Patton Oswalt spent the 11 most crappy days of his comedic career in Surrey (slight paraphrase). But he’s over it now.
The 45-year-old American comic —best known for playing Spence on King of Queens and voicing Remy in the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille — had his first headlining gig in Surrey in the early 1990s, as outlined in a chapter of his 2011 book Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Twenty years later and he’s selling out theatres across North America, yet he hasn’t forgotten about the city where his audiences topped out at eight people.
“I never really gave up on Surrey — it just gave up on me before I got there,” said Oswalt.
When asked how to describe the Surrey residents who came out to his shows, Oswalt took a moment to carefully select his word.
“Sparse,” he said. “That’s the word I’m going to use. Sparse.”
The chapter details his lukewarm stay at a local hotel, his admittedly tepid comedic stylings and his dealings with Reed, a dishonest, passive-aggressive cokehead club owner. (For legal reasons, Reed is an alias and Oswalt doesn’t name the club — in the book, he calls it The Smile Hole.)
“He was like a satire of what a bad club owner is,” said Oswalt of Reed. “I’ve met a few of them on one-nighters back on the East Coast, but Reed tends to kind of hold dominion over all.”
For six nights, Oswalt trudged along the hooker stroll of King George Boulevard between his hotel and the club, bombing every night and muttering under his breath for someone to kill him. That wouldn’t have been so bad if Danny Perrault, a teenage killer who escaped from a minimum-security jail, wasn’t on the loose at the time.
“From what I could get from the news stories, he was a pretty dangerous lunatic,” said Oswalt, who makes note of Perrault in his book. Contrary to the chapter, Perrault was apprehended in South Surrey near 8th Avenue, not right behind his hotel — but that’s just a 20-minute bus ride up the George.
It gets worse: After several laughless shows, Oswalt lost his headlining spot to a friend of the owner who stole jokes from a stack of Playboys — jokes that the audience members already knew, but still preferred to hear over his own act.
To top it off, Reed unsuccessfully tried to stiff him with the bill for his entire hotel stay, which was his breaking point during the trip.
“I’d always lived, up to that point, thinking I don’t want to ever piss anyone off because, in my mind, every club owner talked to each other,” he said. “I was like, ‘I think it will actually help my career if other people know that he can’t stand me.’ [Other club owners might think] ‘Oh, if that guy Reed hates him, he must be OK.’”
But reflecting on his time here, Oswalt wouldn’t liken Surrey to New Jersey — after all, that would be unfair to Jersey, he said, listing off Bruce Springsteen and Hoboken as some of Jersey’s greatest claims to fame.
Rather, he’s embraced his time in Surrey for making him a stronger comedian.
“As bad as Surrey was, it was still part of my experience,” he said. “I don’t curse that, I love all the bad stuff I had to go through. I got to go through it as a comedian. I got to do standup there, I was happy.”
While Oswalt doesn’t plan to set foot in Surrey again, he’s returning to Vancouver — a city that he loves — on Feb. 21, for a standup show at the Vogue Theatre as one of the closing performers of the Northwest Comedy Fest.
“They’ve always been great,” said Oswalt of the Vancouver crowds. “I’ve come up there to do movies, to do TV shows, to do standup. It’s always been fun.”
Tickets at northerntickets.com, by phone at 604-569-1144 or in person at the box office at 918 Granville St. — 30 kilometres from Surrey.
jzinn@thenownewspaper.com
