Bill Schulz' Spiked 2005 Interview with Patton Oswalt

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Gentle Readers,

At the bottom of this post appears a spiked 2005 interview between Fox News' "Red Eye" Co-Host Bill Schulz and comedian Patton Oswalt that was to have appeared in Penthouse magazine. This is from a draft version and the beginning contains notes from Bill to his editors.

Some background from Bill's Twitter feed during the wee hours of this Monday morning...

Speaking of people that r dicks? Watching Real Time right now, and Patton Oswalt is on. Biggest dick I ever interviewed.

I actually think he's hilarious. But could not have been more of a c word during our QandA.

Interviewed Patton for penthouse and it was so awk, and bad, I just turned it in as it was---cause it wouldve been a good read...

And they killed it, cause they didn't want to alienate him, or his publicist. U know what? Ill post it online. Maybe on redeye site.

Patton Oswalt owes me a grand. The kill fee for that article was 200. But his bitchiness hurt my rent.

@haydenlink oh it never went to print. But ill find it. Ill print it to u guys tomorrow. Prepare for stomach cringes...

Okay, I'm looking for this old article on my older laptop. I don't come off well, either. But F it. Patton is a douche. It will be seen...

Okay, I don't have a facebook page. Who wants to post this patton/bill noise?

Finally reread Patton interview. Transcripts r worse than what I edited/wrote. But still good. He was a bitch. Itsa word doc. Who wants it?

So, again, background is his publicist said that the interview WILL NOT be printed. And I gotta kill fee and he was reinterviewed.

In a later exchange with this blogger, Bill lamented, "What I wrote goes nowhere near how awful it really was. I should just release the tapes."

Below appears Bill's transcript of the interview he found "cringe-inducing." Judge for yourself.

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HED: Stand-Up Guys

DEKS: Trading punch lines with comedy’s best.

SINCE THE “PUNCHLINE” TAGLINE DOESN’T REALLY APPLY FOR THIS, HERE’S SOME OTHER OPTIONS…

Trading punch lines—or in this case, punches—with comedy’s best.

The latest installment in our ongoing sit-downs with stand-up’s all-stars.

SUBHED: Patton Oswalt

By Bill Schulz

INTROS: Anyone who owns a remote will recognize Patton Oswalt as Kevin James’ buddy, Spence, (that’s short for “Spencer”, I reckon!) in CBS’s King of Queens, as well his occasional punditry in the snarkathon that is VH1’s Best Week Ever. And the casual fan might go on to mention his meager-but-memorable roles in Magnolia, Starsky & Hutch and Zoolander. But true Oswalt aficionados will point to 2004’s Feeling Kind Of Patton and let the comedy album speak for itself. The man is, quite simply, the funniest stand-up working the clubs today. He’s also kind of a prick. I don’t know if it was the fact that Patton had just done a slew of zoo crew radio appearances the previous Friday or if he just saw me for the hack that I am—but, right off the bat, the comic decided that he hated me. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have opened with the Bill Hicks question…

THE SAFE INTRO: “Anyone who tells you how dangerous and edgy they are, isn’t dangerous or edgy.” Patton Oswalt has, in a roundabout way, just told me that he, himself, is dangerous and edgy without actually saying it. But I’ll let it slide due to the fact that, after recently listening to 2004’s Feelin’ Kinda Patton, I found the album to be both those things as well as chock-full of the funniest material I’ve heard in years. This, I suppose, should come as no surprise considering the man’s pedigree consists of collaborations on Reno 911, The Aqua Teen Hunger Force, VH1’s Best Week Ever and HBO’s deeply-missed Mr. Show With Bob and Dave. Oh, and lets not forget Patton’s role on The King Of Queens and his portrayal of the character Hedges in Blade: Trinity! Actually…he’d rather you did forget the latter. Herein the cranky comic opines on laughs, LSD and—I’m just gonna say it—love.

PH: You worked with the late Bill Hicks. What was your take on Joe Rogan’s claim that Dennis Leary stole his material?

PATTON: It’s absolutely accurate. It’s been documented.

Well Leary has said—like on their respective cigarette monologues—that “you don’t own the subject, you own what you say about it.”

And Denis Leary did the jokes. No one needs to come to Rogan’s defense, these are facts. They’ve been documented. Read the book American Scream. They go point-by-point, bit-by-bit, through Leary’s No Cure For Cancer special. He took word-for-word jokes from Bill Hicks. This isn’t a matter of debate or opinion, it’s fact.

Okay, then. So is he sort of looked down upon by fellow comedians? He seems to have a lot of friends in the business.

None that I know of.

Moving on: Your dad named you after General Patton. Name one of the many qualities that you, no doubt, share with the WWII icon?

Um, with General Patton? I resolve all my differences with desert tank battles.

So Ben Stiller strikes me as one who comes off grumpy, moody and obsessive off camera. Am I wrong on that?

He’s obsessive, but not grumpy and moody about it. He just wants things to be as funny as possible. He also takes on a lot of projects—so it’s not that he’s grumpy or moody, but he’s always pretty stressed. We started working together on the MTV movie awards. We wrote a couple of things together and just really clicked. I did a thing with him where he was a Backstreet Boy.

Oh, yeah. And Andy Dick was the crippled Backstreet Boy with a hook for a hand?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wrote the thing where Will Ferrell came out as that obsessive coach.

Those made me giggle. You used to open for David Cross. Now, are comedians a competitive bunch in the sense that Cross would get pissed at you if you got more laughs than he did?

No. No offense, but it kind of sounds like you have the story already written and you’re kind of hoping for answers you want to hear.

Erm…not at all.

I mean there’s competition among shitty comedians, but the comedians that actually love doing it—it’s not a sense of “I’m counting the laughs I’m getting compared to him.” That’s kind of not how we do it.

Uh, now I know. You recently MC’ed an audience Q&A with The Onion staff. What surprised you about “America’s finest news source?”

How socially awkward they all are. Just, like, not knowing when to start talking and not knowing when to stop. They were awkward, socially, but also very captivating and charming. They’re true comedy nerds. I also never realized it was such a committee thing. Like, even when you write stuff you sort of submit it to the people and then they argue about it, and stuff like that.

What were your impressions of Jim Carrey during your appearance in Man On The Moon? I’m told he stays in character throughout the shoot.

Well, when he would come in it was “hello, it’s Jim,” but for the rest of the day he was Andy [Kauffman]. I heard it was weird at first, but by the time I got on set—I was only in one scene—people we’re kinda like, that’s how it is. In the morning we’d talk, cause we had friends in common, but the rest of the day he was Andy and I didn’t talk to him.

Did you laugh at “Andy” behind his back?

I have so many weird processes myself, that I kind of can’t really judge people on what the fuck is going on with someone else.

Give me an example of some of your proc—

—Can’t articulate them.

[Sighing] Well, you’ve been on Reno 911 a lot. Is there any part of that show that’s scripted?

It’s complete improv. They sort of give you your character, and the situation, and just let you go. I liked doing the D&D character, ’cause we filmed all these extra scenes, and one of my favorites made it onto the DVD. It’s me talking for six minutes, unbroken, about Dungeons & Dragons and Tom Leonard just staring at me and writing down what I’m saying. It’s really bizarre, but it really works. I still play D&D now. Every Wednesday a bunch of friends come over and we’ll play it.

Please tell me costumes are involved.

No costumes.

Do comedians get groupies?

Yeah, but they tend to be kind of sad. If they’re into comedians, it’s like, at least get it up to being with rock stars, you know what I mean?

Give me a good example of the last time you woke up, stared at the thing next to you, and screamed—versus a time when you gave yourself a little pat on the back for her overall hotness.

Put it this way, any woman who’d be excited to wake up next to me is a massive turn off.

Best and worst experience with illegal substances?

My best was my first acid trip on the night Clinton got elected—sitting in a friend’s apartment, and it was full of action figures, and it looked as if they were all on the shelf dancing. The worst time was probably, oh man, probably spring break in college—way too drunk and way too sunburned. Nothing fun. I’ve had worse experiences on alcohol than I ever have on drugs.

Ever over imbibed before a gig?

Whenever I drink too much I kind of just stop caring. Too much booze, for me, makes me not excited to be up there.

You’ve been known to go off on Jay Leno’s comedy in interviews. Ever gotten any feedback from The Tonight Show camp on that?

Why would he even know who I am?

Oh, I definitely think he’d know who you are.

Nah. It’s frustrating when you see someone who’s such a good comedian make those kind of choices, I guess.

Is Leah Remini as much of a hellcat in real life as she comes across on screen?

Um, are we just going to talk about celebrities I’ve met? Because this just seems, I don’t know, kind of boring.

Fine, then. I’ll go for the personal: You’ll be married by the time this hits newsstands. Are you going to have kids?

Nope. Don’t want ’em.

And is the wife in agreement on this?

Nope. [Pauses] But hopefully we’ll come to some sort of compromise.

Uh-huh. Well good luck with that.

END BUG

Trev's E-mail Read on FoxNews.com's Strategy Room 03-25-2010

Watch the on-line broadcast "Strategy Room" at FoxNews.com weekdays starting from 9 AM.

Dissenting from the Gay Agenda

From a comment on a Huffington Post link around the time of President Obama's inauguration:

What self-respecting gay would go near the Republican party? Any time in the last 20-30 years?....You would have to love being dissed and ignored and having people coming up to you asking why you haven't been reprogrammed yet, or else stayed in the closet.

Assumptions like those evidenced above are part of why I - a man who lives with same-sex attraction - choose to remain "closeted" and participate in the Republican Party as a libertarian-conservative.

It is true that the earliest realizations of my own homosexuality were coupled with the sense that it was a bad and a shameful thing I should hide. But as I grew older, I came to realize that the "gay pride" movement threatened something far more sinister than what any schoolyard bully could. I realized that publicly admitting this private characteristic meant, in some sense, surrendering my individual identity to a collective identity dictated by the "out" gay community. It would also mean accepting a label whose evolving meaning in our culture is not something I want to define me.

I experience same-sex attraction (SSA), but it is hardly the sum of who I am.

SSA is a part of my life that affects me in the most personal of ways, and I remain unconvinced that my SSA belongs to anyone else but me. For one thing, my having SSA doesn't mean to me what it apparently means to many Americans, gay or straight.

This distinction between SSA in my life and what "gay" has come to mean in our culture became more stark as I grew in faith as a Catholic man. What the Catholic Church and Bible teach about sex and gender made more sense to me than what our if-it-feels-good-do-it culture appears to believe about these things. I no longer see myself as a "gay man," as though homosexuality and heterosexuality were equivalent, but simply as a man. I am a male, complementary to a female, although a male with a predilection to same-sex attraction. My sexual orientation is not intrinsic to who I am the way my sex is. My SSA is just one challenge in my life that I have to deal with. All men and women have challenges in their lives and we are all responsible for discerning God's will in our lives.

Despite the excesses of the Sooper Trev character I play on Facebook and Twitter and in viewer e-mails to FoxNews.com's Strategy Room, in my life in the world, I reject the gay label, the gay identity, and the dominant gay cultural and political agenda for my country. Some will say this makes me a hypocrite, but I say I have reached my own conclusions based on my own experience.

I am not alone. The opinion and experience of same-sex attracted men and women is much broader and more varied than the self-proclaimed leaders of the gay rights movement would have you believe. Even among those who do accept a gay identity and who seek same-sex life partnerships, forcing social acceptance through government coercion is not the top priority of us all. Many self-identified gays and lesbians would prefer self-defense through the right to bear arms to the fleeting protection of PC "hate crimes" legislation. And many of us are more concerned with containing and defeating Islamofascism than we are with subjecting the mightiest military in the world to the social engineering exercise of repealing Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell.

For me, rejecting the gay label reinforces my dissent from gay collectivist allegiance to the Democrat Party and its victimology-based LBGT constituency groups like Human Rights Campaign, GLAAD, PFLAG, GLSEN, and countless others exploiting and cashing in on the pain of the homosexual experience.

Thankfully there are other voices for same-sex attracted men and women in public debate besides the Leftist gay mainstream. I'm glad that a group like GOProud is out there. However, I'd hope anyone reading this understands that there are still, even to the right of that, plenty of us who experience SSA who maintain more traditional views on homosexuality. And we're not hypocrites for reaching our own conclusions.

So to the Huffington Post commenter I mentioned above and to those who agree with her: my self-respect comes in part from thinking for myself. I suppose I'll stay "closeted" as long as so many of my fellow Americans remain ensnared by the collectivist, politically correct, grievance-cult programming that you're trapped in. I reject your narrow labels and the presumptions behind them.

Red Eye's Tom O'Connor Mentions Trev on "Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend" 02-10-2010

Catch TV personality and writer Alison Rosen, of "Red Eye" fame on Ustream.com where she hosts "Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend" weekly.

Trev's Message for Greg No. 1

Greg & Trev's Sauna Summit

Greg Gutfeld's Facebook Status

Thank you for all the nice b-day messages. Sadly, when you're drunk they read like this: "glduhdaur," or "glursysshs," and "glrrgggggggg." But it's the thought that counts.
9 hours ago