“I’m seeing her go down my path,” Newman told me, adding that it did give her pause, before saying, “But she’s not me. Her recent Audible memoir, “ May You Live in Interesting Times,” describes young success in deeply ambivalent terms. “As a parent, you do your best,” she said, adding that she is also self-critical. Newman said putting her daughter on medication was a difficult but considered decision. “I feel that there are two forces at odds inside of me,” she said, “a very sincere little puddle with a hat on and then a shoe kicking and splashing the puddle.” So it was not a surprise when the week after we spoke about her start, she wrote me a direct message on Instagram saying that she had been thinking about this emotional moment every day. While her onstage persona is preternaturally confident, exuding laid-back charisma, Einbinder is relentlessly self-critical, following deeply felt statements with second thoughts and then self-mockery. Newman isn’t the only one in the family with a spooky legend. “There are explanations, of course,” she said elusively.
One of the first things Einbinder told me over conversations spanning several weeks is that there are five or six years of her life she barely remembers. Yet Einbinder said Ava was actually more like an earlier iteration of herself, from a time she sees as somewhat lost. “She is a 25-year-old bisexual comedy person living in Los Angeles who has just recently had a life-altering thing happen, so on the surface, those things line up,” Einbinder said of the character, adding that while she did not get canceled for a tweet, the lockdown did eliminate her work as a comic right after she quit her day job. She must take work coming up with jokes for an older Las Vegas stand-up played by Jean Smart, setting up a culture clash of two generations of female comics, one of whom shares similarities with Einbinder. In her first major acting role, a juicy part that lets her demonstrate both deadpan comic and subtle dramatic skills, Einbinder, now 25, plays a troubled young humor writer named Ava who is blindsided by a scandal from a bad tweet that craters her career. While the pandemic slowed momentum she might have built from her “Late Show” appearance, a new HBO Max series, “Hacks” (premiering Thursday), may just speed it up. “My parents met in A.A., so heavy concepts were introduced early,” she said in a video call from her home in the Silver Lake neighborhood. Einbinder, whose father is the comedy writer Chad Einbinder, described herself in an interview as a classic Los Angeles kid who grew up fast. Less understood was that her mother is Laraine Newman, a founding member of the pioneering company the Groundlings and part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast. It was clear from this unorthodox opening that this was a precocious and poised comic more interested in originality than convention. “My mother had me when she was 42, because before that she was” - Einbinder paused to swivel her head - “busy.” Then introducing herself, she adopted the persona of a beat poet, pantomiming flicking a cigarette as the lights dimmed and jazz played. “Good evening,” she said, followed by a grave-faced beat of silence odd enough to get a laugh. Right before the shutdown last year, the comic Hannah Einbinder became, at 23, the youngest (and as of now last) stand-up to perform a set on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” making a splash in her network television debut.
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