Lifestyle
As a 'Seasoned Professional,' Jenny Slate now finds strength in her sensitivity
Jenny Slate’s latest stand-up special is Seasoned Professional.
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Jenny Slate’s latest stand-up special is Seasoned Professional.
Amazon Prime Video
Comic Jenny Slate says her life is a non-stop “emotional multimedia experience. “That also describes her new comedy special, Seasoned Professional, in which she opens up about childbirth, therapy and dating her now-husband.
Slate got her start doing improv as a college student at Columbia University, and began performing stand-up in her early 20s. A self-described “very sensitive” person, she shares that vulnerability onstage — including her tendency to pick up on the “micro bad mood” of whoever she’s talking to.
Slate says the birth of her daughter in 2021 changed her in some ways. “My cheaper vanities have kind of fried off in the exhaustion,” she explains.
But, she adds, “I still have the same personality that I’ve always had. … There’s very little that happens in my head that’s not going directly into my husband’s face.”
Slate co-wrote and starred in the Oscar-nominated animated film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which was adapted from the web series that she co-created with her ex-husband Dean Fleischer Camp. She’s also done voice work for other animated films and TV shows, including Bob’s Burgers, Big Mouthand Zootopia.
Interview highlights
On talking about her feelings in her comedy
If you asked me to tell you what it is [I’m experiencing] right now, it would look the way it looks when I’m doing stand up. There would be screaming. There would be a doorway into my imagination where I’m imagining what would have even had to happen in the other person’s head in order for them to interact with me in this way. And that is my experience. …
I’m not one of these people that’s going through her life and being like, “Ooh, that’s material! … I’m going to do something interesting, so maybe it will be material.” I’m just going through and living my normal life, but I don’t feel that I have to do anything to turn it into comedy. But of course I’ll work on the bits.
On consciously channeling her sensitivity toward empathy and other people instead of self-reflection
I think that when I started doing stand-up in my early, mid-20s, like maybe 23, 24, I realized a lot of what I want to talk about is how I feel. I started to be more aware of it and I also started going to therapy. I think I felt ashamed of how much it was so self-focused. Like, what does this person think about me? I just felt like, why am I like this? This is such a gross way to be. …
In getting on stage and telling the story and needing it to be dynamic and other characters have to exist besides you. … With other people now it’s become more of like, “How do I turn this into empathy?” Like if I am interested in this person, if I see myself starting to focus on them, make it about them, ask questions, don’t make weird assumptions, and show them inside of myself and suffer by that.
On the bats in her childhood home
[My parents] got in a fight with a contractor who was working on our house, and there was a hole in our roof because he was like, “Forget it!” And he left. We had just so many bats in our house because we had, like, an open roof for a while. It still makes me laugh. …
My dad, he would come out in the middle of the night in his nighttime apparel, which at the time was a very, very long night shirt. He worked at the time at the computer company called Wang … and he had this shirt that said “Wang” on it. And he would run down the hallway with an old tennis racket and swat the bats against the hallway. We had, like, bat blood on our wallpaper. I remember just being like, “He got one!” Just such a bummer. Just such an intense way to live and be. I thought it was really funny. I talked about it on stage for so long because I was fascinated by it. Like, wow, I thought this was normal for so long that I didn’t even think about it. And now I realized that this was actually very specific.
On growing up in a house her family believed was haunted
My dad had discovered a packet of love letters that were written to one of the previous owners of the house, but they weren’t from her husband. They were from a captain of a ship. And when my parents first moved in, my mom woke up smelling pipe smoke. My dad smoked a pipe at the time, and she called out to him to come to bed and then rolled over and realized that he was asleep. And so she woke him up and she was like, “You left your pipe burning, you’re going to burn down the house!” And so he went out into the hallway and saw on the stairs — he says he sort of saw it, but didn’t see it — a man in a heavy mariner’s [or] seaman’s jacket walking up the stairs.
And there was a bunch of other stuff that happened. I’m the only one that never saw anything, actually, which in itself is scary to me because I feel like there’s like a backlog, it’s all going to come at once. … I think we were all a bit proud of it, too. It’s mystical. … It was kind of like a treasure, but a terrible one to have.
On working through her shame about her divorce from Dean Fleischer Camp
I think it’s probably just a very, very basic embarrassment of being like … This [marriage] is the decision! Never going back. Absolutely sure. And then having it fall apart rather quickly, like we weren’t married for very long at all. …
When I look back on it now, I’m like, it’s weird that I was embarrassed, but, I guess I don’t like to fail, although I have failed many times. I think it was hard to look at the things that were actually really sad and really scary.
On talking to her 3-year-old daughter in the voice of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
I talk in Marcel’s voice, sometimes without realizing it. … The first time she heard it, [she was like] “What is that?” She thinks he lives inside of me, but that’s not disturbing to her. She also knows what he looks like, but she never asked to see him. She just wants to talk to him. Marcel gets more info from her. So actually, as Marcel, I just ask her questions. Like, “Why didn’t you like that sandwich? What was wrong with it? What happened at school today?” Like, she’ll give Marcel a bigger answer. Which is really nice. And then she likes singing with Marcel.
Heidi Saman and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Karen McNenny is a certified divorce coach, certified co-parenting specialist and author of the book The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family.
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When Karen McNenny was facing divorce about 15 years ago, she was afraid of what it would mean for her future: despair, debt and a lifetime of resentment, she says.
At the same time, she was thinking of her two children, she says. She didn’t want their father to become her enemy.
So she and her former husband chose to approach divorce differently as a couple. “We’re going to renovate and transform this family. We’re not going to destroy it,” she says. “The marriage is ending, not your relationship.”
For McNenny, a mediator, certified divorce coach and certified co-parenting specialist, divorce is a tool, not a weapon. She expands on this concept in The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, which came out this spring. The book offers guidance on how to maintain compassionate and respectful ties with a former spouse while also healing and moving forward.
According to Pew Research Center, a third of Americans who have ever been married had a first marriage that ended in divorce. For that reason, McNenny hopes her book becomes a must-read for couples before they get married. “The best time to talk about divorce is before you need to talk about it,” she says.
She shared insights from her book in a conversation with Life Kit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is called The Good Divorce. What does that mean?
[For those with kids,] the good divorce is about protecting the future of the family while we dissolve the marriage.
After the paperwork is done and the assets have been divided, can you and your co-parent sit on the same side of the bleachers during the basketball game? Can you still see yourselves as a partnership, with the ability to have thoughtful conversations about your kids?
For those who don’t have kids, [the good divorce is] about protecting your health — your mental health and your physical health. If we are doubling down with resentment and bitterness, all of that gets stored in the body and shows up in different ways. You deserve a pathway that’s less destructive.
Let me also be clear: There are times when an amicable, collaborative process is not possible and maybe even inappropriate. For instance, where there’s active addiction, abuse, domestic violence, coercion or unmanaged mental health issues.
How do you get to a place where you don’t feel triggered by your partner, so you both can work together toward a good divorce?
That, my dear, does not happen overnight. That is more like a dimmer switch going up and down and up and down, and the gift of time helps to get there.
It’s a complex emotional journey because we do feel relief in walking away from our spouse and the challenges. But with it, there is extraordinary grief that comes with divorce that I think is often underestimated and undersupported.
If my spouse had died, people would’ve been checking in with me regularly. I never would’ve spent a holiday alone in that first year. There probably would’ve been a meal train.
But he didn’t die. My marriage died, my family structure died, my identity as a wife and a partner died. There’s so much grief through these transformations that come with divorce that we don’t see.
So supporting friends in all those ways that you would as if there had been an actual death is doing a lot for your friends who are going through divorce.
How do you let your friends, family and community know that you’re getting a divorce and that you might need support?
Put a communication strategy together. It’s not just for how we tell the kids. It’s also a communication strategy for the grandparents; to the circle of support around the kids, like teachers, coaches and mentors; and our shared community.
It’s extraordinary when a couple can write that message together, not unlike a marriage announcement. [You might say:] We’ve made a really difficult decision. We wanted to let you know. We’re not going to court. Don’t expect a battle. Please don’t ask us why. Just ask us how we’re doing. We’re on the same side as the kids. You don’t need to pick sides.
In doing so, we’ve given everyone the same information at once. It’s a unified message that comes from the parent team, and it allows your community to know how best to support you. And it takes out all the gossip and wonder about what is going on.
If you have kids and they’re splitting time between two homes, what are some ways to make that change easier for them?
Our kids were 5 and 7 when we divorced, so it was three or four nights at a time in each home. By the time they got to be about 8 or 10, it made sense to go a week in each residence. After COVID, the kids came to us and said, “Can we just have two weeks in a house? We wanna be able to settle in more.” [So we said] OK.
A lot of parents are so rigid about the schedule. There’s no flexibility. That doesn’t serve anyone. So I recommend liberating yourselves from the calendar and letting it grow and bend with your kids appropriately.
Knowing what you know now about divorce, what questions do you think couples should ask themselves before they get married?
So often when people arrive at the threshold of divorce, couples are like, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Get educated about the business part of it.
There is no harm in having a prenuptial agreement. Even if you decided not to file it, have the conversation about the implications. What does it mean if we buy this house together? What does it mean if one of us works more and one of us works less?
We also underestimate what it means to be roommates. What are your value systems around cooking and cleaning? How much alone time do you need? It’s easy to fall in love and not know if you’re compatible.
Do you think you’d get married again?
I absolutely hope that I get to say yes to a lifelong commitment with a partner, as I believe we often are given the opportunity to become a better version of ourself through partnership.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
In Alice and Steve, Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker play long-time friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
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I grew up watching episodic shows on network TV, nearly all of them formulaic but some indelibly great. Then, like everyone else, I moved into the days of what my colleague David Bianculli dubbed Platinum TV, where series like The Sopranos and The Wire and Fleabag aspired to something higher. What both these eras had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted — they had an internal logic, and a tone, that held them together.
In recent years, though, there’s been a proliferation of shows that, possibly obeying some algorithm, care less for coherence than sensation. They lurch among tones, from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness, stirring in random plot twists along the way. Bouncing all over the emotional map, these shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction.
A great example is Alice and Steve, an entertaining but sometimes exasperating six-part British comedy on Hulu about two 50-something best friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.
While the premise is juicy, it’s also a tad yucky, and I mainly tuned in because its title characters are played by performers Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords and Nicola Walker, whom I’ve raved up on this show more than once.
The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend’s funeral. Now, I always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact. As Clement and Walker bray their lines, we learn that Steve’s a divorced celebrity hair stylist who can’t find a girlfriend while Alice is a clothes designer with a doting younger husband, nicely played by Joel Fry, a sweetie-pie of a teenage son — that’s Tyrese Eaton-Dyce — and, of course, that 26-year-old daughter, Izzy, who has inherited her mother’s willfulness. Played by Yali Topol Margalith, Izzy kickstarts the plot by flirting with Steve. Predictably, he succumbs.
Almost immediately, they think they’re in love. While the weak-willed Steve wants to hide their romance — he knows it’s inappropriate — Izzy just blurts out the facts to her mom. Alice flips. And from hereon out in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hangdog, Alice drives the action. Betrayed and violently angry, she’ll do whatever it takes to break them up — no matter who gets hurt. Her antics unleash Steve’s own malice. We’re in Beef territory.
At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones. It’s a fascinating subject, which may be why I found the script by Sophie Goodhart so frustrating. I wanted her to dig deeper. While the show’s got some very funny bits — Alice’s sharp-tongued mother is a blast — it’s often annoyingly lax.
If Steve really does the hair of Charli XCX, how come he’s a clueless older guy whose pop culture references are Willie Nelson and Woody Allen? If Izzy truly adores her mother as she claims, why does she keep rubbing her relationship with Steve in her mom’s face? Halfway through, one character nukes the other’s career, but this life-shattering event has no real weight: It’s barely even mentioned for the rest of the series.
That said, Alice and Steve is worth seeing for scenes like the one in which Steve spinelessly sells Izzy out or the lacerating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasps that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge, not a man she likes hanging with. Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice, wise for once, smooths a romantic crisis between her son and his would-be girlfriend, a pair who are the show’s emblem of hope. For once, we understand why people love her.
While most viewers will find Steve more likable than Alice — the show takes pains not to make him appear predatory or creepy — the role doesn’t give Clement a whole lot to do except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort. The show gets its galvanizing zing from Walker, a beloved star in England with amazing, luminous eyes. Her Alice is the kind of complicated, volcanic heroine that you don’t see in movies and rarely see on TV, one who shows her apocalyptic rage freely and in many different forms.
At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, “Man, is this show a mess.” But that wasn’t a deal breaker. I kept watching. After all, life is messy, too.
How to enter your Sporty Spice era.
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Reality dating and professional sports are not as different as you’d think.
Brittany is in her Sporty Spice era – she watched the NBA playoffs, she’s following World Cup games, and she’s watching the New York Liberty play their WNBA season. These games are daily – and so is the reality dating show Love Island. And she noticed that the two formats are not very different at all. Defector.com staff writer and co-owner Kelsey McKinney came to the same conclusion – so the two of them discuss why these games of athleticism and love can bring us together… and why they get valued differently in our culture.
For more episodes on sports and reality TV, check out:
Get rich or die trying: how sports betting is changing our love of the game
Is this the end of reality TV?
The ugly truth of America’s expensive homes
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
This episode was produced by Liam McBain. It was edited by Neena Pathak. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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