Jenny Slate Stage Fright: A fun, emotional journey
By Luke Lucas
Jenny Slate’s Stage Fright mixes stand-up, interviews, and confessionals that show us who she is. It was fun, emotional, and uplifting. We’ve got the review!
I wasn’t really watching SNL that regularly the season that Jenny Slate was a featured player. I came to know about her when I went to go see Obvious Child back in the summer of 2014. It’s a great little indie movie. I thought that would catapult Slate into more movies. But that hasn’t quite happened. Her future in movies is something that Slate brings up in Stage Fright while she’s interviewing one of her grandmothers.
Jenny Slate: Stage Fright is a blend of stand-up, interviews with her family, and the occasional confessional. And it works. This is marketed as a stand-up special. It’s primarily that. But the mixed media isn’t contrived or hamhandedly trying to set up the comedy. For the most part, the interviews and confessionals have their own purpose. They do get worked into the stand-up, but it feels organic.
The family interviews made me cry a few times. They serve the here’s-a-little-bit-about-me part of a lot of stand-up sets way better than any workshopped bit could. We meet Slate’s parents, grandmothers, and both of her sisters. Through these interviews and home videos, we learn that Slate was always that kid with a ton of energy who got put into time out. She kept notes and poetry verses on the walls inside her closet. There’s an adorable reading of notes she left herself in a feelings box.
Her grandmothers are very different from each other, but both love Slate in the same way. They look at her as an unstoppable ball of energy that’s very special. Her parents and sisters are low key, but you can feel how much more they like their family because Jenny Slate is a part of it. I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but I felt it. The comedic highlight of the family interviews involves the ghosts that haunt the Slate home. More importantly, Slate confronts her dad on introducing the girls to the concept of ghosts at an early age. Once you have that idea in your head, you’ll see ghosts at every turn. Slate admits that she does not like to sleep at her parent’s house when she stays there because of the ghosts.
The confessionals are, as you’d expect, the most personal part of Stage Fright. Slate is the only sister that’s divorced. She can’t even remember another family member that’s been divorced. She has a hard time being alone. Whenever she has a break-up, Slate goes to her parents for a while. But, there’s the whole ghost situation and the fact that her parents are selling the family home. Being alone is hard. It makes you vulnerable. That’s part of what gives Slate stage fright. She has to go in front of a bunch of strangers every night and win them over. The kicker is that she knows she will. But there’s still that moment of putting yourself out there that is so totally identifiable.
That is a revelation that comes near the end of the special. But it totally pays off what we’ve been watching in the stand-up. Slate is really good at going on riffs where she trolls herself. She profusely thanks the audience for paying money to see the show. But, she’ll pivot and surgically destroy the audience with a mix of jokes, short stories, and eclipse-level shade. I’m not really into repeating a lot of jokes in these, but my personal favorite was a takedown of the NFL concussion epidemic. Don’t be fooled. That may sound high brow. But, Slate takes it delightfully low brow in an argument that I’ve never thought of, but makes perfect, savage sense.
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Jenny Slate: Stage Fright is a legit, funny stand-up comedy special. But, the interviews and confessionals give us a fuller picture of the comedian. I think that’s what a lot of comedians try to do at some point. Jenny Slate accomplishes this in her first special in a uniquely executed way. It’s so much more than just a stand-up special. If you isolated the stand-up on its own, the special would still be great. But this is the comedy experience for the multi-device/multi-input age that we live in. Stage Fright proves that you can do that and be funny AF.