosted the Independent Spirit Awards, the year I hosted it, John Waters' first film, which he made when he was a teenager in Baltimore.
It's called Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, and it's about an interracial wedding being sided over by a Klansman.
It's a Klansman marrying an interracial couple.
He shot it on his parent's roof in Baltimore in the 60s, and I told the audience, this is the 50th anniversary of John Waters' first film.
Any of you guys are like, are we pushing too far?
Are we going too far?
He's already done all that work for you.
Fucking go for it.
He was an openly gay teenager in 1960s Baltimore shooting an interracial wedding on his parents' roof with a Klansman doing the ceremony.
Getting back to what you were saying, it's weird that you brought up I have friends who love stuff that I hate but I don't give a shit.
The reason my special is called I Love Everything is when you get to There's still stuff that annoys you and stuff you don't like, but you're like, but I know where this is coming, or I know why he's acting that way.
I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, I think he's fucking horrible, but I also know about his childhood and how he was raised, and I know why he is the way he is.
He grew up in a monster factory, and it was a really well-run monster factory, and it made an incredible monster.
I know why he is the way he is.
Hatred is a luxury for youth.
When you're young, you can go, this is bullshit!
And then you get to 50, you're like, it's not for me, but I don't care.
You have children, you have a child, I have daughters, and when I think of people now, I think of them as babies that grew up And when I was younger, I used to think, if I knew you now, I'd think, oh, Patton has always been this Patton.
But now I can see, because I've seen little babies become little people, and I go, oh, okay.
You just got terrible input, terrible feedback, bad epigenetics, a lot of shit wrong here.
You're a victim of circumstance as much as you are, you know, being an asshole.
You're actually, the reason why you're an asshole is because you're a victim.
It's also not beneficial to anybody to be confrontational and to be angry about things all the time.
Even though it seems fun when you're young, as you get older, you realize it's a terrible way of using your resources.
And it also...
It doesn't create any harmony.
It just makes the people on the other side fight back harder.
Like, there's no middle ground given.
There's no compromise.
There's no forgiveness.
There's no equanimity.
There's no moment where you feel like this is a human being, and I'm a human being, and I make mistakes, and they make mistakes, and let's figure out how we can be nicer to each other.
a lot of times trying to but yeah because otherwise the only other option is the person who's pissing you off actually wins and takes over space in your mind and stops you doing the shit you need to do yeah if you're living a then-centered life or a spite-centered life then that runs you that other person runs your life and think of all the jokes and albums and movies or whatever you were going to do that you never did as you were focused on them that's really common you There's a lot of people that are doing that with Trump.
Who am I? I'm so glad for all the LSD trips I took back in the 90s because you come out of it and just kind of go, oh yeah, okay, maybe I need to...
Anything to shrink yourself in the universe and make you more secure with like, oh, this is actually vast and I'm tiny in it.
Knowing how tiny you are actually gives you more strength and freedom because you're like, if everything I do is insignificant, then I can do anything.
If it's ultimately all crumbles, just do whatever you want.
Harlan Ellison, who was very anti-drug, very anti-drink, but he was putting together an anthology and he had Philip K. Dick's story, Faith of Our Fathers, in it.
He was like, I've never advocated the use of psychedelics or drugs, but my God, if I could write on this level, maybe I would totally gobble them because he's operating on a different level right now.
Well, I think people are scared of him because, for rightly so, because we've all heard stories of people losing everything, lose their mind.
You know, we were talking yesterday about this O'Farrell theater sign that Hunter S. Thompson had given this couple on their wedding anniversary or their wedding day.
Hunter gave it to this couple along with 20 hits of acid, and the woman took all the acid and was immediately checked into a mental institution and never got out.
So on the day of their wedding, Hunter S. Thompson ruined it.
And the figures weren't going crazy, but as the music played, they were all just kind of subtly, just kind of bounced, like they were in line outside of a sound check, just listening to the music.
And it gave me this feeling of such absolute, like, oh, everything in the world is bouncing to a better beat right now.
It felt really, really good.
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It was the perfect time to take LSD. And on that note...