Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: a Book, Oswalt. Non-Fiction. I neglected to check the title page, so I don’t know for sure, but I believe the primary title should be rendered
☐ Zombie
☐ Spaceship
☐ Wasteland
and my own scorecard would look something like
☐ Zombie
☒ Spaceship
☐ Wasteland
I had somehow expected this to be a novel—even managing to miss the ‘B’ on the spine—so I was a bit surprised to find it instead more a series of sketches, many of them autobiographical.
Even the not-obviously-autobiographical material provided insight into Oswalt’s life and career: I suspect the script punch-up notes section would have been both funnier and sadder if I had ever worked as a script doctor, which makes me sorry and glad I have not.
The ability to make other people laugh nearly inevitably springs from a deep supply of what Roy Blount calls “sefflo” (short for “self-loathing”), and I think it’s fair to say Oswalt is not an exception; however, ZSW does an excellent job of letting the reader not look too hard in that direction. Oswalt can, after all, make us laugh.
Contractually obligated mechanical notes after the jump
Not a mechanical note, but I couldn’t work it into the main review: Having been a fan of Patton Oswalt since I first saw his work with Blaine Capatch in the Food for Thought shorts for Comedy Central, I was oddly thrilled to realize that he may have been at the same Genesis concert I was (DC, 1986).
Disappointed that neither Oswalt nor his editor caught “whatever or whomever was in front of him.” On the other hand, bonus points for “pell-mell” where many would have inappropriately said “willy-nilly.”