Patton Oswalt defends his place on MySpace

Comedian Patton Oswalt used his early morning MySpace blog post to deftly recount the story of becoming a new father and how it related to his pop-culture habits, and specifically the new sequel, Crank: High Voltage. There are amusing references to how some comedy sites treated the birth of his daughter, as well as how his friends in comedy and the performing arts all seem to be having babies right about now. But Oswalt also had something to say about why he waited until now, and why he chose MySpace as his forum for sharing all of this:

I didn’t want to announce this on my website, or on my Facebook which, truth be told, I shut down ‘cuz of all the psycho messages I was getting. I mean, I appreciate knowing that you were awake at 3am and heard a katydid chirping my name and that’s why you’re warning me that a hobo-harlequin’s going to kill me with a tire iron on Christmas, but…I mean, didn’t you get tired just reading that?

But MySpace has become a neglected strip mall, which is slowly going out of business because someone built a shiny new mega-mall just down the street. Every now and then you stop by because abandoned, derelict buildings have a weird beauty to them. Have you been over to Friendster lately? The rats are so tame they’ll let you pet ‘em. So think of this as me taping up a discreet flyer in the window of the sketchy Chinese restaurant next to the dollar movie theater where they’re still showing THE WILD WILD WEST. I want to announce this, but people are going to have to pack a sandwich and drive somewhere to find it.

Found.

Coincidentally, Oswalt's latest blog post comes just as News Corp. announced Wednesday it was preparing to replace MySpace's founding fathers, Tom and Chris.

Related: MySpace is touting a new design for its MySpace Comedy page. I've always thought that what made MySpace great was its original mission of connecting bands and musicians with their fans, and the expansion into comedy also was a good idea. If anything "ruined" MySpace, it has been the users, spammers and code designers who filled up user templates with junk and auto-running songs and videos that made it nearly impossible to enjoy the experience. Of course, MySpace still can be a great resource for finding and listening to new musical and comedy acts. I hope they get their act together on that.

Furthermore: The weekly Upright Citizens Brigade comedy show, MySpace, changed its name about six months ago to Facebook for its Wednesday night shows in Los Angeles (and NYC before that) that use an audience member's profile page for improvised inspiration. As one of the several members told me: "After a while, everybody we interviewed for MySpace had only updated their page in hopes of being on our show. Sign o' the times I guess."

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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