Sean Patton on TheApiary.org

November 27, 2007

Character Sketches | Sean Patton
By: Neil Padover

Sean Patton doesn't do characters. He doesn't jump around on stage or deliver deadpan one-liners, although he admits to having tried all of these things at one time. What you see is what you get, and what you see is someone who looks like John Belushi's body double (sometimes Ron Jeremy, depending on if the moustache is in bloom). Despite all of the personal baggage you're likely to hear about in Patton's act, perhaps the comic's greatest challenge has been in finding his comedic voice. "One of the guys I admire the most is Eddie Izzard. This guy can just kind of weave through being really animated and pantomiming a lot, to just kind of standing there--and either way it works for him,'" Patton says. "I would watch other guys like Sam Kinison who's always full force. And I was like, 'what am I?'"

At "The Creek and the Cave" recently, his twenty minute set covered a variety of topics like his struggle with obsessive compulsive disorder, being broke in New York, and living with his aunt, a recovering "crackhead." Patton's jokes don't just sublimate his personal experiences into some form of therapy as so many comics often do. He is able to look beyond himself and articulate how his own experiences are representative of those things which affect us all on a grander scale.

When Patton tells a joke, you never end up back where you started. Each premise is a building block for the absurd world he creates on stage. One of the funniest moments of the show involved a story about Patton's drug addled aunt getting arrested for stealing from a supermarket and then selling the goods out in the store's parking lot. Patton jokes, "Clearly she was arrested because that's just brilliant, that's too good of an idea. We've got to put the kibosh on that before everyone finds out and they're all millionaires. And the thing is, the security cameras caught it: people were buying shit from her." In three lines the bit has grown from a tragically funny anecdote about a family member's troubles with addiction into a satirical take on law enforcement and run-of-the-mill consumerism.

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