WORKING WITH A CLEAN SLATE
Humorist is putting herself ‘back together’ after a few rough years
As Jenny Slate wanders the National Portrait Gallery’s presidential exhibit, she comments on George Washington’s oddly shaped hair, and how funny it is that Richard Nixon’s portrait is so small. “I hope they give Trump, like, a postage stamp,” she jokes.
Then the performer and writer enters a mauve room and is surrounded by women.
They wear flowing dresses and wander through fields, sit at tables and read books in Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s turn-of-the-century paintings. On one small canvas, In The Garden, three figures stand in a haze of emerald that matches Slate’s purse, which is slung across her elegant tweed coat. “The green is just so beautiful,” Slate says, “that I just feel astoundingly optimistic, almost about everything.”
This is Slate offstage: a painting buoys her spirit to sublime heights; a daffodil changes her day; a close friend saying “I’m really glad you’re here” changes her week. This is also Slate onstage, and now, on the page. Her latest works — a debut standup special, Stage Fright, and new book, Little Weirds (Little, Brown and Company, 2019) — are rooted in her commitment to beauty and sweetness, as well as her refusal to treat her sorrow as unsightly.
Slate is known for many things: her dramatic turn in Obvious Child, her comedic characters (Parks and
Recreation, Kroll Show), her vocal dexterity (Big Mouth, Marcel the Shell).
She’s performed standup for more than a decade.
Walking through the world with a tender heart is like carrying around a gift; it often comes with empathy and compassion, and allows you to “have a heightened experience of pleasure,” she says.
But sensitivity can also be a liability, and has the potential to wreck you.
“If you’re sensitive, you start to think about health and how can I be healthy, how can I help,” she says. “How do I want to spend my day not being completely burned up by bad feelings?”
In the past few years, Slate has gone through a divorce and another highly publicized breakup.
In Little Weirds, Slate writes that her “life fell to pieces,” noting her recent “pummeling heartbreak,” “loss of confidence,” “astounding loneliness,” the election of someone she considers a racist bully and facing misogyny in the midst of the #MeToo movement. She wrote the book as an “act of pressing onward” and “putting myself back together so that I can dwell happily in our shared world.”
She exposes herself as someone longing for love and learning to be alone without being lonely, as a woman who treasures friendships and fantasizes about being a “homemade Parisian croissant.”
That vulnerability shows in Slate’s Netflix special, which includes documentary-like footage of her visiting her childhood home, clips from home videos and interviews with her family. Viewers also see a teary-eyed Slate grappling with crippling stage fright and then later dancing joyously onstage to Robyn and delivering material she improvised that day. She compares herself to “a turtle that just got roller skates and realized that things can be fast.”
Slate had never wanted to make a standup special, but changed her mind after seeing Hannah Gadsby’s groundbreaking 2018 special Nanette, which methodically broke down comedy’s limitations. Slate thought, “Well, this woman just tore down the form and built it back up, and left us with something better, and left us with something that totally belongs to her,” and realized she could make a special exactly as she wanted.
“When someone does something new, other people are encouraged to see how they could also create new work. You limit your pool of artists when the art form is ‘we have now perfectly reiterated this thing again.’ If that’s what the art form is, only people who are confident that they can perfectly reiterate the art form show up. I’m not one of those people. I’m not interested in that.”
Stage fright gripped Slate as her fame grew. She joined Saturday Night Live in 2009 for a year. She had a tough time.
Slate grew up idolizing Gilda Radner, but “the spirit was different and I was totally not suited for it.” She was anxious and “I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get how to be there.”
The performer isn’t sure she’ll make another standup special — “It took a lot out of me” — but Slate knows she wants to write for the rest of her life, and to take on more serious acting roles. “That has always been a preference for me. I’ve made my way in the world by making people laugh, which is also a way for me to get past feelings of shyness that are almost always there ... But I feel serious in myself, and so I would like to be able to put that into my work.”