Amy Poehler plays trying hard as funny without ever letting it look pathetic, which is why Leslie Knope and Joy both hold. Off screen she has spent a decade backing other women's sharper, stranger comedies, and that record is as good as her own.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Amy Poehler wanting something. Leslie Knope wants to turn a pit into a park; Joy wants the control room in a girl's head kept pleasant whatever is going on outside it. In both cases the comedy is in the effort, and in both cases Poehler plays it bright, fast and slightly too much, so that you can see the strain and like her for it. Lesser comics play trying hard as a joke on the character. Poehler plays it as the character's one real virtue.
She came up through improv, with the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe that moved to New York in 1996 and had a sketch series on Comedy Central from 1998 to 2000. Saturday Night Live took her in 2001, and from 2004 she co-anchored Weekend Update with Tina Fey, who has kept turning up beside her, in Mean Girls (2004) among others. She left in 2008, and the following year began Parks and Recreation, which ran seven seasons to 2015 and which she wrote and directed episodes of as well as leading.
The first six episodes are the problem, and the problem is Leslie. Poehler plays her as a fool who does not know it, and the programme agrees with her; most critics said so at the time. From the second season, under Michael Schur and Greg Daniels, the fool becomes a woman worth minding about, and it moved us more than we expected: somewhere in the third year we found we cared whether a small town in Indiana got its park, and what did it was Poehler refusing, week after week, to let Leslie's effort be the punchline. Pete Docter used the same quality in Inside Out (2015), where her Joy is bright to the point of exhaustion and the film is wise enough to make that the point, letting Phyllis Smith's Sadness in as relief. Inside Out 2 (2024) writes Joy tired instead, a good idea it keeps describing rather than acting.
Her other career is quieter and, episode for episode, better. Through Paper Kite Productions she produced Broad City (2014) and directed one of its episodes; with Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland she created Russian Doll (2019), eight episodes of a woman dying at her own birthday party, none of them wasted. Neither programme sounds like her, and that is the point: she has used her standing to get spikier women on screen than she plays herself. Her own features as director, Wine Country (2019) and Moxie (2021), stay nearer home, and some reviews of the first said it kept to the ensemble comedy she already knew. The voice has its limits too: sped up for Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009), it is indistinguishable from a smoke alarm, which is the processing's fault and not hers.
She has said that "success is people and process". On the evidence, the process is working best on other people's programmes, and she seems not to mind. Start Parks and Recreation at season two, then watch what she has produced, and judge her on both.
Biography
Amy Poehler is an American actor and comedian. After studying improv at Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic in the early 1990s, she co-founded the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe with Matt Besser, Ian Roberts and Matt Walsh. The group moved to New York City in 1996, where their work led to a Comedy Central sketch series in 1998 and later the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
Poehler joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2001, co-anchoring Weekend Update until 2008. She starred as Leslie Knope in the series Parks and Recreation (2009–2015). Her voice work includes Joy in Inside Out (2015) and Inside Out 2 (2024), as well as roles in Shrek the Third (2007) and other animated films.
