The Treat: Chelsea Peretti

0:00Welcome to The Treat. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Actor-comedian Chelsea Peretti's dry yet deeply felt style is known to most of us because of her work on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. She's shown other skills as well, such as director on the 2023 film entitled First Time Female Director. For The Treat, she takes a look at a venerated playwright whose work is also about discovery. I'm Chelsea Peretti and this is The Treat.

0:36End Game by Samuel Beckett was a play that I read. I believe I read it in high school. I can't remember exactly. But I just remember connecting so much to the darkness and the humor in this play and the existential dread of this play.

1:02And I think that's in so much comedy beneath the surface. So, yeah, you combine that with planes, trains and automobiles. I mean, that's in planes, trains and automobiles.

1:23if there's no stakes no one wants to be on that ride for that many minutes you know i i think about it all the time with comedy why does it work or why doesn't it work and like i remember seeing a movie i won't name but like it had a good cast it had what felt like good writing and an interesting world, and yet I watched the whole thing unamused. And I was going, why isn't this funny? Like, I actually found it fascinating because I was like, I like the people. I think the writing sounds funny. And I think it was something with the stakes of the journey and all that. What time is it? Same as usual.

2:03Have you looked? Yes. Well? Zero. It'd need to rain. It won't rain. Apart from that, how do you feel? I don't complain. You feel normal? I tell you I don't complain. I feel a little strange. Glove? Yes? Have you not had enough? Yes. Of what? Of this. I mean, it's just cool that when you're young and you read things, it could change your whole sensibility. I mean, also took a satire class in college and read like Evelyn Waugh books, you know, about L.A. and the loved one, you know, about these L.A. funeral parlors. And I loved it. And I see that in other people, young people in my family where they are geared that way.

2:52Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh. We laugh with a will in the beginning, but it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we've heard too often. We still find it funny, but we don't laugh anymore. It's so much about a feeling, and it's very poetic. It's very much like a poem about the excruciating feeling of life or something. But the humor is what saves it for me, because I have trouble with, like, relentlessly dark material that has no humor in it. But I think Beckett is really funny.

3:57Actor-director Chelsea Peretti on Samuel Beckett's play Endgame The Treat is produced by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist and I'm Elvis Mitchell It's The Treat

4:32¶¶

4:46Thank you.