Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012

After stirring keynote speeches by Lewis Black and Marc Maron over the past couple of years, Patton Oswalt took to the stage adjacent to the Hyatt lounge on Thursday afternoon to deliver the third annual keynote for the Just For Laughs Comedy Conference in Montreal.

Oswalt employed self-deprecation right off the bat, joking that he was far from JFL’s first choice to address the comedians, industry and fans in the audience. “Luckily for me, none of them could be bothered to wake up before 1 p.m.,” he said. He also noted with sarcasm that in a year in which comedy has come under the microscope of the media and bloggers, of course, a “straight white male” should be the comedy community’s representative to make sense of it all. Speaking of which, he added: “People are referring to us as the comedy communtiy — thats how fucked up things are right now.”

Instead of a straight speech, Oswalt wrote two open letters and read them aloud.

The first letter he addressed to “all of the comedians in the room”; the second, to “all of the gatekeepers” of the comedy business.

Here are those letters.

Dear comedian in 2012:

How are you? I am good. In answer to your last letter, the mozzarella sticks at the Irvine Improv do taste weird. I’m taking your advice and sticking with the nachos.

Hey, ‘know what I was thinking the other day? Everything I know about succeeding as a comedian and ultimately as an artist is worthless now, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I started doing comedy in the summer of 1988. That was a different time, wasn’t it? Joe Piscopo was president, Mary Lou Retton won the Cold War, and Andy Kindler turned 50

If I hadn’t popped that goddamn ‘P’, the Piscopo joke would’ve annihilated.

When I say everything I know about succeeding a comedian is worthless, I know what I’m talking about because everything I know became worthless twice in my lifetime.

The first time was the evening of May 22, 1992. I’d been doing standup almost four years at that point, and that was Johnny Carson’s last ever Tonight Show.

Up until that night, the way you made it in comedy was very clear, simple, straightforward. You went on Carson, you killed, you got called over to the couch, and the next day you had your sitcom and your mansion, and you’re made. Just ask Drew Carey and Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres. And Bill Clinton. That’s how you did it.

But now, Johnny was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

All the comedians I remember starting out with in D.C., all the older ones, told me over and over again ‘you gotta work clean, you gotta get your five minutes, and you gotta get on Carson.’ And it all comes down to that.

And in one night, all of them were wrong. And not just wrong, they were unmoored. They were drifting. A lot of these bulletproof comics I’d opened for, whose careers seemed pre-destined, a lot of them never recovered from that night. You’ll never hear their names. They had been sharks in a man-made pond and had been drained. They decided their time had passed.

Keep that in mind for later. They had decided their time had passed.

The second time everything I knew about comedy became worthless has been petty much every day for the last three years.

I know that’s not an exact date. Some other younger, not yet famous name in this room – you are going to pinpoint that date 20 years from now. But for now, every day for about the last few years will have to suffice.

I just want to give you a brief timeline of my career up to this point, when I knew it was all changing again. Listen to my words very carefully. Two words will come up again and again and they’re going to come back later along with that phrase “they decided” and people are going to carry me around the room.

I was lucky enough to get hired onto King of Queens in 1998. I had nine years on that show. Money, great cast, even better writers, a lot of fun. I bought a house. Then I was lucky enough to get cast as a lead voice in a Pixar movie in 2007. Acclaim, money, I got to meet a lot of my heroes. Then I was lucky enough to get cast on The United States of Tara on Showtime. I got to watch Toni Collette work. I got to perform Diablo Cody’s writing. After which, I was lucky enough to get cast in Young Adult, which is where I got to make out with Charlize Theron. I will use that as an icebreaker if i ever meet Christina Ricci.

I’ve been lucky enough to be given specials on HBO, Comedy Central, and Showtime. As well as I’ve been lucky enough to release records on major labels, and I was lucky they approached me to do it. And that led to me being lucky enough to get Grammy nominations.

I know that sounds like a huge ego-stroking credit dump. But if you listened very carefully, you would have heard two words over and over again: “lucky” and “given.” Those are two very very dangerous words for a comedian. Those two words can put you to sleep, especially once you get a taste of both being “lucky” and being “given.” The days about luck and being given are about to end. They’re about to go away.

Not totally. There are always comedians who will work hard and get noticed by agents and managers and record labels. There will always be an element of that. And they deserve their success. And there’s always going to be people who benefit from that.

What I mean is: Not being lucky and not being given are no longer going to define your career as a comedian and as an artist.

Remember what I said earlier about those bulletproof headliners who focused on their 5 minutes on the Tonight Show and when it ended they decided their opportunity was gone? They decided. Nobody decided that for them. They decided.

Now, look at my career up to this point. Luck, being given. Other people deciding for me.

In the middle of the TV shows and the albums and the specials, I took a big chunk of my money and invested it in a little tour called The Comedians of Comedy. I put it together with my friends, we did small clubs, stayed in shitty hotel rooms, packed ourselves in a tiny van and drove it around the country. The tour was filmed for a very low-budget documentary that I convinced Netflix to release. That became a low-budget show on Comedy Central that we all still own a part of, me and the comedians. That led to a low budget concert film that we put on DVD.

At the end of it, I was exhausted, I was in debt, and I wound up with a wider fanbase of the kind of people I always dreamed of having as fans. And I built that from the ground up, friends and people I respected and was a fan of.

And I realize now I need to combine both of the lessons I’ve learned.

I need to decide more career stuff for myself and make it happen for myself, and I need to stop waiting to luck out and be given. I need to unlearn those muscles.

I’m seeing this notion take form in a lot of my friends. A lot of you out there. You, for instance, the person I’m writing to. Your podcast is amazing. Your videos on your YouTube channel are getting better and better every single one that you make, just like when we did open mics, better and better every week. Your Twitter feed is hilarious.

Listen, I’m doing the Laugh Trench in Milwaukee next week. Is there any chance for an RT?

Your friend,
Patton Oswalt

This is his second letter.

Dear gatekeepers in broadcast and cable executive offices, focus groups, record labels, development departments, agencies and management companies:

Shalom.

Last month I turned in a script for a pilot I co-wrote with Phil Rosenthal who has had a share of luck and success I can only dream of. Thanks for the notes you gave me on the pilot script. I’m not going to be implementing any of them.

And no, I’m not going to call you “the enemy” or “the man.” I have zero right to say that based on the breaks I’ve gotten from you over the years. If I tried to strike a Che Guevara pose, you would be correct in pointing out that the dramatic underlighting on my face was being reflected up from my swimming pool.

I am as much to blame for my uneasiness and realization of late that I’m part of the problem, that I’m half asleep and more than half complacent.

And I’m still not going to implement your notes. And I’m quoting Phil Rosenthal on this, but he said after we read your notes – and I’m quoting him verbatim – “We’re living in a post-Louie world, and these notes are from a pre-According to Jim world.”

I just read a letter to my fellow comedians telling them what I’m about to tell you, but in a different way. Here it is.

You guys need to stop thinking like gatekeepers. You need to do it for the sake of your own survival.

Because all of us comedians after watching Louis CK revolutionize sitcoms and comedy recordings and live tours. And listening to “WTF With Marc Maron” and “Comedy Bang! Bang!” and watching the growth of the UCB Theatre on two coasts and seeing careers being made on Twitter and Youtube.

Our careers don’t hinge on somebody in a plush office deciding to aim a little luck in our direction. There are no gates. They’re gone. The model for success as a comedian in the ’70s and ’80s? That was middle school. Remember, they’d hand you a worksheet, fill in the blanks on the worksheet, hand it in, you’ll get your little points.

And that doesn’t prepare you for college. College is the 21st century. Show up if you want to, there’s an essay, there’s a paper, and there’s a final. And you decide how well you do on them, and that’s it. And then after you’re done with that, you get even more autonomy whether you want it or not because you’re an adult now.

Comedians are getting more and more comfortable with the idea that if we’re not successful, it’s not because we haven’t gotten our foot in the door, or nobody’s given us a hand up. We can do that ourselves now. Every single day we can do more and more without you and depend on you less and less.

If we work with you in the future, it’s going to be because we like your product and your choices and your commitment to pushing boundaries and ability to protect the new and difficult.

Here’s the deal, and I think it’s a really good one.

I want you, all of the gatekeepers, to become fans. I want you to become true enthusiasts like me. I want you to become thrill-seekers. I want you to be as excited as I was when I first saw Maria Bamford’s stand-up, or attended The Paul F. Tompkins show, or listened to Sklarbro Country….

I want you to be as charged with hope as I am that we’re looking at the most top-heavy with talent young wave of comedians that this industry have ever had at any time in its history.

And since this new generation was born into post-modern anything, they are wilder and more fearless than anything you’ve ever dealt with. But remind yourselves: Youth isn’t king. Content is king. Lena Dunham’s 26-year-old voice is just as vital as Louis CK’s 42-year-old voice which is just as vital as Eddie Pepitone’s 50-something voice.

Age doesn’t matter anymore. It’s all about what you have to say and what you’re going to say. Please throw the old fucking model away.

Just the tiny sampling at this amazing festival…. I’m excited to not be the funniest person in the room. It makes me work harder and try to be better at what I do. So be as excited and grateful as I am.

And if in the opportunities you give me, you try to cram all this wildness and risk-taking back in to the crappy mimeographic worksheet form of middle school, we’re just going to walk away. We’re not going to work together. No harm no foul. We can just walk away.

You know why we can do that now? Because of these. (Oswalt holds up an iPhone)

In my hand right now I’m holding more filmmaking technology than Orsen Welles had when he filmed Citizen Kane.

I’m holding almost the same amount of cinematography, post-editing, sound editing, and broadcast capabilities as you have at your tv network.

In a couple of years it’s going to be fucking equal. I see what’s fucking coming. This isn’t a threat, this is an offer. We like to create. We’re the ones who love to make shit all the time. You’re the ones who like to discover it and patronize it support it and nurture it and broadcast it. Just get out of our way when we do it.

If you get out of our way and we fuckin’ get out and fall on our face, we won’t blame you like we did in the past. Because we won’t have taken any of your notes, so it’ll truly be on us.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the stuff uploaded to Youtube. There are sitcoms now on the internet, some of them are brilliant, some of them are “meh,” some of them fuckin suck. At about the same ratio that things are brilliant and “meh” and suck on your network.

If you think that we’re somehow going to turn on you later if what we do falls on its face, and blame you because we can’t take criticism? Let me tell you one thing: We have gone through years of open mics to get where we need to get. Criticism is nothing to us, and comment threads are fucking electrons.

Signed,

Patton Oswalt

(hat tip to Sharilyn Johnson of Third Beat, who sat next to me during Oswalt’s speech and typed much more furiously than I did)

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.

View all posts by Sean L. McCarthy →

84 thoughts on “Patton Oswalt’s Letters to Both Sides: His keynote address at Montreal’s Just For Laughs 2012

  1. Hell to the yes!

    Everybody’s always complaining about how “lucky” other people are, when in fact these “other” people got lucky by working their asses off!

    Now more than ever, it’s up to each of us to create our own success (not to sound like a motivational speaker, but really…).

    “success is your own damn fault”
    -Larry Winget

    “get er done”

  2. When he pulled out the iPhone he should have done it like De Niro in Deer Hunter holding the bullet… “You see this? This is this. This ain’t something else. This is this!”

  3. Patton Oswalt has put his finger right on our carotid artery. The TV and film industries are soon to go the way of the music business, and there’s nothing the execs can do about it except try and buy up all the internet band width and hold it hostage. I don’t think that’s gonna work. We the artists are now in charge of our own lives, for better or worse. We can sit in poopy diapers waiting for the Irving Azoff’s of visual media to tell us what they want, or we can see what Louis CK has done and grow up. We can cast our rings and chains into gold statues of the gods of old and piss ourselves in prayer to the dead, or we can move on to a brave new world. The choice is ours.

  4. Are you sure that’s not supposed to be “comment threads are elections”? Seems more to the very strong point he is trying to make.

  5. oh Patton you have lived up to the name today buddy. you have taken on the gatekeepers like a frickin tank takes on a watermelon it ran over! squish! and it’s true and it applies to every form of media out there. not JUST comedy. careers are being made on youtube. lives are being changed by blogs. comment is king and the gates have fallen. it sometimes feels a bit like living in Jericho doesn’t it? and i can hear the walls that separated us falling down. lines are blurred and even wiped away and the world is watching! and ya know what it’s an amazing thing to see. there is and always has been more talent out there that the gatekeepers would never even look at. and now the whole world gets to see them. do not fear change. it is the constant that holds this universe together. thanx for having the balls to say this brother. the world might learn something if they listen to these words of prophetic wisdom!

  6. Nailed it completely.

    All artistic mediums like comedy, music and film are being streamlined by the people themselves and completely over taking traditional media platforms. It’s a great thing to see as now executives are being left in the dust and this giant moguls are routing their money into fighting creative commons and sharing of ideas. Artists have to work harder to create their own branding and showcase their talents but aren’t held back by the trivial politics that all too often focus on the next sensationalist “big thing.” It puts the control back in the hands of the people who sweat, bleed and fight the good fight to be where they end up.

    I think this was an extremely poignant message by a well respected and talented member of the comedy family and I’m glad that it was said.

  7. Thanks for posting Sean ! “Just for Laughs” keynotes are essential annual confessionals. These ‘Fathers’ confess all our sins and go further lighting a mighty torch up our ass to get on with it and make better shit. Patton made writing the 5th anniversary of My Damn Channel letter (July 31) more of an important challenge. This speech and his delivery were the high-water mark of the conference. Followed only by the web pitcher ex-inmate club owner.

  8. I am a musician… but this sounds exactly like the music business as well! Amen to you for having the guts to stand up and say this to the world! Wish you many many more years of huge success!

  9. To say the truth, this man has really inspired me,with all the analogies and tactics he used in developing his speech, he has place a hopeful spot in the hearts of many. I really love his speech and for that i give him kudos! Keep up the good works man someday the world will not only remember you for who you are but for what you have done! Thank you.

  10. Thanks for sharing this information. I hope the gatekeepers Patton addressed will listen, but I suspect they’re too mired in doing things the way they’ve always done and fearful of what will happen if they change. However, comedians, as well as other artists, now have options, choices, and freedom like never before. It’s important to educate themselves about what’s happening in their industry and not just try to do things the “old” way.

    A month ago, I listened to NY Times bestselling author, Stephanie Laurens, give a similar speech at the Romance Writers of America conference. She pointed out the ways authors now have ways to reach readers and challenged traditional publishers to become more author friendly or face the consequences.

    I certainly have benefited from the new opportunities in self-publishing. My self-published books (that two agents couldn’t sell to traditional publishers) sold almost 100,000 copies in a year, and the first book made the USA Today list. I allowed Montlake (Amazon’s romance publishing line) to acquire the books because the company has a contemporary view of publishing. The things they are doing for their authors are amazing. However, I’ll still keep self-publishing some of my stories.

    It’s a whole new world, and I’m so grateful for that!

  11. Great, timely and very true. I can’t help noticing that some further implications of this change were missing though – when the establishment has lost is power then no-one will be able to become ‘established’. When someone used to get given a lucky break it was often attached to and with some recognition, a platform which in itself often brought more luck, more breaks and an ascendent path into established success. Along with that establishment came all the PR, Agents and Bookers that came with a proven track record.

    Now I agree that, they (the system) are going, going, gone, and I very much love the idea that youth will be less important and content king, but here’s the problem. Great today will not mean established tomorrow, you will have to be great every day, fight for recognition every day, put out content everyday in order to stay relevant and make it standout from the ocean of media being created. That’s a very big ask of any artist and even bigger problem if that artist needs to financially support a career in the long term.

    Without an environment that ultimately rewards talent with established security and income and recognition then the creative career will be a short term endeavour only taken up, and succeeded in by those who have the financial backing to continue a loss leading process. To quote a British DJ/Artist on twitter recently ‘the f**king music business is just full of rich peoples kids’…..

    The music business has been bumbling along for some time, dilute and unattractive to big money investment, some are getting fed but most are scraping a living on it’s scrap heap. Until a new model provides artist with a long term promise of financial result and career attainment I fear we will see no better in any of the creative industries.

    If you read this far, thank you, I would love to hear your responses..

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  14. On each side, they create their own stories about the other entertainers and gate-keepers. When you can set aside your story and really understand what the other person is about, then progress can be made. Great letters to both groups of people.

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