The standup stole scenes in Parks and Recreation and won plaudits for Obvious Child. Now she is stretching herself further with an unlikely seashell-centred passion project that even divorce couldn’t derail
Photograph: Ramona Rosales/AugustPhotograph: Ramona Rosales/August
The standup stole scenes in Parks and Recreation and won plaudits for Obvious Child. Now she is stretching herself further with an Oscar-nominated passion project that even divorce couldn’t derailt is 9am in Los Angeles and Jenny Slate is smiling – or is that grimacing? – over Zoom. When I ask how she is, the comedian and actor is brutally honest. “I’ve been up since about 4.30am with my two-year-old,” she explains.
Slate’s brand of openness doesn’t just extend to telling strangers about the trials of parenting a toddler; a radical kind of honesty has long permeated her stage and screen work. After graduating from Columbia University, the Milton, Massachusetts-born comic spent years honing her craft as a standup in “shitty dive bars” across New York. From the start, her comedy was intimate and revelatory. “I’ve always just shared really personal stories,” she says, “many of them about my body.
Without YouTube or Instagram to help promote her work, she did things the old-fashioned way, with regular, exhaustive gigging across the city. It was a slog, but she never thought to give up. “Any time I would get to perform, even if there were only five people there, to me it was still a performance,” says Slate. “To give up would be to be spiritually deceased.
Her approach paid off. By her mid-20s, Slate had started to make waves and was spotted by a commercial agent, who put her in adverts selling everything from “energy drinks to dishwasher detergent”. Then, in 2009, she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live where she would only appear for one season before moving on to off-kilter US sitcoms such as
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