Channel-surfing sometimes feels like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole with Patton Oswalt — the versatile comedian can seemingly pop up anywhere.
Whether he’s yukking it up as a sitcom stooge on “The King of Queens,” commanding the stage in a comedy special or appearing in a supporting role in an indie film, Oswalt, 43, jumps from station to station in the same way that Remy, the gourmand rat he voiced in Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” darted around Parisian kitchens.
Tonight at the Beacon Theatre, Oswalt promises to stay in one place long enough for you to catch him doing what he does best: stand-up comedy. At Stand Up for Heroes, a benefit to support injured service members, he’s sharing the bill with Bruce Springsteen, Robin Williams and others.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Oswalt confesses, “but I’m also a little bit terrified to perform in front of the Boss.”
Tomorrow night, he’ll headline Town Hall as a part of the New York Comedy Festival. Just don’t expect him to hold still for too long.
“I look up to so many performers who make themselves a moving target, so you can’t quite pinpoint what they do,” Oswalt says. “Steve Martin’s really good at that. Louis C.K. and Albert Brooks, too — people who refuse to fit themselves into one thing, and who just have fun being creative. That’s the ultimate goal: getting to be creative for a living.”
With a résumé that includes critically acclaimed performances in indie films “Big Fan” and “Young Adult,” and a best-selling book of comic essays, Oswalt’s certainly achieving his ambition.
“It’s amazing that I still have this outlet that’s completely mine,” he says. “I can scratch the stand-up itch whenever I want.”
Since he began performing comedy in the early 1990s, he has mastered the art of conversational joke-telling. He peppers his set with mini-rants — on topics ranging from sweatpants to organized religion — that are the comedy equivalent of an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo: rapid-fire flurries of jokes that leave Oswalt winded and the audience roaring with laughter.
Oswalt, a Virginia native, now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Michelle Eileen McNamara, and his 3-year-old daughter, Alice. “Being a dad affects me [as a comedian],” he says, “but it’s the act of change and novelty that affects me.”
After toiling in comedy clubs for nearly two decades, he now takes the stage like a conquering hero. The raucous ovation that kicks off his 2011 comedy album, “Finest Hour,” is more suited for a Roman gladiator entering a coliseum than a comic at a club.
“It still freaks me out,” Oswalt says. “I’m not used to adulation out of the gate. I like winning people over who don’t know anything about me. So as gratifying as it is to come out and get that attention, it’s also fairly intimidating. Like, what if I deliver a set that doesn’t live up to how they just cheered me?”
He’s hardly immune to missteps. He’s starring as a scoutmaster in “Nature Calls,” a sophomoric camping comedy that’s in theaters tomorrow but may soon be relegated to 3 a.m. showings on Comedy Central.
Don’t expect that to slow Oswalt down: Next year, he’ll appear in Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” based on the James Thurber classic.
And while Oswalt specializes in wickedly funny tweets — more than 1 million of his Twitter followers read his election-night tweet, “Wow. Rachel Maddow just wrung a shot of Scotch from a washcloth of Chris Matthews’ forehead sweat. Gonna be a long night” — he’s not about to leave stand-up.
“Even when performing sucked, it was still fun,” Oswalt says. “Think of who people have to hang out with during their working day and how boring it must be . . . I get to hang out with comedians.”