Elephant in the Room - Time

From his only hour-long special, Patrice delivers what might be his most ambitious bit: a sprawling meditation on time and how it relates to relationships.

His thesis: men and women experience time differently. A woman's time is "more expensive" than a man's—she has a biological clock, her dating market value peaks earlier, her fertility window is finite. A man can waste his twenties and still have options in his forties.

This asymmetry, Patrice argues, explains most of the conflict between the sexes. Women are playing a different game with different stakes, and men don't understand why they're always in trouble.

It's Patrice at his most intellectual, building an elaborate framework that's simultaneously absurd, offensive, and uncomfortably insightful. The audience keeps trying to decide if he's joking or lecturing, and the answer is both. He was a comedian who happened to have theories, and he was fearless about sharing them.