Feelin' Kinda Patton is funny. Damn funny. Sometimes it's painfully funny. And most tellingly of all, after three weeks, it's still funny. I blame Feelin' Kinda Patton for the abrupt downturn in my driving abilities (hey, it's hard to change lanes when you're laughing so hard you can't see!), my newfound inability to hear the words "Black Angus" and keep a straight face, and my wife's recent inclination to call me at work and yell "Suck my knob, Police Woman!" -- something she almost never did before this disc entered our lives. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself...

You may know Patton Oswalt from his role on King of Queens (be honest -- you've watched it a few times while thinking evil, depraved thoughts about Leah Remini and what she's really like) or his other TV work, or you might have caught his toned-down routines on various talk shows, seen him in movies (he played a DJ in Starsky and Hutch, but you were probably busy being disgusted and fascinated by Har Mar Superstar during that scene), heard his voice in Aqua Teen Hunger Force or laughed at one of the movie scripts he's tweaked. None of that really matters here. Unless you've actually heard Oswalt perform, you have no idea just how entertaining the little bastard actually is. He is a dangerously smart and funny little man -- a wide-eyed, seething bundle of manic energy, savage logic and unhinged excess. He will change your life.

Now I've got the enormous task of communicating Feelin' Kinda Patton's absolute profundity without blowing all the good bits. Oswalt fans will recognize a lot of the best material -- the shockingly bleak Stella d'Oro Breakfast Treats bit, the Robert Evans imitation and ESPN spots, and that wonderful steakhouse bit, which should be engraved on a foot-thick slab of gold and put in the Smithsonian. Oswalt's few minutes of nominally political material perfectly capture America's place in the world (as the equivalent of a retarded trust-fund kid) and point out the fundamental hypocrisy behind That Damn War. He creates priceless, brilliantly detailed situations (the Gay Pride parade converting rednecks in the deep south) and asks the questions we're all afraid to ask (for instance, "Why are there no gay retards?"). He brings a comic book geek's rabid enthusiasm to his discussion of the Apocalypse, and wrings endless (often disgusted) laughs from semi-literate porn spam in "The Poetry of Pornography". And as a music magazine, we'd be remiss not to mention "'80s Metal", Oswalt's treatise on (a) the latent homoeroticism of hair bands, and (b) those bands' much-missed propensity to make videos in which their music altered the actual fabric of reality -- turning crappy clothes into a new suit or transforming a junky car into a sports car with a single tortured riff. The capper here is Oswalt's verbal shorthand for the riff -- he screams "squibbly-flabbily-doo" so passionately, it quickly acquires Pavlovian effectiveness; simply thinking of it will bring tears to your eyes. Bill Hicks never screamed "squibbly-flabbly-doo", but maybe he should have.

Admittedly, the album's first two or three minutes are a bit choppy; unlike the Stella d'Oro Breakfast Treats bit, which sounds like it's going to be a tired standup fixture but transcends the stereotype, Oswalt's material on ball-shaving and midgets is a bit tepid. Fortunately, he makes up for that by delivering a full fourteen minutes of encore stuff, which -- in a break with convention -- is actually really fucking funny.

If you can listen to Feelin' Kinda Patton without losing your shit, you're either a joyless elitist bastard or a tight-assed born-again. Don't be stupid -- surrender an hour of your life to the little screaming man and you'll live a better, happier life. Oh, and every now and then you'll yell stuff like "Bend over, Abigail Mae, 'cause here comes a gravy pipe!" and people will look at you funny. But hey, fuck them.