In the summer of 2004 Patton Oswalt‘s career in comedy went supernova almost overnight when his first stand-up CD Feelin’ Kinda Patton was released. In that instant he evolved from a moderately well-known comedian and King of Queens co-star to one of the universe’s funniest and imaginative personalities. Three years after the release of his first CD, Oswalt made a blazing return to record stores with his brilliantly titled follow-up album Werewolves and Lollipops; its unheralded genius, coupled with the successful theatrical release that summer of the Pixar animated delight Ratatouille, confirmed Oswalt as a force to be reckoned with in the world of comedy.

This month, Patton Oswalt’s epic second comedy album is on sale at Amazon as part of their monthly $5 MP3 deal. You can also check out more of these deals at the main sale page and order Werewolves and Lollipops on CD here.

Like the best comedians Oswalt has always had a great gift for combining genuine wit with insightful observations about life and the world at large. But unlike George Carlin and Richard Pryor he is a raging yet articulate pop culture geek and listening to Oswalt weave references to This Mortal Coil and The Dukes of Hazzard into devastatingly funny social and political bits is like watching a great artist working in his element. On Werewolves and Lollipops you’ll find some of his greatest comedy routines from his material on KFC’s Famous Bowls to his epic surgical deconstruction of the Star Wars prequels through a hypothetical conversation with George Lucas. He is also upfront with his fears about the inevitability of parenthood and manages to distill them into a hysterical routine about having his dream child who would be named Ten Hours Sleep at Night.

During a bit about buying birth control Oswalt gets heckled by a rowdy audience member and the way he confronts the heckler is both hilarious and a genuine testament to the healing power of comedy. Whereas some comedians would get downright intense in their dealings with hecklers (case in point: Michael Richards) Oswalt, much like his late fellow stand-up comic (and my idol) Bill Hicks, makes the excitable spectator a part of the routine but in a way that no one could find offensive unless they were completely bereft of a sense of humor. In short, Werewolves and Lollipops is a minor masterpiece – superior in many ways to Feelin’ Kinda Patton and one of the best comedy albums of the last decade.

Note – when you purchase MP3s through Amazon, it stores your purchases to Amazon’s Cloud Drive; from there you can stream the music right from their online player. Also, if you have a Kindle Fire, your MP3 purchases will automatically be available for you to stream on your device. All your purchases are backed up and available for you to download at any time. You can download the files to your computer to load to an MP3 device and to your iTunes account if you have one. If you’d like to gift these MP3 purchases, you can – just click the “Give album or song as gift” button on the right on the product page. From there you enter the recipient’s email address and then select either specific songs to gift or the entire album.