Jeffrey Ross, a staple of Comedy Central’s celebrity roasts, shares a surprising anecdote with The Post about comedian Patrice O’Neal, who delivered a powerhouse set during the 2011 roast of Charlie Sheen.
“People stop me on the street all the time and go, ‘How come Patrice wasn’t on this last roast?’ ” says Ross. “A lot of people are watching Patrice’s specials and the Charlie Sheen roast reruns, and they don’t know that [O’Neal] passed away. They’re just discovering him.”
O’Neal died in November 2011 at the age of 41, the result of a stroke he suffered following a decades-long battle with diabetes. But since then, O’Neal’s reputation has grown from that of a comedian’s comedian to a more-popular-in-death icon, à la Mitch Hedberg or Bill Hicks.
His first album, “Mr. P,” released three months after O’Neal’s passing, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s comedy chart. Rolling Stone gave it four stars and called it “crushingly funny.” Last month, additional bits from the same set — recorded in February 2011 at the Improv in Washington, DC — were collected for an online-only release, “Unreleased,” which also topped the comedy chart. This Tuesday sees the CD version of “Unreleased,” featuring even more previously unavailable material.
O’Neal was comedy’s brutal truth-teller. On “Unreleased,” O’Neal calls out a white couple in the audience for wearing matching hockey jerseys, dubbing the outfits their “I refuse to be scared of n – – – – rs so I wore my horses – – t hockey costume.”
“He was a dangerous comedian,” says Ross. “You didn’t know what was gonna come out of his mouth, and a lot of fans are turned on by that.”
“He really understood people, and he was unafraid of the audience disagreeing with him, which was beautiful,” says comedian Jim Norton, a friend.
O’Neal, who moved to New York City in the late 1990s, grew up in Boston and hit the stand-up scene in ’92, along with fellow newbies Bill Burr and Dane Cook. He would later say that one incident in his youth had a profound effect on his worldview: a two-month prison stint for statutory rape when he was 17. O’Neal and his friends had consensual sex with two girls who were two years younger.
Much of O’Neal’s riffing concerned race and gender roles, and his sexually charged banter with female audience members centered on primal, politically incorrect opinions that few would dare say out loud.
In “Elephant on the Room,” O’Neal’s February 2011 Comedy Central special and DVD release, one bit found him pointing out a biracial couple in the crowd and saying the African-American man had found himself a “top-shelf white woman” — before seguing into a bit about societal values and how white women who go missing are searched for longer than black women are.
“He had that brutal honesty from day one,” says Burr, a close friend who’s organizing a benefit in O’Neal’s name in February. “To this day, there are moments when I go, ‘Man, I wish I had more Patrice in me.’ ”
Norton adds, “He made male/female interactions a science. He called women out on what he considered their phony horses – – t” — as on “Mr. P,” when O’Neal tangles with a female audience member who refuses to reveal her age.
Some interpreted this view as misogynistic — articles about his death were littered with the word — but those who knew him saw that as a misunderstanding of who he really was, and the truth he sought to impart.
“I didn’t experience him as someone who dislikes women,” says Amy Schumer, star of Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer,” who considered him a mentor. “He treated me as an equal, and I think that at his core, Patrice did feel that [women were his equals].”
At this point, O’Neal is viewed by many as one of the great comedians of our age. Had he lived, there’s no telling how close he might have come to attaining living-legend status.
“Patrice had the ammunition to go the distance. He had the mind and the integrity, and the face of someone you wanted to watch,” says Ross. “He was just emerging as a star, and he’ll be remembered as one of the greats.”
PATRICE O’NEAL’S BEST JOKES
“When I came up, football was about gladiators . . . When we hit somebody and he didn’t get up, we didn’t hold hands with the other team and pray. We’d be looking for his mother crying, like, ‘That’s right, lady . . . He can’t even wiggle his toes. Take his socks.’ ”
“Having women work with men is like having a grizzly bear work with salmon . . . dipped in honey.”
“I’m 40. That’s young in everyone-else years, but in black years — high blood pressure, diabetes. If you do the black-to-white life ratio, I’m 177 years old.”