Patton Oswalt Talks New ‘Tea & Scotch’ Special, Seinfeld, Curb & More w/ Rich

Patton Oswalt came on to promote Tea & Scotch, his tenth comedy special, and finally told the story behind one of his first big breaks: how he landed a role on Seinfeld.

It was 1994, the show's sixth season, when being on Seinfeld meant the whole country saw you the next day. Oswalt played a video store clerk in the episode where George, refusing to read the book for book club, tries to rent the movie of Breakfast at Tiffany's, learns it is checked out, and sneaks a look at the renter's address so he can talk his way into a stranger's apartment to watch it.

The audition is the part Oswalt loves. Larry David read the George role, badgering him for the address, and Oswalt instinctively glanced around for another employee to pawn the customer off on. It was not an acting choice. It was pure muscle memory from his years working retail, the panic reflex of handing a difficult customer to someone else. The bit made the room laugh, and it got him the job. Rich likened it perfectly to a store clerk who, out of the pants a customer wants, offers to go ask the buyer for them back.

Years later, the relationship came full circle on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Oswalt played Larry David's CPA who, in classic George Costanza fashion, lies his way into a woman's good graces by claiming to be a competitive eater, then drags Larry into the hot dog contest he invented. The final shot is the two of them cramming hot dogs into their faces. As Rich marveled, if you had told that kid on Seinfeld that 24 years later he would be doing multiple takes shoving hot dogs next to the show's creator, he never would have believed it.

Oswalt could not say enough about David's genius as an improviser. Where most people try to win a scene with the funniest line, David sets everyone else up to be funnier and ends up funniest himself. He thrives as the incredulous straight man, especially opposite JB Smoove, and surrounds himself with elite improvisers like Richard Kind and Vince Vaughn. Oswalt's favorite version is David in public, unable to stop himself from turning a trivial exchange into a disaster, then self-aware enough to recognize the comedy in burning his own life to the ground.

On his own craft, Oswalt credited a career spent around funnier people. His pre-stage idols were Carlin, Pryor and Steve Martin, and once he started, his Largo circle included David Cross, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis and Tenacious D. The worst thing for a comedian, he said, is being the funniest person in the room, because then you stop growing.

He also previewed Dink, a Ben Stiller pickleball movie arriving July 24th on Apple TV, alongside Jake Johnson and Mary Steenburgen. It is a snobs-versus-slobs comedy, tennis country-clubbers against the pickleball crowd, with Ed Harris as the tennis-only villain whose on-set stare, Oswalt swore, is earth-scorching. He played his own pickleball, though ringers were brought in for the trick shots that drew crew members over to watch.

That handed the desk its running argument about whether pickleball is even a sport, which Oswalt defended as a game of strategy over power, where the gentle dink is the devastating weapon. He closed by nailing his own movie trailer on the second take: July 24th, think dink.