Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional

I laughed so much. The ridiculous stories, at times over-the-top delivery, her voices, and her facial expressions are all entertaining.

I didn't even know she did standup. Stories of birth and bodily functions, early pandemic traveling; slice of life stuff. Her physicality, her lack of filters, her honesty about the realities of giving birth are all refreshing.

I'm sure this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but she's unlike anyone I've seen before, and that in itself is worth a watch. I would watch another standup with her anytime.

Was it rambling? Yes, but that's part of the charm. She wanders into other stories from other times and circles back to her original narrative. She never lost me in doing it this way. I giggled right through to the end.

This special is full of run-on ramblings without payoff, random sounds to illicit laughs rather than being clever, and valley girl-esque speech that is grating to listen to.

Google a transcript from this special and read it rather than watching this special. It is truly uncommon that a transcript of a comedy special has better delivery and pacing than the comedian, but unfortunately this is the case here.

This show reads less like a comedy special and more like a broken person talking to a disinterested therapist. The therapist would likely laugh more than the audience, and would likely be less annoyed at the incredibly gratuitous dissertation of all of the possible uses of "like" in a published work.

The only reason this special has as high of reviews as is does is that the majority of its watchers turned it off in the first five minutes and watched something that was actually engaging and worth their time.

I will preface this review by stating I think Jenny Slate can be a very funny comedic actress. I've enjoyed watching her in a number of film and tv bits, including her time on SNL.

That having been said, there is something fundamentally wrong with her delivery as a standup comic, at least in this particular special. "Like, like, like" every 3-5 seconds. It was really hard to sit through.

I think she needs to listen to her own set from an audience perspective, maybe just the audio. This is not a joke nor an exaggeration, she says "like" 604 times in this special. Almost 8% of the words she said out loud during this routine was "like", that one word.

I don't think I need to say anything more about this special than that. I know some people use like as a crutch, but this was so overdone it was nearly impossible for me to hear anything else she said.

Her story of her special was like having a child tell you about their day- so haphazardly told that you might lose what part of the story's structure you're in. They way Jenny breaks up her already lengthy setups with erratic outbursts of screams and random noises makes her delivery painfully erratic and came off as desperation for easy laughs rather than quirky comedic styling. As pointed out in @rmmil's review, the excessive and repetitive use of "like" was like, uh, yuck. She placed it on the audience to "find the comedy in this" when she couldn't, because there wasn't.

There were others, but these main reasons made it painful to sit through this special, hoping I would "find the comedy in it".

Jenny struts onto the stage in this hideous little weirdly proportioned school-boy tuxedo thing. Bad first impression. Moving on... Oh, my god, like how can someone, like have vocal fry and be nasal and, like also shriek all at the same time? Um, well, like this annoying, shrill chick can. Someone married her??? She gets voice acting gigs???

Jenny's comedy is nothing original; PC millennial, pandemic observations. Trying to be edgy and psychological but she just looks and sounds like a fool.

It's really weird to get this intense, viscerally hostile reaction to a standup act. I want to go kick over my neighbor's stupid porch goose or something. The only other comic that's ever invoked these kinds of crazy negative feelings was Ilana Glazer. I actually thought her and Jenny were the same person for a while. They might as well be. They both suuuuuuuuuck. I mean, they both, like um, totally suck.