Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

Let’s say you look out your window on a Saturday morning and there’s your neighbor. Mowing the lawn, washing the car, cleaning out the garage, painting the tool shed. What he’s doing, his interests, are on public display.

In the case of Patton Oswalt, that window is Twitter. His chatter is unrelenting. It seems possible, while peering through that window, to know everything there is to know about Oswalt.

We see that he has just discovered Escape Room, an adventure video game that he’s been playing with his 7-year-old daughter, Alice. He expresses admiration for what’s said to be a ’60s-era soul cover of David Bowie’s “Starman” by Milky Edwards and the Chamberlings. And he’s right, the song is stunning, euphoric, energizing.

Oswalt headlines the opening weekend of the First Niagara Fringe Festival with a Sept. 16 show in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre. It is his first week back on the job after nearly half a year, when he found himself left, as he has said, “face-down and frozen.”

Oswalt is a comedian, yet not simply a comic, although that can be a complex-enough assignment. As his social media presence demonstrates, Oswalt is an omnivorous consumer of popular culture and current affairs.

“I just like being aware of stuff, being friends with the world, reacting to things,” he says. “Things I like. Things I hate, and justifiably.”

Things Oswalt likes: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, a 1980s series of sci-fi novels set on a future Earth whose sun is dying. The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein’s dense chronicle of the politics of division. “It’s just how I re-charge my batteries,” he says of such otherworldly dalliances. “Reality can be switched off whenever you want.”

Things Oswalt hates: “Trump,” he says, without feeling any need to elaborate. For that we turn to his Twitter feed, where he engages in raging battles with defenders of the Republican presidential candidate. Oswalt mocks Trump’s video opp in which he is shown spending a mere 49 seconds helping unload a truck of blankets and Play-Doh for victims of flood-ravaged Louisiana a few of weeks ago:

I can’t get over that one. That’s so symbolic of a Trump administration. Louisiana? August? (Here Oswalt inserts a lightbulb emoticon, representing a bright idea.) Blankets!

Yes, summer in the humid south does negate the need for blankets. But as any parent knows, children do eat Play-Doh.

Oswalt’s social-media posts also share something that is seemingly too painful and personal for us to see: Michelle Eileen McNamara, his wife, was 46 years old when she died unexpectedly in her sleep on April 21. That is what left him face down and frozen, it’s why the jokes stopped. As he wrote for Time magazine’s web site, “She hasn’t left a void. She’s left a blast crater.”

A few days after this interview, he posted this on Twitter:

I am now at the “Phil Collins’ ‘We Said Hello Goodbye’ Made Me Burst Into Tears In A CVS Parking Lot” stage of mourning.

But Oswalt is slowly being drawn out of his mourning, to attend to business. His first shows will be a pair of comedy club stand-ups next week for a few hundred people in Irving, California. And then a bigger step, when he stands before a couple of thousand people here three days later. It is familiar territory; Oswalt headlined the first Fringe Fest five years ago at the Eastman Theatre.

Oswalt’s calendar is beginning to fill up again. His Rochester show was originally set for Sept. 18, but moved to two days earlier so that he could attend the Emmy Awards. He’s been nominated for “Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special – 2016,” for his Netflix comedy special Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping.

The world is moving ahead, and Oswalt cannot bear to be left behind. On a Facebook post, he repeats what a therapist friend told him of the environment that has led to a man striving to be president “who is so obviously insane and dangerous. Narcissistic, borderline personality, and anti-social.” Oswalt adds:

We are living in a horror movie written by comedians and performed by maniacs using megaphones.

Sorry this wasn’t funnier. I’m still working on that. I’ll get there.

How will he get there?

“I’m learning to grapple with this new world,” he says.

Scrapping with Trump fans on Twitter, typing ironic comments about things he’s seen on television, endorsing music that he’s come across, all of that internet stuff might be a part of the fight. Oswalt will act again and write more essays and books. It was never easy, anyway. “I’m not a natural for anything, anything I’ve done I had to work hard at,” he says. Telling jokes in front of an audience, that was hard too, and maybe it will be harder now. Yet, “The standup, I have the most fun doing it,” he says, “I’ve met so many great people. All my comedian friends, my circle of comedian friends.”

On his Twitter account he identifies himself simply as, “Mr. Oswalt is a former wedding deejay from Northern Virginia.” True, but a few things have been left out. Oswalt’s father was a career officer in the Marines, and he and his wife named their oldest son after Gen. George S. Patton. “It wasn’t The Great Santini household,” Oswalt says, referring to the Robert Duvall film about a household terrorized by a Marine-pilot father. No, Oswalt says, his father was a Vietnam vet, he’d seen combat. “He told me, ‘You’re not going into the military.’”

Instead Oswalt majored in English at the College of William and Mary and then fought his way through the stand-up comedy ranks to this: Nearly three dozen film credits, ranging from bit roles as a submarine radioman in his first movie, the 1996 stinker Up Periscope, to his generally acclaimed lead role as a follower of the New York Giants in 2009’s Big Fan. He even appeared in Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, a 50-minute satire released last February on the web site Funny or Die. Johnny Depp landed the much-sought-after role of Trump. Oswalt is Merv Griffin.

A Twitter follower confesses to having never seen one of Oswalt’s films and asks for a recommendation.

TRAINING DAY. I won the Oscar for Male Lead Performance.

You can’t believe everything you read on the internet: Milky Edwards and the Chamberlings’ version of “Starman” is a hoax, although a very convincing one. And Oswalt was not in Training Day, unless he was in a non-credited role playing Denzel Washington playing a Los Angeles Police Department narcotics officer.

Television, of course. Oswalt first appeared as a video-store clerk in a 1994 episode of Seinfeld. Since then, every year brings a half-dozen or so TV appearances by Oswalt, be it his comedy specials, as a voice on The Simpsons,SpongeBob SquarePants and the Narrator on ABC's The Goldbergs, or full-figured guest shots on Inside Amy Schumer or The Comedy Channel’s Drunk History, where he’ll be on the new season as well.

Plus six comedy albums, a voice on video games (including two Grand Theft Autos) and music videos (on Weird Al Yankovic’s “Foil,” he appears as a TV show director who turns out to be an alien lizard in disguise).

If Oswalt is indeed a pop-culture omnivore, he drifts to the nerd side of the screen. His comedy is often drawn not from the mainstream, but from the alternative world. He has written stories for comic books and essays on rock music and even a memoir on his obsession with movies, Silver Screen Fiend.

Oswalt’s reacting to so much stimuli, his interests seem so varied, does he have six television sets on at once in his home? “I only need the one, plus a stop by Talking Points Memo,” he says of the liberal political web site.

“I just get drawn to whatever looks interesting to me. Even if a thing did turn not turn out well, it’s grist for the mill. It’s a thing that shaped me. And when you work in show business, it’s selfish to have regrets anyway. You’re getting to do things that are amazing.”

He says he feels as though he must be creating all of the time. Is he a workaholic? No, “I limit the time I write, so it feels like a treat when I do,” he says.

His wife was a writer as well. An accomplished crime writer who founded the web site True Crime Diary. At home, he wrote jokes, she wrote murder. The two rarely mixed. As writers, Oswalt says, they needed their space.

But now that Michelle McNamara is gone, Oswalt is stepping into her space. When he apologizes for a tweet not being funny and adds, “I’ll get there,” finishing his wife’s unfinished business may help him find the way. She was writing a non-fiction book about a never-identified California serial killer, who she called “The Golden State Killer.” Oswalt is going to see that book is completed. “I’m working with collaborators, shepherding the way there now,” he says.

“I thought she was going to solve it. She was going to solve it.”

On Aug. 1, marking 102 days after her death, Oswalt went to social media once again to let us know how he was doing. It was a long post, heartfelt, honest and awesome:

I was face-down and frozen for weeks. It’s 102 days later and I can confidently say I have reached a point where I’m crawling.

And he gave us this advice from the abyss:

You will not be physically healthier. You will not feel “wiser.” You will not have “closure.” You will not have “perspective” or “resilience” or “a new sense of self.” You WILL have solid knowledge of fear, exhaustion and a new appreciation for the randomness and horror of the universe. And you’ll also realize that 102 days is nothing but a warm-up for things to come.

And...

You will have been shown new levels of humanity and grace and intelligence by your family and friends. They will show up for you, physically and emotionally, in ways which make you take careful note, and say to yourself, “Make sure to try to do that for someone else someday.” Complete strangers will send you genuinely touching messages on Facebook and Twitter, or will somehow figure out your address to send you letters which you’ll keep and re-read ’cause you can’t believe how helpful they are. And, if you’re a parent? You’ll wish you were your kid’s age, because the way they embrace despair and joy are at a purer level that you’re going to have to reconnect with, to reach backwards through years of calcified cynicism and ironic detachment.

You will not have closure.

“I’ll go along with James Elmore, who said the word ‘closure’ should be stricken from the vocabulary,” Oswalt says. “There is no closure. There just isn’t.”

JSPEVAK@gannett.com

If you go

What: Patton Oswalt, with Nate Fernold opening.

When: 9 p.m. Sept. 16.

Where: Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, 60 Gibbs St.

Patton Oswalt tickets: Ranging from $35 to $80, available at rochesterfringe.com, and (585) 274-3000 and the Eastman Theatre box office at 433 E. Main St.

Fringe Fest tickets: Available at rochesterfringe.com, (585) 957-9837, the Fringe box office at the corner of East Main and Gibbs streets and at the Fringe venues.