Patton Oswalt started his year learning personal growth sometimes means distancing yourself from the past. After posting a photo with Dave Chappelle from New Year's Eve, Oswalt had to decide between his comedy fraternity or his personal allyship with the LGBTQ community and chose both...for now.
On Saturday, Oswalt shared a series of photos of himself and Chappelle on Instagram with a glowing caption that described the joy of performing on New Year's Eve at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena with “a genius that I started comedy with 34 years ago.” The comment section of the post was a microcosm of the ongoing debate over Chappelle’s offensive LGBTQ humor: some claimed Oswalt turned his back on a community of people who supported him, while others described the union as the sort of tolerance Chappelle needs in order to evolve. Either inspired by the negative comments, his inner circle, his conscience, or all three, Oswalt made a follow-up post the next day to provide further context. The before/after photos paint a hilariously stark difference: one has pride and wistfulness of years of memories, the other has pensiveness bordering on shame.
