Whenever an artist or entertainer says they’re branching out, I’ve been trained to approach this announcement with jaded trepidation, and I blame the media. It pressures us, urging us to play the excited parent at the school pageant and show our child with excessive praise and trips to Chili’s when he doesn’t completely bungle his lines. “You did good,” we’re supposed to coo, “c’mere, you were great! I’m so proud of you!” Then we proceed to tousle his hair.
Someone with a name in one field shouldn’t automatically get credit in another; they need to be judged by the standards of the new game. There are recurring problems in books by non-author celebrities. Usually, the book is sloppy. It’s hastily assembled, as if the deadline crept up much like a term paper would on a hapless university student. As such, typos can squeak past, yes typos! The font might be enlarged, or the spacing between lines increased to make the book look bigger, as though it were trying to intimidate a bear. And that’s before getting to content.
There’s a special problem for books by stand-up comedians: the humor gets lost in translation. As anyone who’s ever watched a foreign film could tell you, the hardest parts to translate are the jokes. And as in these films, exemplary onstage chucklemongers could find they lose the funny in print, lacking the voice integral to delivering the joke to a chuckle-thirsty people. I wasn’t surprised though when Patton Oswalt (of “Ratatouille,” “Comedians of Comedy,” and, of course, “King of Queens” fame) announced his inaugural book “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland.” Oswalt’s gotten his hands dirty writing articles online and comic books, and he’s a very literary dude onstage, an English major even. Maybe he could fare better than his compatriots. I hate to spoil the surprise, but it turns out he can. Let’s not dish out hasty praise though. I’ve built up a few-hundred-word head of steam here and Oswalt does fall prey to some of the common pitfalls listed earlier.
The way that “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” works is that there are essentially three types of pieces: autobiographical ones, humorous essays, and purely comedic passages. The lattermost of these falls prey to the aforementioned comedic translation problems. While the absurd flights of fancy may excite a club crowd, they falter without the energy Oswalt’s live performance provides. A weaker concept can be sold “in the moment,” but it is much more difficult to sell when the entertained process, and scrutinize, and re-read. The passages collapse like cardboard cutouts in a slipshod children’s spookhouse. It’s the rest of the book, however, which makes “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” a humorous and, dare I say it, engaging read.
“Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” is at its best when Oswalt embraces his past, both as a writer and a person. These short story-length pieces are given room to breathe and, as such, are drenched in mood, infused with perspective along with both the nostalgia and regret that come with it. The memoir pieces seldom lapse into sentimentality or pseudo-intellectualism (though the decision to break up a piece with multiple occurrences of REM lyrics borders on the latter). Oswalt mines the dark humor of laughing at the ultimate punching bag: one’s past self. This past Oswalt character games the system with his arrogant teenage compatriots and obsesses over of the game of Dungeons and Dragons to gain some control over his adolescent life. Bringing the over-analytical mind of a repeatedly disappointed optimist, Oswalt peels back the veneer from his reality like skin off a pudding. The juxtaposition of cynicism and nostalgia is at the core of the appeal to the best passages, though; it’s as if he were wearing rose-tinted goggles, but one of the lenses fell out.
Whatever the criticisms I direct at “Zombies Spaceship Wasteland,” Oswalt’s love of books shines through, especially in the foreword, which is about his love of books. While imperfect, the book is intriguing and funny, funnier than most books written recently. For these reasons, Oswalt earns his fountain pen and inkwell in writing.
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