Chelsea Peretti is, as she puts it, “one of the greats”, so it makes sense that she won’t be restrained by a schedule. Call Chelsea Peretti hasn’t been the most prolific of pods this year, but it’s finally out of its “meditative trance” and on form.
Peretti’s presence isn’t a million miles away from her delusionally brilliant character Gina on the cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine. She’s a bag of contradictions. While she welcomes her callers warmly, she’s quick to bin them off. Her supreme confidence is tempered with a good dose of self-doubt. While her distinctive voice (an exaggerated nasal whine prone to bursting into song) isn’t for everyone’s ears, the comedy ridiculousness it brings rewards listeners.
First on the line is a guitar player whose arm once caught fire. “I thought you were shredding so hard on the song that your fuckin’ guitar burst into fliz-ames,” she says in her indifferent drawl, shortly before cutting him off. If a flaming limb’s not enough to hold her interest, what is?
“Great stuff,” she deadpans to a man who tells her about being held up at gunpoint while he worked at Domino’s. “Let me ask you this. When you eat pizza, do you cry?”
Peretti is a woman with enough tangents to hold her own when the callers don’t come up with the goods, which is most of the time. “You are all wonderful beings,” she tells her guests after trolling them with Psycho strings, canned laughter and gasps from the imaginary audience.
Her clowning is constant, whether she’s singing Amy Winehouse’s Rehab, wondering if Louis XIV hung out with nature or talking about her addiction to her phone.
“What am I, a Jew magnet?” she ponders after a couple of callers with the same religion. Which brings her on to her love of hot banana bread with cream cheese and her extreme wanderlust. “Is Israel, like, the Miami of somewhere else?” she asks.
The theme, if there is one, turns out to be graduation. Peretti gets a flash of inspiration in the dying minutes of the podcast and before you know it the whole affair has escalated into a one-woman tale of graduating rabbits, rodents becoming all-powerful and humans living under the floorboards. It’s a pretty special conclusion, wrapped up in hysterical laughter. “I feel born again,” she sighs.
