What can you say about Patton Oswalt? He's simply one of the best comedians of the modern era. And today he's 40. To celebrate, he's doing a show at LA's UCB Theater tonight with Blaine Capatch, Brian Posehn, Karen Kilgariff and Dana Gould. You can read more info here.

Rather than flap my e-gums in the normal fashion, I think it makes more sense to just paste what Patton himself wrote on his blog about this so-called milestone. As with everything Patton does, it's wonderful:

Comedians are a superstitious lot. We secretly fear things like irrelevancy and un-hipness in ways that only the excluded and left out can. We’re always afraid of things like marriage and children and “selling out”, as if these things are supernatural beings humming with a sort of Dark Magic, some force that will rob of us of our comedic mojo.

But watch people like Louis CK and Bill Cosby and Tina Fey. They get married and raise families, and just get better and more incisive and wise as every new dimension of life opens up to them. Irrelevancy can also befall the unmarried, ironic T-shirt wearing “rebels” who want life frozen at 22 forever.

In fact, the only thing that can truly destroy a comedian – or any artist – is paying attention to benchmarks like “20” and “30” and “40”, or any new set of tens. Turning away from your age, and from the loss of life, is the deepest sort of fear and childishness. There’s nothing creepier than the new generation of twenty-somethings who act like giggly twelve year-olds. And there’s nothing sadder than someone over forty still acting like they’re home from college freshman year, trying to shock their parents over Thanksgiving dinner by declaring they’re an atheist.

I’m turning 40. I can’t wait to be 60. And 70. I think when I turn 50 I’ll wear the same suit every day and look like a cool demonologist with my grey hair. Maybe I should get a swordcane. A 20-something couldn’t pull

that off.

For more Patton, be sure to check his official site where he blogged about Sundance last week. And after the jump, you can watch a video of Patton in Park City interviewing the "oh my god" kid from Troll 2.