In June 2011, a few months before he suffered the stroke that would eventually claim his life, comedian Patrice O’Neal made one of his last appearances on Opie & Anthony, the shock-jock radio show that had become known as a place for comics to drop in, hang out, and roast each other on air. O’Neal was a frequent guest and listener favorite, and when he sat down at the mic that day, he had a lot to be happy about. His first one-hour special, Elephant in the Room, had premiered a few months prior to rave reviews, and he would soon get even more praise for his set on the Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen that fall. Twenty years into his career, it seemed as though O’Neal was finally getting recognized by a business that had neglected him for far too long.
Not that he wasn’t partially or even mostly responsible for that neglect. O’Neal was a notorious bridge burner, both with corporate executives and other comics, and he was unwilling to make any creative compromises he felt threatened his integrity. He was also the first to admit that his raw and sometimes cringe-inducingly honest style of comedy would never have the kind of audience market that, say, Dane Cook’s or Jim Gaffigan’s acts had. “There’s people that count on me to have a revolutionary attitude,” he explained, which made a new cultural dynamic he saw developing all the more disturbing.
What O’Neal mostly talked about on-air that day was an early example of what we would now call cancel culture: Tracy Morgan, then at peak fame with 30 Rock still on the air, had come under fierce criticism on social media for an anti-gay bit in his stand-up act. O’Neal admitted he found Morgan’s remarks indefensible, but he also wondered why more people weren’t acknowledging that they were part of a frivolous comedy routine and that Morgan obviously didn’t mean what he said. To him, it seemed as though “we all let context be destroyed.”
For O’Neal, the emerging cancel-culture trend was everything he hated about corporate media, now let loose on greater society. “It sets people up who want to control everyone,” he warned, and it presupposed a world where “having an opinion should [only] be in the hands of people who are qualified intellectually.” The result meant losing out on the potential for the kind of authentic encounters that could change one’s life and views. If not tolerating hate speech meant being unable to grow and express oneself organically, O’Neal’s mind was made up: “Tracy can be as ignorant, as f—ed up as he wants to be because I want to be able to communicate.”
Patrice’s careerlong attempt to communicate with his audience on his terms is the focus of Killing Is Easy, a new documentary airing on Comedy Central as the 10th anniversary of the comedian’s untimely death approaches. The title comes from something O’Neal told fellow comic Denis Leary: that “killing” onstage, or getting the audience into a rolling fit of laughter, was easy for him to do, but it wasn’t enough. More than anything else, he wanted to tell the truth.
The documentary traces O’Neal’s life from his childhood in the Roxbury section of Boston, a city where black comics were notoriously few in number when he first started performing at open mics, to his move to New York, where, by the early aughts, he, Bill Burr, Jim Norton, Colin Quinn, and others were holding court at a large table in the Comedy Cellar, roasting each other for hacky bits and generally trying to one-up one another in insults. Kevin Hart recalls how, while bombing at a club during one of his first-ever stand-up sets, he heard a voice scream “Ugh!” from the back of the crowd, then, all of a sudden, found himself dodging a phone book thrown at the stage. “Call anybody in there, and ask ‘em if you made the right decision!” a voice boomed. The heckler was, of course, Patrice.
Most of the comics interviewed in Killing Is Easy acknowledge that O’Neal was a comic genius whose off-the-cuff takes were unmatched. “He had an instant opinion [about everything],” his friend and fellow Boston-born comic Bob Kelly said. This talent was most evident on his many radio appearances. One day, Patrice might be summing up the movie Avatar: “Basically, they changed black people, Asian people, Mexicans, and the downtrodden and oppressed of this world into giant blue things — and white people stayed the same.” Another day, he might be on a hilarious conspiracy theory tangent about how the head of the Illuminati probably looked like the guy on the Quaker Oats label. Patrice seemed to have an opinion on anything and everything, and it was almost always an unexpected one.
Killing Is Easy does a good job showing how the freedom to explore, in all its messiness, was central to O’Neal’s creative process. And it was this creative freedom he saw as under threat on that morning in the summer of 2011 when he considered the dawn of cancel culture. “It’s scary. It’s deflating. It makes me furious,” he lamented. O’Neal vowed that, should he find himself facing an outrage mob, he would never apologize under pressure: “I’ll die first.” Sadly, the comic’s failing health meant that he would keep his promise that November.
In retrospect, the tragedy of Patrice O’Neal is clear: His vigilance against selling out was so extreme that he never got the platform he deserved in life, and just as he was starting to gain fame on his own terms, he was gone. Less obvious is the tragedy his absence illuminates for the world he left behind. Nearly 10 years after his death, we are that much closer to realizing fully a culture in which a comedian as original and outrageous as Patrice O’Neal is unthinkable.
Nat Brown is a former deputy web editor of Foreign Affairs and a former deputy managing editor of National Review Online.
