Comediva of the Week: Amy Poehler

Who is hilarious, adorable without ever looking over-processed, married to Will Arnett, and has two sons whom she got away with naming Archie and Abel without raising any eyebrows?  That would be one Amy Poehler, our ridiculously talented Comediva of the Week.

poehlerSource: TheCinemaSource.com

Amy Poehler has been professionally funny since 1993 and amateurishly funny since birth, we imagine, since she has gone straight to the head of The Funny People Line in every town she’s ever lived in.  She joined the improv group My Mother’s Fleabag at Boston College.  She then went on to join Second City in Chicago where she met Matt Besser and was recruited by New York’s Upright Citizen’s Brigade.  She was also one of the few people in history to be promoted to full cast member on her first season on Saturday Night Live.

Amy Poehler isn’t any kind of ordinary hilarious, either.  Despite the fact that she seems to surround herself with other hilarious people (imagine her dinner parties… crazier still, imagine being raised in a house run by Will Arnett and Amy Poehler!), there is no missing her when she steps on stage or screen.  Amy matches her bizarre-a-tude with sweetness, her casually filthy mouth with prim amazement so convincing that you can hardly believe the words are coming out of her sweet, little blonde self.

parksThat’s the real genius of Amy, you see: her utter commitment to the contradiction that is her comedy.  No matter how outrageous the role she’s playing, Amy can invest genuine normalcy in a character with strong conviction.  All it takes is a blink of those big blue eyes after even the wackiest of monologues to make you wonder if you’re the crazy one and she’s actually quite sane.

So what can we learn from the charming and talented Amy Poehler, whose unlikely and sometimes unsettling comedy seems impossible to replicate?  Humility, my friends.  Too frequently, famous comedians allow their own personas to become so big that they are no longer nimble enough to be funny.  But not Amy.  She can completely disappear into the wild, out-of-the-box-but-somehow-real characters she creates without ever letting us forget that we’re watching Amy Poehler because, in some ways, she acts more like a young improv troupe player throwing herself into a scene than she does a star.  Unlike so many women who let the drives of fame and fortune water them down, Amy’s ability to remain unimpressed with her own accomplishments has allowed her to remain essentially Amy, rather than bleaching, botoxing and starving herself into the guise of Hollywood Amy.  So next time you catch yourself thinking, “When I’m famous, I’ll have lipo,” or, “When I’m famous I will make four interns carry me around on a divan and feed me grapes,” remember, it’s hard to be funny when you’re stuck toting around an ego the size of the pyramids.  Just be you; that’s enough.

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