Patrice O'Neal

Today I wanted to stray a little from my normal focus on communication in the modern world to commemorate a comedian named Patrice O’Neal, since it’s the second anniversary of his death and as a huge fan there’s not much else I can think about. On November 29, 2011, he passed away after his type-2 diabetes led to a previous stroke in October which left him essentially paralyzed and eventually he was only able to communicate via eye movement before he passed. Patrice was a guy who grew up in Boston in a poor area and was just one of the most naturally funny people in the world. If I can relate this post to communication at all, then it can be about how Patrice was among the best of communicators of humor in history.

He could tell a story and no matter the topic, it would become hilarious, even when he was telling a story about something bad and serious, like one of his most well-known stories to fans of his when he revealed on my favorite radio show, the Opie & Anthony Show w/ Jim Norton, of which he was a regular guest, about how he was charged with statutory rape of a 15-year-old when he was 16, but Massachusetts didn’t have close-in-age laws, plus he was black and it was in the early 80s so he was basically screwed. He ran into trouble throughout his life due to this, such as being turned back from Canada, after numerous comedy tours up there, when one time they finally checked his background after he had driven 15 hours to the border and he was never allowed the border after that. It’s a sad story, considering how ridiculous the charges were, but even with stories like that, he was able to relate personally in a way that few can, and take serious topics and find humor in them.

He started as a comedian in Boston during the early 90s and as his stage presence evolved, he got more and more popular. But he was always a guy of principal, and was never willing to sell out to corporate masters who wanted to turn him into a walking gimmick. They basically wanted him to act like the other famous black comedians of the time, who were wacky and acted like they were in a minstrel show so that a network would pick them up and market him, but he wouldn’t fall for it. That got him into good graces with Spike Lee, who put him in the Edward Norton movie “The 25^th Hour,” which got him exposure and his career started to take off, with numerous guest roles like “Chappelle’s Show” and one of my favorite shows of all time, the comedian roundtable “Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, and TV pilots that never took off because he was so brutally honest to the producers about not being their slave, that they would pass him over.

Coincidentally, he hosted a minimally popular internet-video-commentary show called “Web Junk 20” on VH1 which was eventually completely ripped off by Daniel Tosh’s big hit show “Tosh.0” when internet stuff became big, and I actually came into personal contact with him. By sheer chance, I had been a big fan of him for 6 years before this, and in 2006, my first college roommates and I had made a funny video of me punching my roommate in the face, replayed in slower and slower motion throughout, after he had lost a bet to me, and somehow Patrice had come across the video, thought it was funny, and wanted to use it. I told him how I was coincidentally a big fan, and that if I could get tickets to his show, I’d let him use the video, which he didn’t even have to do because I would’ve let him use the video anyways, but he was cool about it and I got to meet him at a show. I stayed in minimal contact with him after that, calling into the Opie & Anthony show whenever he was on, seeing him whenever I went to one of his comedy sets, through social networking, etc, and he was getting more and more popular each year, despite his uncanny ability to piss off producers by not “dancing” for them.

He peaked after he got chosen for the coveted final spot on the Charlie Sheen Roast in early 2011, although the circumstances were a clear set up by producers to make him look bad, after he had disagreed with a pilot they cast him for. The way he explained it to me, and eventually on the radio before his passing, the comedian who had that spot had dropped out two weeks before the roast, yet they waited until two days before to tell him that he had the spot, clearly not giving him enough time to prepare. He said that he’d written his jokes on the flight over the night before, and decided to just be brutally honest, rather than gimmicky like the other roasters. That night he absolutely KILLED; he was by far the funniest and most down-to-earth guy at the roast, and he was lauded for the performance, which led to a huge breakthrough in his career, and massive exposure to a much wider audience, leading to his first hour-long TV/DVD special “Elephant in the Room” which was critically acclaimed. Sadly it wasn’t to last, as he had suffered from Type-2 diabetes since his early 20s which led to his stroke.

His style was different than most, sacrificing high energy for being comfortable with his audience, not afraid to hear people call out to him so that he could set up a punchline on their behalf; he was impossible to heckle because of this ability. He was known to actually pay people to leave his comedy show if they tried to attack him for his controversial jokes, and for being a huge proponent of free speech, no matter what the person said; he would get in the funniest racial arguments I’ve ever heard with the radio hosts I mentioned before, and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. He was featured on a Fox segment about the outrage over rape jokes, and completely destroyed a female guest commentator, in one of the greatest moments of comedians defending free speech. His posthumous releases “Mr. P” and “Better Than You” have sold huge numbers, showing just how popular he was becoming before his untimely death at age 41. He’ll be missed by the world of comedy and free speech supporters.