Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jenny Slate: Stage Fright’ on Netflix, In Which Home Is Where The Horrors Are

Jenny Slate’s first Netflix comedy special, >Stage Fright, intercuts from her stand-up comedy taping in New York City back to her childhood home in Massachusetts, with documentary footage of the comedian/actress interviewing her sisters, parents and grandmothers, plus home movies that deliver a more complete portrait of the artist’s evolution from a young age to 30-something.

JENNY SLATE: STAGE FRIGHT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: This is a banner month for insightful films focusing on anxiety-ridden Jewish comedians who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and have moved back in with their parents in suburban Boston.

First came Gary Gulman: The Great Depresh on HBO, which found his mother taking him back into the Peabody home he grew up in on Boston’s North Shore. Now comes Slate, who reveals in this hour-plus that she tends to retreat to her childhood home in Milton on the South Shore in the wake of heartbreaks. But Slate has other motives for involving her closest relatives in her special.

For one thing, she’s always wanted the spotlight. She says so openly and repeatedly in the early minutes. First, in front of her two sisters (Jenny’s the middle sis), she says: “It’s very embarrassing! I have decided to make a film in our childhood home, which is my dream and everyone else’s nightmare.” Then, while sitting with her father, not thinking this is for the cameras necessarily, she confides: “You know what is funny about this? I’ll just say…is that, as a little girl, I probably didn’t know what documentaries were, but this is what I would like imagine, is that the movie comes to your house.” She and her dad laugh in recognition of the moment. “You know what I mean? The movie comes to your house. It just shows up one day and they just make a movie about you. I was always like hoping for it.”

Her stand-up material, recorded at the Gramercy Theatre, is equally self-aware and meta, exploring various ways in which stage fright manifests itself when all the world’s a stage, and when your life’s work and your dreams come back to haunt you. Sometimes in obvious cliche ways, such as societal pressures reinforced by show business toward women. As Slate says: “I am an actress, and I work in Hollywood, and everyone likes the women there to look long and lean, and have the physique of Timothee Chalamet. They want us to still super-wanna have their babies, but just not be supple!”

And sometimes she may have been quite literally haunted. As in, by ghosts! Later in the hour, Slate lets us in on some of the ghastly secrets lurking in her home, and her father recounts a tale that perhaps he shouldn’t have shared with his daughters at any age.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of? Obviously, Gulman’s The Great Depresh. For something a little less obvious, perhaps Kevin Hart: Laugh At My Pain. For something with obvious in the title, may I suggest Obvious Child, the great 2014 feature starring Slate (and featuring some of her actual comedy material) and directed by Gillian Robespierre, who also worked with Slate on Landline and directed this Netflix special.

Also, not a comedy special, but if you watch Venom before this, it’ll enhance your enjoyment of the documentary portions.

Memorable Jokes: We learn in this hour why Jenny isn’t a Jennifer, and what name she’d have chosen for herself instead. There’s a fabulous montage in which Slate tries on dresses from her Nana Connie’s closet, with a fantastically riffed line as she examines one dress, “I’m a turtleneck as a person.” We see that Slate, much like the protagonist in Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, kept a box where she tucked away her most explosive emotions as she went through puberty. We find in adulthood, she grapples with the aftermath of divorce, wondering if she’ll ever find love or simply become the weird aunt in her family. Especially after her friends set her up on a blind date with a white knight who takes the premise a bit too close to the chain mail.

And, befitting anyone who grew up around Boston, Slate finds that the intense sports fandom has rubbed off on her, even if she doesn’t particularly care to follow it. As she illustrates with her fanfic explanation of football, which proves that she knows everything anyone needs to know about the gridiron. To wit:

“Jock culture is really interesting. Isn’t it? I think that, like…I mean…I’m happy for the men that they can have like sort of ways to blow off some steam. Like, I think it’s so sweet how they have their sports. I think that’s so darling. How they have their football teams. I think that’s funny. That’s so sweet. And I love football, because I don’t like to watch it all, but I love to imagine things about it. And what I like to imagine is that all of the men have to decided to be on a team, of course, because they’re best friends. And they love to be best friends, and that’s why they wear the same outfit, and get together on a strict schedule to put on the same outfit and then go rush after the toy. Oh, my goodness! How darling. And I like to imagine them in their locker rooms where they keep their underclothes. And they’re standing in there, and it’s like, Tom Brady, and he’s standing there next to Gronk, and they’re holding hands because they’re super nervous. So nervous about their game. And then Tom looks at Gronk, and he’s like, ‘Gronk…If I get the toy, I’ll give it to you.’ And then Gronk looks at him, and he’s like, ‘You’re my best friend, Tom. Good luck today.’ (kisses) And then Tom’s like, ‘Thank you so much!’ (kisses) So sweet, so darling. And then they all go out there on the lawn, and they rush after the toy, and then they fall down in a big pile, and I think it’s very, very important that also they put their tender, little penises and balls into cups. Because it would be very, very bad if something were to happen to their penises and balls while they were playing their game. Haven’t figured out how to make their hats work as well, but just as long as their penises and balls are safe. All those tender penises and balls. When they get bumped, it really hurts.”

Our Take: So about that stage fright. It’s not a case of imposter syndrome. Slate shows us the multiple trophies in her childhood bedroom from winning state and regional New England speech competitions. And there’s no mention of Saturday Night Live here, in case you were expecting that to surface. She has moved on and up from that experience. For Slate, her issue more often than not is overthinking her ability to enjoy the moment, to the point where it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It’s not that I think I’m not funny. It’s that right before I go onstage, I am, like, presented with this essential question:, which is, like: Will they? Will they like me? And I know that they will once I start to talk. But I don’t earn the love unless I give something beautiful that goes out. So my stage fright comes from a deeper thing of like, of exchange.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Slate gives us her all, and all of her, here. It’s almost impossible not to fall for her.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Jenny Slate: Stage Fright on Netflix