Unclean Slate

You can’t box in Jenny Slate. Maybe her now-ascendant career trajectory wasn’t so clear when Saturday Night Live booted her after one season. But it’s been obvious since then, in standout big roles (Obvious Child) and scene-stealing smaller ones (Parks & Recreation, Kroll Show, Everything Everywhere All At Once) that Slate is uniquely talented in a way that’s been hard to sum up.

That talent explodes in sharp bursts, like the unexpected poignancy of the Oscar-nominated Marcel the Shell With Shoes On web shorts-to-movie adaptation from 2022. Here was a platform for Jenny Slate’s voice: both the actual voice oft utilized in animation projects and her Capital-C Voice, the comedic presence that roils with deep emotion and barely-contained joie de vivre.

Slate has written books of essays (a new one is forthcoming) and has done stand-up comedy specials. But her new one for Amazon Prime Video, Seasoned Professional, feels like something big and scary has emerged from her subconsciousness. While her previous special Stage Fright interspersed footage of growing up with her family and felt like a post-divorce accounting, the new one features a more confident performer—one who is secure in the industry, marriage, and new motherhood—and who gives no fucks about what she reveals and how it comes across.

Seasoned Professional is Slate’s Bring the Pain, a major announcement of a well-regarded, but modest stand-up career crossing into A-list territory. The title does not mislead: she has leveled up.

The special starts off funny, but typical, with Slate’s mock-judgmental eye cast on the artifice of seeing live theater. Plays are stupid, she says. “I know you’re you,” she chastises a cast member she imagines on stage. “Your name is Caitlyn, I saw it on the Playbill.” It’s a bit reminiscent of one of the funniest video contributions anyone has ever made to the internet, a hilarious riff on why books are dumb.

But pretty soon, though, Seasoned Professional stares into Slate’s psyche and its preoccupations with sex, love and attention, and embarrassing decades-old traumas that still haunt her mind. One of them is the wild story she tells of her teen visit to the Montreal Hard Rock Café, “The least Jewish place in the entire world.” She recounts an ill-advised meal with no Lactaid taken that leads to “a full peacock trail of diarrhea in the restaurant.” The bit is completely mortifying.

Slate holds back even less when describing her messy childbirth, how a needy period of time led her to sleep with friends she no longer has (“wish I hadn’t done that”) and the time her future husband invited her to ride a bike in Amsterdam, “The most fucked up thing anyone has ever said to me.”

She’s insightful enough to drop lines like describing chill people as “a concept misogynists invented so we could pretend we don’t have needs” or to tell her Amsterdam lover not to ask if she needs to visit the Anne Frank museum because, “I do not need an epigenetic meltdown on my sex vacation!”

Slate is smart, she does great voices and act outs, and she’s matured as an artist. But what really sets her apart, what now puts her in the league of comedians like the great Maria Bamford is that she’s unafraid to let loose the joy and hysteria that’s always been her energy under the surface and now presents as squeals and kicks and sudden screams. It can be alarming, like being in the presence of a sugared-up young child, but it’s also cathartic. When a microphone stand falls and slowly rolls off the stage, Slate watches it and then reacts with a squeal and a dance. It’s okay. Everything is fine and Slate is here for all of the weirdness and surprises of life, like when the producers of It asked her to audition for the role of Pennywise the clown, an offer she says (and screams) that genuinely hurt her feelings.

Slate concludes with a brilliantly acted imaginary confrontation with her therapist’s daughter in a seaside restaurant bathroom that ends with a primal scream. She’s unleashed, yet completely in control.