Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.
Pop culture obsessives writing for the pop culture obsessed.
Illustration for article titled Jenny Slates engagement story is exactly as goofy and adorable as youd expect
Photo: Andrew Lipovsky (NBC)

Jenny Slate might have gotten fired from Saturday Night Live back in the day (although not, as the story goes, for dropping an accidental on-air f-bomb), but she and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon still have the SNL veterans’ bond, as evidenced by them yukking it up at Slate’s typically hilarious and silly-sweet appearance on Tuesdays show. As anyone who’s seen her touchingly revelatory and riotously funny recent Netflix stand-up special (or, really, anything she’s been in, ever) knows, Slate’s brand is “exuberant, eccentric, and secretly soulful,” qualities that she brought to her long anecdote about recently receiving a proposal of marriage from her now-fiancé, Ben.

A country drive to a picturesque abandoned French castle, a hamper of romantic picnic foods, a lovely party dress and kitten heels—all pretty standard romantic fairy tale stuff, turned into the sort of loopy but lovely adventure an evening with Jenny Slate seems to invariably turn into. (And that she chronicles in her new book of autobiographical sketches, Little Weirds, which she was there to promote, sort of.) Telling Fallon about the roadblocks to a picture-perfect French proposal story (spooky-creaky gates, a quartet of old, French, possibly ghost-picnickers, and a picnic basket just overflowing with processed meats, since sausage fan Slate got to do all the shopping), Slate had Fallon rapt with giggly attention. By the time the surprise proposal came, as Slate related how she’d unknowingly started jamming nervous handfuls of sausage into her mouth, her dreams of a demure, Audrey Hepburn-style acceptance went by the wayside in favor of a more Jenny-esque raptor’s roar of carnivorous joy. (“Now you said it, you have to do it!,” Slate bellowed, relating how her inner Jenny’s meat-flecked response really sounded.)



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