Jenny Slate

She paces the stage with a jittery, giggling energy, often dressed in high-end pieces like a silk blouse or a shorts tuxedo. Then she opens her mouth and lets out a cartoonish squeak about her own bodily functions. Slate does not write setup-punchline jokes. Instead, she delivers long, frantic stories that feel like being cornered in a bathroom by someone having an anxiety attack. She will drop her pitch to mimic a tiny creature, then physically contort herself across the stage to reenact a middle-school stomach ache.

She operates outside the traditional comedy club circuit, drawing theater crowds who arrive specifically for her strangeness. Rather than grinding out sets for indifferent weekend crowds, she builds her hours as theatrical, inward-looking events. She leans so heavily into her own anxiety that she named a special Stage Fright and asks for the spotlights to be blindingly bright so she cannot see the audience.

The appeal of her act rests entirely on the force of her personality. Because the material is devoid of one-liners, if a viewer does not find her baseline persona charming, the hour has no traditional joke structure to fall back on. When she hits her stride, she takes heavily trodden topics like childbirth or therapy and makes them strange again through the bizarre imagery she attaches to them.

Her deep background in character work bleeds directly into her live act. The vocal control required to voice the tiny protagonist in Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the exact tool she uses to animate her stage time.