Jeff Spevak

@jeffspevak1

The audience was ready to offer sympathy to Patton Oswalt on Friday night. But he wasn’t having any of it.

Oswalt’s wife, the true-crime writer Michelle McNamara, passed away unexpectedly last spring, and this is the first week the comedian was back on the stand-up job. Two comedy club appearances earlier in the week, and now this show for what looked like more than a thousand people in Kodak Hall at the Eastman Theatre. Back for the second time as the headliner of the First Niagara Fringe Festival; he played the first one, five years ago.

Oswalt: Jokes, but no closure, at Rochester Fringe Fest

“This is the job I do,” Oswalt said as he brought up the subject of his wife, fairly early in the show. “I’m doing better.” But when the crowd broke into encouraging, appreciative applause, he waved it off, scoffing at the idea, the cliché, of “my healing journey.” Instead, he wove McNamara’s death, very respectfully, into the fabric of the comedy. And he did it quite beautifully.

Comedy is the job that Oswalt does. The first 10 minutes of the show wasn’t a routine at all, but Patton simply improvising off his surroundings. “Do they know what I do?” he asked, waving a hand at the theater’s giant faux-Roman backdrop, a space designed to hold the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, not a short, stocky comedian. “This is like mocking me.This is a fierce-looking thing to have behind a comedian.”

He toyed with the guy standing off to the side of the stage signing for the hearing-impaired, forcing him to interpret a rapid-fire monologue of self-pity. Later in the show, Oswalt demanded to see the sign for heroin addict, which apparently is jabbing an invisible needle into the forearm.

When the real routine settled in, the topics included what Oswalt called “white genocide,” or white people’s fear that they are losing control of the planet, triggered by the appearance of a black stormtrooper in the most recent Star Wars film.

Racism? “We had pure races for 10 minutes after the Earth cooled,” Oswalt said mockingly.

He dove into his wife’s death by going after his own reactions. He joked abut delivering her eulogy in a Borat accent — a bad idea, he admitted — and wondered why people were so insistent on him recovering from her death. “Even if you get to 100 percent, it all sucks right now,” he said of the world. “We’re about to elect a Cheetos psychopath.”

That was one of the few Trump jokes from a man whose Twitter feed is roiling in anti-Trump commentary. He can’t even talk about the Republican candidate for president because, “I hate him so much.” That drew some of the loudest applause of the night, although a large portion of the audience did sit in silence as the moment passed.

Returning to his wife, Oswalt noted that pop culture, one of his favorite passions, had failed him. That all of those comics in which the superhero goes to a cemetery to lament the death of a wife or friend, vowing revenge, didn’t reflect the true feeling of helplessness. That his life felt like an ’80s sitcom, where the main character is a widower, except “there’s no punch line, ever.”

These were funny comments, yet piercing truths. Oswalt was merciless, in targeting racists and Trump, and in explaining his pain. He closed the show with a heartfelt thank you to the audience. “I needed this,” Oswalt said.

JSPEVAK@gannett.com