This Is the Best Joke From Patton Oswalt’s New Stand-Up Special

Patton Oswalt is one of the most beloved stand-up comedians working today, and in case his multitude of podcast appearances this week didn’t tip you off, the Ratatouille star and part-time Vulcan has a new stand-up special: Black Coffee and Ice Water.

But you can’t watch the special on HBO Max, or Netflix, or even the digital graveyard that is Quibi. Nope, it’s only available to stream on Audible, meaning that you’ll have to stick it in your ear holes the old fashioned way.

As Oswalt recently told Stephen Colbert, he jumped at the chance to make an “old school comedy album, like the kinds I used to listen to growing up where you sit there and you imagine; you paint pictures in your head.” He said he was especially happy with this hour because he was so much looser on stage and didn’t have to worry about his wardrobe or lighting.

And Oswalt clearly didn’t feel like he was robbing fans of eye candy. “Shirtless, my torso looks like Walter Matthau’s face,” he joked.

Over the course of the 65-minute special/album/very short audiobook, Patton covers a number of different topics, including religious rituals, the inadvertent comedy of the first Halloween movie and the post-apocalyptic possibilities of Hobby Lobby. 

But the highlight of the hour is Oswalt's extended take on artificial intelligence. After explaining how wealthy, boring people are pushing the technology onto the rest of us, Oswalt describes a chance meeting with a tech employee who works in AI. When he asks her what she does exactly, she replies, “I keep it from becoming racist.” She goes on to say that AI “tends to go racist” because they give it access to the internet.

“No no no! You do not give the baby a gun, are you nuts?!’ Patton exclaims. “Because that’s what AI is, AI is a baby. It didn’t invent itself, we invented it. We’ve got to raise this baby. It’s not going anywhere, it’ll never go away, we’ve got to raise it! And we’ve got to feed it beauty and love and compassion and art.”

“But we’re not doing that right now,” he continues. “We’re raising it like a couple of meth-head parents. We’re passed out on the couch, we’re letting it eat gummy worms all day and watch Requiem For a Dream, of course it’s gonna nuke us! ‘Yeah, we let that thing that can launch nukes watch the racism machine all day, I don’t know what happened. Weird, I never saw this coming.’”

He then goes on to explain that while “racist AI is terrifying” he does “kind of want that to be the plot of the next Terminator film.” And, you know what, that still wouldn’t be the most questionable creative decision in the Terminator franchise.