It didn’t take long for Patton Oswalt to come up with a name when asked who he believed was our greatest living comedian.
“Right now, the greatest living comedian is definitely Maria Bamford,” he said on the Good One podcast. “She is because she is her own category.”
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Wait, what? How can Bamford be in her own category? “She's a comedian, but there are certain people within a profession where you're like, you don't put them anywhere,” he said. “You go, ‘And now, a separate chapter about this person.’ She's her own chapter, both in form, content delivery and in how she pursues her career. It's all original. It's all brand new and unprecedented, and it's amazing. No one comes close.”
Podcast host Jesse David Fox went Oswalt one better. “I was hoping you'd say that,” he replied. “It's her. It's just (Richard) Pryor, then her, to me is the conversation in terms of what can be done with stand-up as a form.”
Bamford, who toured with Oswalt as one of the Comedians of Comedy in the 2000s, came up multiple times in the conversation. On his new album, Black Coffee and Ice Water, Oswalt has a bit about AI that he couldn’t figure out an ending to. Rather than turning to, well, AI for a clever solution, he kept working the bit on stage until he found a way to turn his creative pain into comedy. “Maria Bamford is so good at just embracing being overwhelmed, which is such a human thing to do, but very scary for a comedian,” Oswalt said. “I realized the joke came from me going, I don't have this ending.”
Vulnerable struggles on stage unite the comedy of Pryor and Bamford, a vital part of stand-up that might be threatened when some future, funnier version of ChatGPT supplies endless punchlines. Fox told Oswalt about something Caleb Hearon told him recently: “In a time of AI, the only salvation is to really focus on process.”
AI, on the other hand, focuses on easy answers. You want Ratatouille to rap? Type a prompt and let the algorithm do the work. Hearon, on the other hand, is saying that “to be an artist is process,” noted Fox. “And (Oswalt’s bit) is a joke that is essentially about that. That is what you're really giving people.”
There’s another good reason to walk the hard path, according to Oswalt. “The process itself is always, always, always way more fun than the product when you look back on it,” he says. “I’m very grateful that I’ve had the specials I’ve had, the albums I’ve had, but the most fun was sitting in a coffee shop with half a joke and my friends around and we’re working it back and forth.”
Oswalt was thrilled with Hearon’s observation about process. If Bamford represents the best of past and present stand-up comedy, perhaps Hearon represents its future. “Save us, Caleb Hearon!” Oswalt pleaded directly to the camera. “Seriously, fucking save us, dude!”
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