Patton Peter Oswalt was born January 27, 1969, in Portsmouth, Virginia, to Carla and Larry J. Oswalt; his father was a career U.S. Marine Corps officer, and Oswalt was named after General George S. Patton, according to Wikipedia’s biography of Oswalt. His father’s postings moved the family between Ohio, Tustin, California, and Sterling, Virginia, where Oswalt spent most of his childhood as a self-described military brat. He has one younger brother, Matt Oswalt, who also became a comedy writer and performer, best known for the YouTube series “Puddin’.” Oswalt graduated from Broad Run High School in Ashburn, Virginia, in 1987, then earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the College of William & Mary in 1991, where he was initiated into the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity; the school awarded him an honorary Doctor of Arts degree in May 2023. He performed his first stand-up set at a Washington, D.C., open mic while still in college and has cited Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, Bill Hicks and Louis C.K. as formative influences. Oswalt married true-crime writer Michelle McNamara on September 24, 2005; their daughter, Alice, was born in April 2009. McNamara died on April 21, 2016, from complications tied to an undiagnosed heart condition and a combination of prescription medications, and Oswalt spent the following two years completing and helping publish her unfinished book, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” about the Golden State Killer case, released in February 2018. Oswalt married actress Meredith Salenger in November 2017, after becoming engaged that July.

Oswalt began performing stand-up on July 18, 1988, and spent the early 1990s working the San Francisco comedy scene before relocating to Los Angeles. He got his first significant industry foothold as a writer on “MADtv,” contributing to the Fox sketch show for roughly two seasons in the mid-1990s while continuing to build his stand-up act on the club circuit, according to Wikipedia’s career overview of Oswalt. He recorded an HBO stand-up special in 1996, the same year he made his film debut in “Down Periscope” alongside Kelsey Grammer, and his television acting debut came in a 1996 episode of “Seinfeld.” Steady work as a working comic and character actor through the late 1990s led to his best-known early break: landing the role of Spence Olchin, the eccentric best friend on CBS’s “The King of Queens,” which ran from 1998 to 2007 and became the role that introduced him to a mainstream network-television audience well beyond the stand-up circuit he had built his name on.

“The King of Queens” gave Oswalt nine seasons of steady network income and name recognition, and he used the platform to keep building a parallel stand-up career, releasing “Werewolves and Lollipops” through Sub Pop in 2007 — the same year he voiced Remy, the food-loving rat protagonist of Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and became one of the studio’s most acclaimed films. Further specials followed on Warner Bros./Comedy Central Records: “My Weakness Is Strong” (2009), “Finest Hour” (2011) and “Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time” (2014). Oswalt’s screen work broadened through the 2010s with roles in “Young Adult” (2011), “22 Jump Street” (2014) and “The Circle” (2017), recurring guest spots on “Parks and Recreation,” “Community,” “Justified,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “Veep” and “Modern Family,” and a multi-season run as the Koenig family of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents on Marvel’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” from 2014 to 2020, according to a character summary of Oswalt’s Koenig roles. He signed with Netflix for a run of specials — “Talking for Clapping” (2016), which won him a Primetime Emmy for writing and a Grammy for Best Comedy Album; “Annihilation” (2017); “I Love Everything” (2020); and “We All Scream” (2022), which marked his directorial debut and was filmed at Denver’s Paramount Theatre, according to Netflix Tudum’s coverage of the “We All Scream” release. He voiced adult Adam F. Goldberg as the narrator across all ten seasons of ABC’s “The Goldbergs” (2013-2023), starred as Principal Ralph Durbin on “A.P. Bio” (2018-2021), voiced Matthew the Raven in Netflix’s “The Sandman” (2022-2025) and Pip the Troll in Marvel Studios’ “Eternals” (2021), replaced Louis C.K. as the voice of Max in “The Secret Life of Pets 2” (2019), and hosted the first season of Fox and Amazon’s game show “The 1% Club” in 2024 before being replaced by Joel McHale for its second season. Most recently, he released his tenth stand-up special, “Tea & Scotch,” as a free premiere on 800 Pound Gorilla’s YouTube channel on June 9, 2026, and appeared as Dr. Hubert Wartzki in “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” (2024).

Oswalt has never appeared on Forbes’ published rankings of highest-earning comedians, a list dominated by arena-level headliners such as Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle, and no outlet has reported an audited annual income figure for him. His earnings instead come from a diversified mix of theater- and club-level touring (his ticket prices for the 2026 “Effervescent Tour” started around $39, with an average around $72, according to secondary ticketing data), scale-plus fees for supporting film and voice roles, licensing and, in the case of his newest special, a direct-to-YouTube release with no traditional network or streamer fee attached, syndication and streaming residuals from “The King of Queens” and “The Goldbergs,” and book royalties. This diversified, mid-tier income profile — steady rather than blockbuster — is consistent with net-worth aggregators clustering his estimated wealth well below headline-grabbing comedians despite his four-decade career.

Oswalt’s specials illustrate a shift in how mid-tier comedians monetize hour specials over the past decade. His Netflix run — “Talking for Clapping” (2016), “Annihilation” (2017), “I Love Everything” (2020) and “We All Scream” (2022) — represented the traditional streamer-licensing model of a flat production and licensing fee per special, terms neither Oswalt nor Netflix have disclosed publicly. His most recent special, “Tea & Scotch,” broke from that model entirely: rather than a paid streaming deal, it premiered free on 800 Pound Gorilla Records’ YouTube channel on June 9, 2026, presented by Super Nice Guys, according to Deadline’s report on the “Tea & Scotch” release — a direct-to-audience distribution approach increasingly used by established comedians to retain more long-term ownership and touring promotion value rather than a single upfront licensing check. His touring contracts for the 2026 “Effervescent Tour” run through club and theater venues rather than arenas, with general ticket sales opening August 5, 2025, and no tour-gross figures have been publicly reported by trade outlets such as Pollstar or Billboard, unlike some of his more heavily toured peers.

Oswalt has appeared in national ad campaigns for Caesars Entertainment and Caesars Sportsbook, including the spots “Hey, I’m Carl,” “Rookie Card” and “Only Caesars Can Give You Caesars Rewards,” several alongside J.B. Smoove, Muggsy Bogues and Clyde Drexler. He also starred in a Wizards of the Coast campaign for “Magic: The Gathering Arena” alongside Danny Trejo and streamer Sean “Day9” Plott, and has appeared in a Marshalls TV spot titled “Mr. Bonejangles.” Industry ad-tracking data credits him with roughly 20 nationally aired commercial campaigns to date, according to iSpot.tv’s tracking of Oswalt’s television commercial appearances. None of these deals have disclosed fee amounts publicly.

Oswalt’s outside ventures lean toward creative ownership rather than traditional business investment. He co-created the comic book series “Minor Threats” with Jordan Blum and Scott Hepburn for Dark Horse Comics, which Netflix optioned for series development in July 2024, and has written or contributed to comics including “JLA: Welcome to the Working Week” and “The Goon: Noir.” He served as executive producer on the Oscar-contending short film “Sardinia” (November 2024) and directed his own 2022 special, “We All Scream.” He has authored two books, “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland” (Scribner, 2011) and “Silver Screen Fiend” (Simon & Schuster, 2015), and finished and helped publish his late wife Michelle McNamara’s true-crime book “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” (2018). No public reporting indicates Oswalt holds outside business stakes, production companies or brand ventures comparable to those of touring-comedian peers who have built restaurants, apparel lines or venture investments.

Oswalt purchased a Mediterranean-style home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2009 for $1.615 million, buying it from actress Mayim Bialik; the roughly 3,595-square-foot, four-bedroom property, built in 1926, included a pool, an enclosed sun porch and a guest apartment above a gated garage. He listed the home in August 2017 around the time of his marriage to Meredith Salenger and sold it that same month for $2.6 million, about $101,000 over asking, according to The Real Deal’s coverage of the Los Feliz sale — roughly $985,000 in appreciation over eight years of ownership. Later in 2017, Oswalt purchased a Spanish-style home in Studio City, California, for $3.4 million; the roughly 5,945-square-foot property, built in 2012, sits on about 0.29 acres and includes five bedrooms and six bathrooms. No subsequent property transactions or additional real estate holdings have been publicly reported.