During the slow months of my senior year of high school, I went to go see Diablo Cody’s new film, Young Adult. I didn’t know much about the film, but I liked Juno and I was curious. The real reason for seeing it was my best friend Matthew, who was currently nursing a huge obsession with Charlize Theron, the film’s lead. The movie follows Theron, who plays a despondent, struggling author as she returns home to Mercury, Minnesota to try and win back her high school boyfriend, a happily married new father. Despite Theron’s incredible performance, I left the theater entranced by a smaller, supporting character named Matt Freehauf.
Freehoff was a classmate of Theron’s character Mavis in high school, and they become buddies during her time back in Mercury. She recognized him as the so-called “hate-crime guy,” referring to the time in high school that a bunch of jocks who thought he was gay jumped him in the woods and beat him with a crowbar. Freehauf, not a gay man, made the national news and now walks with a crutch. Freehauf is a moral compass among a slew of characters lacking any direction, and he drew me in completely with his authenticity, insight, and humor. His character is simple without being naive, and is vulnerability without being pitiable. He completely broke my heart. I wasn’t someone who always noticed good or bad acting, but something about Freehauf’s portrayal went right through me.
At that time in my life, I prided myself on being familiar with all the best actors in the industry. I kept tabs on award season religiously, and I spent hours playing film trivia games with my cousin, a professional film critic. A phase describable as Katie-eagerly-searching-for-a-thing. Still, the character of Matt Freehauf rang so true, and it killed me that I had no idea who played him. Out of hubris, I assumed that my unfamiliarity with this actor meant that he was either a stage actor or new to the American film industry. There was no doubt in my mind that this incredible performance that shook me to the core couldn’t have come out of thin air. It couldn’t have been a first-time actor. I left the theater, dropped Matthew off at his house, and when I got home I headed straight to Google to solve my little mystery.
The actor’s name was Patton Oswalt, and later that year he would receive a Critic’s Choice Award for his performance. I was wrong in my assumption that he was from the stage or from another country. Patton Oswalt, I learned, was a stand-up comedian. The discovery hit me in waves. As I considered Oswalt’s performance, I was struck by the depths he was able to reach with stand-up comedy as his training. I knew that there had to be something, something much deeper, happening in the world of stand-up that I'd never considered.
Over the next few months, I consumed everything Patton Oswalt, everything I could find. Patton was 5’5, chubby, comic-book obsessed, and completely endearing. I learned that he had been one of the top comedians in the alternative comedy scene in New York in the 1990s. I watched his interviews and read every article about him. I listened to every podcast episode he appeared on, I read his book, and most importantly, I devoured his comedy albums. "'You've got to respect everyone's beliefs.' No you don't! That's what gets us in trouble.” Says Patton Oswalt. “You have to acknowledge everyone's beliefs, and then you have to reserve the right to go, 'That is fucking stupid.'"
Patton spoke with the energy of an angry prophet, and he fed me new ideas about reality. He felt like someone from another world, showing me that I could ask questions of what I was told, and that just because someone was older, stronger, or male, did not make them automatically correct.
The crazy thing was that Patton wasn’t from another world. Hell, he wasn’t even from another town. In the midst of my obsession I learned, to my shock, that Patton was from Sterling, Virginia -- the small suburban outside of DC where I'd lived my entire life. He went to Broad Run High School, my high school’s rival a few miles away. He even made fun of Sterling specifically on one of his albums, it was surreal. “It was come home, go to sleep, get up, go to work, don’t look at each other,” he says of Sterling. “There was no identity to it at all -- we’ve got a 7/11, a gas station, a pizza joint there, shut the fuck up, go to bed.” Knowing that someone like him could come out of someplace like this was everything to me.
I fell in love with Patton, and I fell in love with the podcasts that let me into his mind. If you’re looking for vulnerability and authenticity, podcasts are where you’re going to find them. Long conversations and interviews that are unedited and often unproduced lend themselves easily to soul-baring, and the relatively safety of their small audience magnified these tendencies. My new love of comedy podcasts led me to discovering brilliant, sometimes terrifying, inimitable, authentic comedians like Pete Holmes, TJ Miller, John Mulaney, Maria Bamford, and countless others.