Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional’ On Prime Video, A Comedian Grows Up (and Glows Up) In Brooklyn

Jenny Slate released her first stand-up comedy special for Netflix in 2019, but Stage Fright literally and metaphorically left the stage multiple times to follow Slate back to her childhood home for conversations with her family. Five years later, Slate has remarried and become a mother, and she’s ready to stand on her own two feet for this, her first proper one-hour comedy special.

JENNY SLATE: SEASONED PROFESSIONAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jenny Slate enjoyed a banner 2022 when she starred in, co-wrote and co-produced the Oscar-nominated animated feature, Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, co-starred in the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, and co-starred in the Prime Video rom-com, I Want You Back.

Slate keeps her A24 relationship going with her longtime directorial collaborator Gillian Robespierre, who not only helmed Stage Fright but also was behind the camera for Slate’s starring turns in Obvious Child and Landline.

This hour finds Slate back in Brooklyn, where she lived in the Aughts, explaining how the beginning of the pandemic impacted her in unexpected ways, as well as her experiences with love, marriage, pregnancy and therapy.

Memorable Jokes: After an opening bit announcing herself and her surroundings, “I did my dressage, so now I feel good,” Slate is ready to tell us about how much her life has changed in the four years since the pandemic.

For one thing, Slate got married again, and this time, she wasn’t about to let her addiction to microphones let her turn this wedding into yet another comedy show. She’s all grown up now, which also means “I’m trying to make an effort to say the word ‘breasts’ more.” Why? So her doctor won’t give up on her for a lack of maturity. Slate also had a baby daughter, which meant she had to endure a whole host of bodily changes. Breastfeeding transformed her from a B-cup size to “an instant set of fucking porny gazongas.” She somehow still cannot believe she gave birth to begin with, even after going through the entire pregnancy:“It just doesn’t feel like something that I would do.”

Talking about the gross realities of vaginal birth? That is definitely Slate would do, and does complete with a flashback to a disastrous school trip to a Hard Rock Cafe in Montreal where her table of popular kids ordered so many menu items with dairy and cheese that overwhelmed her young lactose-intolerant frame. Which also reminds her of the epic road trip she and her future husband took across the United States at the very start of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, which included more excretory mishaps and culminated when they reached Massachusetts, celebrating by conceiving their daughter that night. She also hits the rewind button to fill us in on her Amsterdam sex vacation where she sealed the deal on her relationship with the man who’d be her second husband.

All of which makes Slate laugh even harder, as she recalls for us what she said toward the end of her Netflix special, claiming: “I was not going to date anymore, and that I was going to turn my pussy into a museum with a major alarm system.”

Our Take: Slate’s bow-tie, outfit, vocal acrobatics, and her whole vibe shows just how well she might’ve fit in on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Even if she’s more than a bit more confessional and profane in doing so, sharing “as much as you can share without going to jail: that’s my limit.”

Fortunately for her, First Amendment rights allow her to get as gross as she wants describing how her body transformed through her pregnancy and afterward, as well as her foibles, both intimately personal and professional. This honestly reminds me a lot of the young Jenny Slate that I knew and that New Yorkers saw on a regular basis during the five years in the late 2000s when Slate was an alternative-comedy darling of the scene out of college and before her hiring at Saturday Night Live. Gross, but adorably so.

She nods slyly to her professional past with a passing admission that “anytime something’s been hard or I didn’t want to do it, I’ve always just been able to quit or be fired.”

And yet she’s oh so sassy, still. Whether it’s telling the audience she’s not going to describe every medical term about her pregnancy, or whether she’s casually dropping the mic stand while jumping up and down, then stopping to watch the mic stand roll away from her and eventually off the circular stage. It’s cute, and symbolic.

My only real fault with this hour isn’t Slate’s fault, either. It’s the first Amazon Original comedy special to fall victim to Prime Video’s new rules putting ads on everything, resulting in two different ad breaks, both of which fall in the middle of a story. Those of us old enough to remember when most comedy specials aired on Comedy Central should be used to watching stand-up with commercials, but at least Comedy Central knew where to break up the bits appropriately. Let’s hope Amazon figures this out.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Slate describes her act at one point as “this weird love story in reverse,” and even if we cannot give her the same love her therapist does or even her real mom, we at least can see why she’s so lovable in the first place.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.