It’s easy to think of Patton Oswalt as simply a standup comedian with 20-plus years in the business until you reflect upon his CV. He has appeared in a pile of televisions shows, including Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; Dollhouse; Reno 911!; Community; Caprica; and Seinfeld, as well as a run as a recurring character on King of Queens, and recently on HBO’s Bored to Death. He may also be found in dozens of movies, notably Blade; Trinity, Balls of Fury, The Informant!, Observe and Report, and yeah, he was the voice of the rat in Pixar’s Ratatouille. But wait, there’s more. Mr. Oswalt is an author of comic books and the recent book-book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, now available in paperback at finer bookstores near you. We sat down with Patton Oswalt in a subterranean silo located at an undisclosed location deep within the historic Georgetown neighborhood of our Nation’s Capitol. Seriously, there’s a hotel that has a silo in it, with weird acoustics and everything. Our transcribed conversation begins right after we voice some OFF-THE-RECORD SPOILER ALERT stuff in regard to Young Adult, a new movie about an unhappy fiction writer trying to unblock her work and her life. Mr. Oswalt stars, with Charlize Theron.

Patton Oswalt: One of the things I like about this movie is that I’ve seen people leave screenings and they start arguing with each other about it, how dark was this, how funny was this, so it’s the way real people react to real life, which is, one person is like, “That person needs help, we shouldn’t be making fun of them,” and the other person is like, “Yeah, but she drove her fucking car into a . . .” so that was really interesting to me.

City Paper : Did you have a lot of input on your character?

PO: I didn’t really need to, it was so well written. I didn’t want to do too much input and then get my fingerprints all over the thing, when I thought the thing was so of a piece. There were a couple of minor suggestions, but it was never coming from me going, “This could be better.” I remember at one point he originally just collected action figures, in the script, and I said, “Well, you know, there’s this subculture of people who cannibalize figures, and modify them,” and I thought, how subliminally symbolic is that for what Matt wished could happen to his life, like, “Why can’t I have a better pair of legs, on a better torso?” that kind of thing, and to Diablo [Cody]’s credit, because she is such a confident writer, she said “Yes, I love that.” She loves natural stuff like that, she had no problem with that, but for the most part, I wanted to read the script as written because it was really good, and if I read it as written, I’m gonna be a lot better than if I’m like (pouty voice), “I wanna add my joke here,” which, if you have something great, fine, but why don’t you read the script? It might really be good.

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