Jessi Klein: the thinking laugher's new live wire

Interview, Nov, 2004 by Lewis Beale

Jessi Klein says she's "just another snarky idiot," but thanks to her hilarious commentary on VH1's pop-culture show Best Week Ever, the 29-year-old New York native has become the female comic you'd most like to be insulted by.

Klein grew up a shy, academically oriented kid with a secret inner life inspired by the Marx Brothers. "My greatest dream is to be a female Groucho," she says, "this smart pervert." Shortly after graduating from Vassar, where she majored in art history, Klein landed a job in the talent department at Comedy Central (she's now a development executive with the network). She then decided to try stand-up, eventually developing an onstage persona, "this oversexed girl with glasses, which is something I feel compelled to do, even though it's not me."

Often compared to other brainy comic babes like Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey, and Janeane Garofalo, Klein has appeared on everything from The Today Show to Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, and is amazed that "being on TV for nine seconds a week has gotten me that much notice." She's also warped enough to think that NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert is really hot, and wonders what it would be like to have sex with Dick Cheney. ("It would be angry, angry sex," she says.)

"I was always someone who got rewarded more for being smart than for being pretty," says Klein, who is currently writing a chapter for a book about the disco-ized bar-mitzvah culture of the 1980s. "But I always had a perverted side," she adds. "When I was in second grade, I would draw pictures of naked people for other kids."

Lewis Beale is a New York-based writer.