Comedian Patton Oswalt recorded a new standup special Black Coffee and Ice Water on July 11 and 12th 2025 at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater in New York City and it has just been released as an Audible Original, meaning audio only and only on Audible. Some of the topics he touched on were AI, high school, raising wolves, religion, how his daughter doesn’t take him seriously, and religion.
I got to know Patton a little bit in the most relaxed Zoom interview I have ever done and I am very sorry that I did not include the transcription of the laughs, because we had a great time which I hope is translated in this interview. A new comedy album by a top comedian can be a special thing and his new show is likely to not only capture your attention, but make you see things in a different way.
One thing he did not mention in the show in any way was drinking black coffee and ice water which is why I decided to ask him about it in my first question, so please enjoy my interview with Patton below, edited for brevity and the most interesting questions and answers.
Why isn’t your title in your special?
The title is never in my specials.
Why is that? Is that like how nineties bands used to have names that were nothing to do with them?
I’m kind of in the overall mood that the title is more of the overall mood, but never anything you’re going to hear
Your daughter calling you “dude” was one of the best bits I’ve ever heard.
That one is straight out of life unfortunately she decided to call me dude that’s that thing when they’re not little kids anymore and you’re not a young dad anymore and you’re well into your fifties and they see you as “oh hey what’s up dude.”
You could be the coolest guy and most famous person in the world and it wouldn’t faze them.
Yeah, it doesn’t matter. There’s a picture of the lead singer of Slayer at the Grammy’s with his teenage daughter and she’s rolling her eyes so no one is safe from it
I always like when comedians take a left turn and do something a little different like in your film Big Fan which I really like.
Oh thank you! Yeah. I like the challenge of it and that script was really amazing, but it was also really stark and bare bones. There weren’t a lot of places to hide in there, which I loved. Like you just had to be raw and exposed and it was great.
Well, like from this special, it didn’t really seem like you were hiding too much. I’ve never heard a transition in my life like when you just said “Jews.” That was your transition.
You know I love the weird segue when the comedian could clearly not find any connective tissue, so I’m just gonna wallow in the fact that there’s nothing connecting here.
I’ve never heard anyone do that before. It’s like when local comics go. All right. What’s next? What’s next?
Yeah. What else? What else is in the news? What did Andy Killer say? If Huey Lewis was a comedian, his band would be Huey Lewis and what else is in the news?
I like that.
Yeah Yeah.
What are some of the challenges of putting this new special together?
Well I usually generate about an hour and a half of material every year and a half and I had just done a ton of films and TV shows, and a lot of traveling, and my life wasn’t focused on standup for a while. And along with that was how hallucinatory and illogical the world is becoming around us.
And as a comedian, like how do you take a step aside away from that to then go, “I’m gonna make fun of this thing that is already kind of comedy proof in a weird way ’cause it’s already so messed up. So, there’s a lot of that feeling in this I think. And on top of all that this was not a visual special. I was so much freer to perform and just have it be the material. When you’re doing a special you’re thinking of the camera angles, the wardrobe lighting, how does it look. You have all that in mind. It’s everything but the material. But, this is just me. The people are just gonna hear my voice and hear the audience and how we’re both relating. Being that stripped down and that simple for me was just fantastic. It just felt so great and I was much, much looser on stage than I normally am.
Yeah. Well it felt pretty raw and some of the stuff you were talking about like adopting baby wolves and they grow up and now you have a wolf in your house. Now, obviously that’s a real thing. I’m guessing you’re talking about.
Oh yeah, it’s a very real thing.
Now I’m wondering if that to you maybe feels like a metaphor for other things going on in the world right now?
Well it definitely has that, but I don’t want to apply anything that’s so personal to me, to the bigger world, but there is that, Hey, can I just step away from this for a while and not have to deal with the daily updating and posting and reading and clicking and refreshing? Can I just be disconnected from that? It really fed into that bigger thing with me, which is just wanting to vanish every now and then.
But however that will relate to the bigger world that’ll be up to the listener. I love that part of creativity, especially if you’re doing it for an audience, the thrill comes from it being out of your control and in someone else’s hands. They’re gonna interpret it the way that they want to interpret it. So I like not knowing a hundred percent (how it’s going to be interpreted) like that to me is part of the excitement.
And I gotta say it was pretty brave to have that one bit where you kept saying, “I don’t know what the end for this is yet.”
Hahahahhah but it ended up working organically for the bit because it’s about AI and AI is anti surprise, anti creativity, anti uncertainty, and to really celebrate the fact that this is a human being who doesn’t quite know how this ends yet, but we’ll figure it out. That’s something that ends up being very positive and I think hopeful about that in the end.
And I love that it has a non-ending like that. I think that’s actually really important.
Yeah, I think so too. I guess I was wondering if you think you’re gonna leave it there in the future.
I’ll always be tinkering with stuff, but now I might leave it the way it is because it’s so perfect that it’s unfinished that way and it stands for why human creativity is ultimately so much more memorable and valuable down the road.
Definitely, Also you mentioned Virginia in your special and I’m from there and wanted to ask you about that.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Newport News, Virginia.
I was born in Norfolk, (nearby) but I only lived there for like nine months, and then we moved. So I don’t have memories of the Tidewater area.
Sure, but I heard you went to William and Mary though.
I did go to William and Mary.
And I think you said your parents are from Northern Virginia, so how do you think that affected your comedy career?
We were moving all around ’cause my dad was a Marine when I was young, and then we settled in this very bland suburb in Northern Virginia. We were just government workers living in a bedroom community. There was no accent, there was no real culture. And there was this yearning. ’cause I was getting all my pop culture, like second and third hand. I didn’t have access to downtown DC, didn’t get to be in part of that hardcore scene with Fugazi, couldn’t get the really good art movies that I wanted to see, like the Road Warrior and stuff like that. So I think that need to go find that stuff is what led me back west first to San Francisco and then to LA. I wanted to be where the stuff was being created.
Now I wanna go back to something. I thought it was interesting when you were talking about how you kind of wanna hide sometimes and I was wondering if your daughter laughing while watching Halloween with you, a movie that scared you a lot as a kid, was like a counterpoint to that.
To me that was so much more illustrative that you have to accept that the stuff that you thought was cool and edgy is not gonna stay that way for a younger generation. They will find their own stuff that thrills and terrifies and moves them, and it’s my very gentle way of saying to the Boomers and Gen X that it’s time for us to get out of the way and stop rehashing our nostalgia and then trying to sell it to Gen Z. They don’t want it. They want their own thing. Even if that thing isn’t great, they want their own thing. Let them have their own thing.
I wish they would take your advice.
Yeah, exactly.
And speaking of taking your advice, I really loved the joke about how the really rich guys who have all the money in the world are the most boring people. I’m sure you’ve thought about this a long time. Have any of them ever gently taken your advice at parties?
They take no one’s advice. Why would they? In their minds, they look at life as a thing you can and they think that they have won and why would they take input from someone whom they believe has lost? They will never do that.
Another big segment in this show was the religious stuff. You weren’t afraid to go there?
No, because religion isn’t afraid to go there. Religion has no problem barging into our lives constantly with no sense of self-consciousness or shame. So, alright, if you’re gonna come barging in, let’s look at you.
Do you ever workshop these jokes with your daughter?
Well just the stuff that involves her. I wanna make sure she’s okay with it, but I don’t run the whole set by anybody. That’s one of the ongoing appeals of standup comedy for me is that it’s what I think is funny. I don’t need to run this by a committee or a production staff or a studio. This is my thing and I love it.
Another fun segment was about phone banking for the election. That never does get old, does it?
Look, I know some people hate it and I understand why they can hate it, but I was fascinated with how extreme people were on the phone. Everyone talks about how people hide behind internet personas and they’re these online stuff guys. But now I actually have someone on the phone and they’re just screaming, F— Biden, like right in my ear. It was thrilling to be connected to that level of just rage and insanity.
Your embarrassing moment in high school with a guy named Brandon Tilley really stuck out to me. Was this about remembering the bad things and forgetting the good?
Well, you remember the intense things and that can be intensely good or intensely bad. And every now and then something happens to me and a fully formed bit has dropped into my lap. And that was one of them, you know, like, here it is. All I gotta do is just describe what I’ve seen.
Yeah and other than when they fully drop into your lap like that do you just get little bits in your head and write the jokes down?
I’ll write like premises and stuff, but my way of writing is going on stage every night and just working it out until I’ve got it. And I just have never found a better way for me to do it.
Well, that’s great. That’s what live comedy is all about, man.
Exactly!