How ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ star Chelsea Peretti became ‘One of the Greats’

TORONTO – Chelsea Peretti’s ultra-confident onstage persona started as an act. But the comedian and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star says that faking self-assurance actually helped make it real.

“It’s funny because I think I started being interested in that kind of persona and then it wound up being kind of self-actualizing,” she said in a telephone interview.

“When you’re young, you think you can do anything. Then when you’re spit out into the world and you have to get a job… you start going, ‘Maybe I’m not this child genius that I thought I was.’ Hopefully now I have a more balanced view of things.”

In her new Netflix special premiering Friday, “Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats,” she said she tried to shed her “tough” persona and embrace the silliness that is also a part of her personality. The special opens with Peretti riding a motorcycle, reflecting on her “countless one-hour specials where she looked like a damn fool,” with clips of her adopting different ridiculous comedic styles.

Filmed live at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the special also plays with the genre’s convention of “reaction shots.” Dogs, clowns and a moustachioed man salting a boiled egg are among the unusual guests in Peretti’s audience.

“I really wanted to innovate and I wanted to show what it feels like to do stand-up for me. I wanted to be vulnerable, and show the things that you might see that are distracting,” she said.

“There are some very bizarre things you’ll see from being on stage. People don’t think you’re seeing them, but you really are seeing people unless you have the lights in the house completely out.”

Peretti, 36, hails from California and has been a familiar face on the stand-up circuit for years. Before starring alongside Andy Samberg and Terry Crews in Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” she was known for guest roles on “Louie” and “The Sarah Silverman Program.”

When she first started doing stand-up, she found she was always the “female comedian” on the line-up. Shows with multiple women taking the stage become “female shows,” whereas all-male rosters are never considered “male shows,” she said.

“The reason that I believe that my stand-up is good is that I talk about themes that human beings can relate to. Hopefully someday you can just be called a comedian and it won’t even be a ‘female comedian,’” she said.

She said she’s hopeful that things are changing. She mused that a joke she has about male confidence — “My fantasy of what it’s like to be a guy is you just wake up in the morning and your eyes open, and you’re like ‘I’m awesome! People probably want to hear what I have to say!’” — will become obsolete in a few years.

“Pretty much almost once a year… there’s this whole slew of articles that come out asking if women can be funny. I find it almost bizarre that society even tolerates the question, which to me seems hugely insulting. That’s like asking if someone can be intelligent,” she said.

“I think that people are getting increasingly intolerant of those kinds of questions. There’s been a long line of women that have certainly proven that we are a voice and we have a comedic sensibility because we’re human beings.”

But Peretti stressed that she didn’t want to dwell too much on her gender. She hopes her stand-up tackles topics that hit home for men and women.

“I hope it’s not all about being a woman,” she said. “The themes that I wanted to talk about in my stand-up are social media, being reclusive and having a fear of peeing and eating around people and a fear of sweating.

“I feel like there’s this weird fear of even just being human. I just hope that those themes resonate with people beyond just gendered stuff.”

— Follow @ellekane on Twitter.