One of the Greats

Chelsea Peretti treats the comedy special as a format begging to be mocked. Before she even tells a joke, she rides a motorcycle through the streets in a faux-dramatic intro, adopting a Christian Bale Batman growl to reflect on her fake history. Throughout the set, the genre’s standard visual conventions are dismantled. Cutaways to the audience randomly feature dogs, babies, and couples making out, while offstage, a clown-suit-clad Peretti heckles her own performance. The self-aggrandizing title is entirely the point, establishing an elevated, aggressively confident persona.<br><br>Beneath the meta-commentary, the actual material remains grounded in dry observation. She targets the agony of small talk, the egos of conventionally attractive women, and male comedians’ predictable approaches to sex jokes. Her delivery is authoritative, completely stripping away the uncertain, upward-inflection tone that plagues so many modern sets.<br><br>Filmed at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the 2014 Netflix release caught her right as her mainstream career was exploding. She was already a staple of the alternative comedy scene and a writer for television, but this hour coincided with her breakout run as Gina Linetti on Fox’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Critics noted that the hour felt like a definitive bid for center stage, ranking her among the top performers of the year for putting out a special that genuinely matched its grandiose title.