Jenny Slate Wants to Know What You’re Thinking About Her Face
Jenny Slate tends to attract the same kinds of adjectives again and again: relatable, quirky, authentic. It’s the kind of fondly diminutive language so often applied to women in the public eye who talk a lot about their feelings and make jokes about body hair and gastrointestinal issues. But Slate’s emotional openness is clearly more than a shtick. Her work takes on themes that might seem like surprising fodder for comedy—loneliness, kindness, loss. “I do feel very vulnerable and very fragile,” she told me. “It’s just who I am.”
She started out doing stand-up and then got cast on in 2009, where she made headlines after accidentally cursing on air. She was fired after one season because, she’s said, she and the show simply “didn’t click.” It was in the weird, uneasy period of her life after that she first came up with Marcel the Shell. She and her then-boyfriend, Dean Fleischer Camp, were packed into a hotel room with a group of friends during a trip, and she started channeling her discomfort into a tiny, crackly voice. She named this creation Marcel; Fleischer Camp assigned him a shell for a body, a single eyeball, and a pair of plastic doll shoes. (One
