When you hear of Jenny Slate, you’d probably think of the clip “Don’t be suspicious” from Parks and Recreation, the teacher from Gifted, or the Big Mouth character. From what we can see on the surface, Jenny Slate has a loud, oversharing, animated personality to the point where she comes off as obnoxious and someone who also happened to date Captain America at one point.
But when you delve deeper into her creations, which is, for Jenny, synonymous with actually catching a glimpse into her life and her psyche, you will realize that she is poignant while being witty, she is funny while being honest, she is capable of telling soul-crushing stories but veiling it under the strangest of characters and metaphors. That’s why, after following her work closely for the last four years, when I think of Jenny Slate, I think of the quote from Little Weirds, her heartfelt collection of essays,
“As the image of myself becomes sharper in my brain and more precious, I feel less afraid someone else will erase me by denying me love.”
It won’t be too far off to say that this quote saved me from going off into the deep end more times than I can count. In her 41 years of life, she has explored many areas of art, and with her nervous and anxious energy, she is initially a bit hard to get into. Still, once you get through the initial hiccup of getting used to that, you will encounter some of the most subtly guttural art imaginable.
The usual process is that she releases a comedy special, closely followed by a book. It will be the same this year with the book following her journey into motherhood and her pandemic daughter, who is a toddler now. The themes directly coincide with the special. It is a special about exploding vaginas, explosive diarrhea, and expressive vomiting. Her comedy can be most accurately described as physical, and if you are a Fleabag fan, a more exaggerated and unhinged version of Phoebe-Waller Bridge.
In her first comedy special, “Stage Fright,” she talks about how she feels the need to give out something beautiful to earn love. The anxiety of making her art perfect prevents her from doing what she actually loves: performing. It was a talk about femininity being a performance and how patriarchy makes women feel like they are not dressing alone but in front of a bunch of wide eyes. The special ended with her vowing to herself that she would treat her body as “a museum with alarm bells” and the only form of sexual pleasure she would have would be from “masturbating to the full moon.”
Cut back to 5 years later, and she has now found the love of her life, a baby, and is seeing a therapist she has a parasocial relationship with, and she was unequivocal in pointing out the irony in that. Her still being in disbelief that she had the baby on her own made up for a very relatable segment where she talks about how even till the last moment, she was expecting a “sub-in”to have the baby for her because she never went through anything complicated like this before without quitting or getting fired.
She followed up with admittance to falling in love too intensely and immediately but ultimately being brave for love.
She moved past her self-deprecating thoughts and trust issues and let a good person love her, even traveling continents and doing sports for them. It was as funny as it was humane, genuine, and honest.
But, of course, it was not all good. It took time for me to get used to her exaggerated and animated physical persona. The jokes fell flat in the beginning. I’m not sure if you could even count them as jokes. It was loud and obnoxious and filled with random screeching in the middle. I contemplated turning it off many times and kept looking at the progress bar to see how many minutes were left. But to my pleasant surprise, it picked up, and thank goodness it did.
I would not deny that I was very determined to like this special because, to me, Jenny Slate is the person who also wrote a crushing, poignant bunch of essays about her deepest fears and desires and put into words what every woman at some point has felt. Jenny Slate can bring to life the weirdest characters, like a one-eyed shell with shoes on and an even weirder voice, and will use giant dogs and horses as metaphors to talk about the most visceral humane emotions. When asked why her good dreams constitute of sitting on the lap of a giant dog, its paws snugly wrapped around your torso, she says
“I don’t know why I had that dream about that dog, except that I just think that for me, to be alive also coincides with wanting to enjoy myself.”
Somehow, her screaming into the microphone, “That hurt my feelings so much! Things hurt my feelings so much,” made sense as it came out as years’ worth of frustration from being in the entertainment industry and being offered humiliating roles (see: offering a woman, a Jewish woman the role of a balding killer clown) While it is easy to take it as a joke, which I admit, I did find it funny in the beginning. But when I thought about it, after she talked about it, her bitterness made sense because that was what her agents genuinely asked her to audition for, as a way to say this is what I think you’re best fit for regarding your looks and personality.
When asked if that screaming was cathartic, Slate says to Vogue, “It is not just about that moment. It’s an aggregate of that feeling—of all the tiny little times that I have held something in because I didn’t want to be a problem” and she does not want to accept that and have her daughter take that learning, “I don’t want her to have to take on other people’s bad decisions and tell herself that they happened because somehow she’s low worth.”
Slate is unapologetic and unfiltered about her desires, feelings, and mistakes. Wanting to create and be seen but scared to be perceived and judged, desperation to be loved but terrified to be abandoned, she doesn’t sugarcoat things. Instead, she screams into the microphone that what she wants from her lover is not to destroy her. And frankly, so do I, and so does everyone. Jenny Slate’s “Seasoned Professional” has once again swept me off my feet and left me with a funny feeling that someone just held a mirror to my face. It is not a regular mirror, but the ones that distort and twist your body in a funny exaggerated way, but a mirror nonetheless.
Her new essay collection, “Lifeform,” comes out this October. It has been described as “a wild, soulful, hilarious collection of genre-bending essays depicting the journey into motherhood as you’ve never seen it before.” However, when it comes to Jenny Slate, “never seen before” is an expectation, not a surprise.
I don’t know about you, but I will eagerly count the days until it comes out,, and I can guarantee that I will love it very much. In a world full of pretentiousness, Jenny Slate has managed to give us her authentic and unfiltered self every time, and that will make me fall for her art or, more accurately, her antics every time.
