Like his stand-up act, Oswalt’s memoir pieces contain few jokes in the traditional sense —instead, the humor comes from his sharp storytelling and sardonic wit. “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland’’ begins with arguably his strongest such work, a lengthy essay about working at a decrepit movie theater in high school.
The crummy first job is hardly an original source of comedy, and Oswalt’s opening observations about the banality of the suburbs seem all too familiar, but his description of the Towncenter 3 theater and its desperate staff members turns the piece into a darkly funny character study.
“Dan claimed he was an ex-Texas Ranger,’’ he writes, referring to his former boss. “Do the Texas Rangers make their members drink a quart of Vladimir vodka every day? If so, Dan was keeping their frontier spirit alive.’’
Oswalt develops the rest of the Towncenter crew with focused relish. He takes resigned sympathy on Roddy, the scruffy assistant manager whose ability to buy cases of beer and bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 gained him a posse of teenage hangers-on — despite the fact that he lived in a supply closet. He reserves no such courtesy for Gary Jay, a 4-foot-9-inch-tall usher on steroids who refuses to show remorse after raiding Roddy’s hidden cache of weapons with the rest of the teenage staff. Young Oswalt, along with two other employees, shamefully returned their loot of nunchakus and air pistols.
The rest of the personal material deals with similarly muted conflicts and plotlines, like a childhood snow day or his first headlining gig at a run-down club outside of Vancouver. But he populates these stories with expertly drawn characters, and infuses them with a limitless supply of cultural references and deft turns of phrase.
“Reed leans closer in,’’ Oswalt writes during an exchange with the Canadian club’s cocaine-addicted manager. “His breath smells like he’s been eating Doritos and olives and drinking very little water.’’
