She’s the comic who dropped the F-bomb heard ’round the world, so it seems appropriate that Jenny Slate would make her leading-lady debut in an eyebrow-raising romantic comedy. Throughout her career, the 32-year-old has made her name with a series of artistic left turns.
In the acclaimed new indie “Obvious Child,” Slate plays a Brooklyn stand-up who gets pregnant during a one-night stand and plans to have an abortion. But unlike nearly every other movie in which this plot twist comes up, her character actually goes through with it. Starting on July 17, she can also be seen as a series regular in the new FX comedy “Married,” alongside Judy Greer and Nat Faxon.
If you’re not familiar with Slate — a Massachusetts native who lived in Brooklyn for seven years after attending Columbia University — here are five things you need to know.
Slate co-created the short film “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” in 2010 with her husband, filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp. The duo created the video in just a handful of days. And then it went viral — so viral (more than 22 million views to date) that a follow-up and two books followed. The couple are currently working on a full-length feature and they also created the Web series “Catherine” in which Slate stars.
She made waves with a stupendous gaffe during her 2009 debut on “Saturday Night Live,” in which she accidentally dropped the F-bomb. She stayed on the show for the duration of the season — but her contract was not renewed.
Slate met her friend Nick Kroll, on whose Comedy Central show, “Kroll Show,” she appears, at a now-closed East Village NYC club called Rififi. Slate has said he made an impression on her for his spot-on observation that the venue “smelled like a bag of Doritos had thrown up.”
For five years, Slate co-hosted a free comedy show, “Big Terrific,” in Williamsburg with her friends Gabe Liedman and Max Silvestri. Though Slate has since moved to LA, Silvestri still hosts the show every Wednesday.
She’s good at playing bad: On “Girls,” she was Lena Dunham’s literary nemesis, Tally Schifrin, and on “Parks and Recreation,” she played the unhinged Mona-Lisa Saperstein. On “Hello Ladies,” she played passive-aggressive actress Amelia Gordon.