What qualities make an artist’s work effective, insightful, and enduring? Whether it was Claude Monet’s first showing of what eventually became the foundation for the “Impressionist” movement or Kurt Cobain’s acoustic swan song on MTV’s (Yes, children. For a brief moment, the “M” stood for “Music” before it stood for “Money”) Unplugged program, these works stood as a testament to something in the world turning towards honesty, beauty, and truth. Some phantom spark in our hearts, both individually and collectively (communally?), was flamed and smoldered in gratitude to our noticing and naming it. We are moved to the brink of total rapture, all-encompassing ecstasy and quite possibly pushed over the edge to pitiful insanity.
Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt’s Zombi Spaceship Wasteland does none of these things. Well, except maybe the insane part…But it is really funny. And he talks a lot about role playing games, science fiction and rejection from girls. He also quotes R.E.M. songs. A lot.
For all intents and purposes Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is a stand-up routine bolstered by comics that feature vampires hurling insults at each other (“You lurk like a manatee!”), detailed R-rated explications of fictional hobo songs, and a collection of drawings entitled “Chamomile Kitten Greeting Cards.” But more than a random series of jokes and humorous cartoons, it serves as one part biography, one part confessional, and one part poet’s statement. Introductions to some of his stories include: “I’m eleven years old and my two friends are ten years old except for one other friend I have who is also eleven years old but is only twenty-two days older than me. And this is how cool our snow fort is” and “I started my stand-up career in the summer of 1988 at a Washington, DC comedy club called Garvin’s. It’s now a gay nightclub called the Green Lantern.” Or “My Uncle Pete was insane.”
Now, the number of times I laughed out loud to Patton’s writing was followed closely by the number of times I silently reflected on my own life. My own strange suburban childhood and geekery-fueled adolescence, my attempts at leading a creative life, and my failures at leading a creative life. Perhaps it is something unique to my generation or my socio-economic class, but I’ve noticed that we have a strong desire to relate to those who entertain us. We want to know them, check their credibility and commune with them in dissecting and attempting to understand a world that we find threatening, beautiful and ultimately responsible for the beauty we adore and the hideous mediocrity we find so threatening…like some hipster Ouroboros listening to Smashing Pumpkins b-sides while hunting for Easter Eggs on the DVD of the Blade Runner director’s cut.