M Bar is a Los Angeles comedy venue in Lindy West’s account of her early devotion to live comedy and her later conflict with Patton Oswalt. Across two recollections, it becomes a place of both uncomplicated fan enthusiasm and an encounter that gains new significance when comedy turns into a public argument.

Setting in West’s Comedy Life

During college in Los Angeles, West went to comedy shows as often as she could, usually alone because her roommates were not interested. M Bar was among the venues where she watched Patton Oswalt work out new material. She describes this period as falling between comedy booms, when the access and apparent ordinariness of comics seemed astonishing to her. M Bar belongs to a wider circuit of performances she sought out, alongside shows at Largo and the Improv; she wanted to be immersed in comedy both as an audience member and as a future participant in its creative world.

The Earlier Encounter

West later recalled a night at M Bar in 2003 or 2004, when she shyly approached Oswalt after a show and told him he was her favorite comic. He was kind and generous with his time. Their conversation turned to Seattle, though neither could remember the name of the movie theater on the Ave that was not the Neptune. After West remembered that it was the Varsity, she emailed Oswalt; he thanked her warmly and sincerely. The episode records a small, personal exchange in the setting of a comedy club, with West approaching an admired performer and leaving with a shared, if incomplete, piece of local trivia.

Recollection and Reversal

Years later, as West and Oswalt exchanged arguments online about rape jokes and feminist criticism, she remembered the M Bar encounter. The memory sharpened the contrast between their earlier face-to-face conversation and their later public disagreement: the next encounter she had imagined with him was not a fight about rape on the Internet. M Bar thus returns not as the site of the dispute itself, but as the remembered point of comparison that makes the change in their relationship legible. It anchors West’s account in the intimacy of an earlier fan encounter while placing that warmth beside the contested boundaries of comedy criticism.