Patton Oswalt Helped Raise Money For An Ailing Man Who Trolled Him On Twitter

Social media is so often used for bad that it’s easy to forget it can also be used for good. Patton Oswalt decided to try out the latter on Thursday: The comedian and frequent animated animal voice star sicced his 4.45 million followers upon a man who had trolled him, commanding them to help this stranger pay his soaring medical bills.

It didn’t start out benevolent. At first it was one of those times when an internet troll attacks a celebrity. Actually, it started with Oswalt zinging our president for his latest attempt to push his possibly forthcoming border wall.

Oswalt’s tweet netted some 45,000 likes. Among the legions who did not care for it was one Michael Beatty, an Alabama man who’s not, based on a cursory glance at his feed, a fan of the left. He inevitably took umbrage with Oswalt’s quip, which piggy-backed not off of the original tweet but a reply that posted a video of an audience applauding.

“I just realized why I was so happy you died in Blade Trinity [sic]!” Beatty jeered, reaching way, way, way back into his CV and mostly succeeding in reminding people that Patton Oswalt was in the 2004 threequel. Maybe the deep cut is what got Oswalt’s attention.

Oswalt’s typically detailed and imaginative response got 1,818 more likes than Beatty’s, which scored one. Beatty tried again, with an insult.

This could have gone on ad nauseum. Instead, Oswalt whimsically checked out his attacker’s feed. At that point he discovered something more actually, truly chilling: Beatty is very, very sick. According to a tweet from mid-January, he was recently in a coma for eight days, as a result of a diabetic condition. The medical bills were such that he — a Vietnam veteran who lives off what he describes as a “meager retirement check” — set up a GoFundMe page to pay it off.

So Oswalt decided to not only forgive and forget but to lend a hand.

“He’s been dealt some sh*tty cards — let’s deal him some good ones. Click and donate — just like I’m about to,” Oswalt tweeted. As of this writing, Beatty’s $5,000 goal had been met twice over, with nearly $13,000 in donations.

And so what could have been another case of strangers fighting over the information superhighway has turned into an internet friendship, in which two sides of the political spectrum put down their gloves in the name of basic human decency.

Beatty said that he would use the excess money to help out relatives and friends. Oswalt responded by saying he was trying to make it out his way.

But of course, being one of the most popular and respected comedians around, Oswalt couldn’t let this heartwarming event go by without some good natured joke-hostility.

(Via EW)