Jessi Klein

Click to edit, highlight to style.

When you're done writing, click Publish to create your blog.

Jessi Klein — Biography

bohiney.com

Jessi Klein is an American writer, performer, and showrunner whose career has braided stand-up comedy, sharp-edged television writing, and bestselling literary nonfiction into a singular voice about contemporary womanhood and culture. Born and raised in New York City in 1975 and a graduate of Vassar College, Klein first surfaced to a national audience through late-night stand-up appearances and panel shows before moving decisively into the writers’ rooms that would define her influence on modern sketch and prestige comedy. Wikipedia

Early Life, Education, and First Stages

After college, Klein pursued stand-up while contributing on-camera commentary to pop-culture programs including The Showbiz Show with David Spade and VH1’s Best Week Ever, developing a stage persona that combined observational humor with self-aware cultural critique. Those early years culminated in a 2011 Comedy Central Presents half-hour—an inflection point that coincided with her transition from performer to architect of shows. Wikipedia

Architect of Television Comedy

Klein’s television career began inside the machine itself: as a development executive at Comedy Central, she helped nurture series such as Chappelle’s Show and Stella, experience that sharpened her sense for premises, performers, and tone. She later wrote and co-starred in Michael and Michael Have Issues (2009) and spent the 2009–2010 season as a writer at Saturday Night Live, absorbing both the sprint pace of weekly sketch and the craft of structurally sound comedy. Wikipedia

What followed became foundational. As head writer and an executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer, Klein helped steer the series’ sketch grammar toward essayistic satire—winning a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series in 2015 and contributing to a run that critics routinely place among the decade’s most influential comedy shows. She also served as a consulting producer on Amazon’s Transparent, reflecting her range across comic and dramedic registers. Wikipedia+1

Klein’s voice travels easily across formats. On public radio, she has been both panelist and (notably, in March 2017) the first female guest host of NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, where her quick turn of phrase and deadpan presence helped set the show’s tone for a week. Wikipedia

Books and Literary Voice

Klein’s prose has become as central to her profile as her television work. You’ll Grow Out of It (Grand Central Publishing, 2016) collects essays about navigating femininity, ambition, and identity; the book became a New York Times bestseller and drew praise for its candor and construction. Her follow-up, I’ll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood (Harper, 2022), extends the project into the bewilderments of caregiving, aging, and selfhood, debuting as an instant bestseller. Together, the volumes map Klein’s evolution from “late bloomer” to a keen chronicler of the small negotiations that make up adult life. Hachette Book GroupHarperCollins

Critics have underlined the literary turn in her comedic voice: profiles and reviews in outlets such as Vanity Fair read her as part of a cohort of comic essayists translating stand-up’s precision into the reflective cadence of personal nonfiction. The result is hybrid: joke density and set-piece craft tethered to memory work, domestic detail, and cultural argument. Vanity Fair

Animation, Acting, and the Big Mouth Era

If the books extend inward, Klein’s most visible performance work projects outward through animation. On Netflix’s Big Mouth, she voices Jessi Glaser, a sardonic, whip-smart adolescent whose storylines about puberty, desire, and autonomy have given Klein a second canvas for her thematic preoccupations. Her contributions also include producing roles behind the scenes, linking the show’s ribald energy to nuanced character arcs. Wikipedia+1

Themes and Contributions

Across mediums, Klein’s signature concerns recur: the dissonance between cultural scripts and lived experience; the bodily and logistical realities of caregiving; the social theater of gender; and the absurdity that attends even the most earnest attempts to be good, competent, and present. She is less a confessionalist than a structuralist of feeling—using anecdote to reverse-engineer why a situation lands the way it does, and then building jokes that expose the gears. That sensibility travels neatly from sketch to essay to podcast mic.

Recognition and Ongoing Work

Industry recognition has followed the work rather than led it. The 2015 Emmy for Inside Amy Schumer affirmed Klein’s capacity to align a room of writers around an aesthetic; audience uptake of the books affirmed the appetite for a comic intelligence that respects the stakes of daily life. In recent years, she has continued to write for and consult on high-profile series (Dead to Me among them) while maintaining a presence on social platforms that function less as promotion than as occasional dispatches from a working writer’s life. WikipediaHarperCollins

SameAs / Social & Professional Links (naked URLs)

bohiney.com author page

dossier

(Twitter)

— You’ll Grow Out of It (Grand Central Publishing)

— I’ll Show Myself Out (Harper)

page at Harper

— Big Mouth (character reference)