Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Esther Povitsky: Hot For My Name’ On Comedy Central, Making A Mockery Of Her Upbringing

Comedy Central postponed Esther Povitsky’s first solo comedy special from early June when the #BlackLivesMatter took center stage across America. Now in mid-July, watch as Povitsky mixes documentary footage with stand-up and attempts to turn her real-life upbringing into a reality show melodrama. Whether her parents are the villains she portrays, or willing co-conspirators, is up to the viewer.

ESTHER POVITSKY: HOT FOR MY NAME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: You may recognize Povitsky from her role on Hulu’s Dollface, which stars Kat Dennings, or from her starring role before that on Alone Together, which ran for two seasons on Freeform. Povitsky also has popped up in episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Love and Difficult People.

The Los Angeles comedy community dubbed her “Little Esther” when she arrived on the scene, due to her youthful look. At 32, she still looks younger than her age, and is definitely going places professionally. But for her first comedy special, she wanted to take a camera crew back home with her to Skokie, Ill., mostly to taunt her parents for raising her in such a way that she could only become a comedian, then taking Morrie and Mary Povitsky on the road with her to prove she’s done them proud all the same.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: By cutting back and forth from the stage in Los Angeles to her homecoming with her parents, illustrating and demonstrating some of her premises, it’s a lot like another recent special, Yvonne Orji’s Momma, I Made It! for HBO. That Povitsky uses staged docudrama with her closest relatives to her comedy advantage also bears a slight resemblance to last year’s Whitmer Thomas special on HBO. If Thomas was The Golden One, then what role does Povitsky hold in her family tree? For her own part, Povitsky describes herself on Twitter as: “Cute but gross.”

Memorable Jokes: The interactions with her parents hit home, so to speak, precisely because Povitsky wanted to make Morrie and Mary such central characters.

The hour opens with them enjoying a banana split outside the Dairy Star, with Little Esther telling her mother and father about how stand-up comedians are born. “Don’t you know? It’s a famous thing. If someone is a comedian, then they came from rough, you know, something bad, you know? Because you need to go onstage and get attention from a big group of people? That means that something’s wrong with you.”

What does Morrie think of that theory? “Oh wow. That is such horseshit!”

It sets the stage for a generational she-said-they-said throughout the hour, as they share their conflicting recollections about Esther’s childhood and adolescence.

At the end of the hour, Esther gets the last word by replacing Morrie and Mary with professional actors (Christine Taylor now playing her mother) in a comedy sketch that turns into a music video, with Povitsky singing and dancing: “I Look More Like My Dad.”

Our Take: When Povitsky leans into just how young she still looks, and jokes about the kind of men who are attracted to her, and then the very nature of men lusting after 18-year-olds, that whole routine resonates so much stronger now, in the wake of allegations against male comedians within the L.A. scene for dating and pursuing teen girls, than it would have even just a month and a half ago, when Comedy Central originally intended to premiere her special.

Why do men glorify “barely legal” teen girls, indeed? And why has our culture tacitly condoned such behavior for so long? Povitsky doesn’t try to provide the answer, nor should she have to, in this hour. Instead, the hour is all about her and her need for attention and adoration.

By the time her parents have traveled to New York City to watch Povitsky perform at Gotham Comedy Club, then attend a bizarre meeting with Comedy Central executives, both mom and dad have come to terms with the idea that they’re essentially co-stars in their daughter’s special. The meeting at Comedy Central headquarters also sets off unintentional irony alarms, as neither Anne Harris nor Jordy Ellner are with the cable network following mass layoffs over the past several months.

Povitsky, though, remains positioned for future stardom. Her co-writer for the sketch musical finale, Dan Bulla, is a former Saturday Night Live writer who wrote the screenplay for Adam Sandler’s Sandy Wexler movie on Netflix. And Happy Madison’s imprint is all over this hour. Allen Covert is an EP, as is Nicholas Goosen, who also directed Povitsky here.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Povitsky may joke that “both my names are ugly,” but she’s proving she didn’t need to change either of them to succeed in show business.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Esther Povitsky: Hot For My Name on Comedy Central