The genius of Kristen Wiig

I’ve been admiring Kristen Wiig in bit parts (ADVENTURELAND, KNOCKED UP)  for a while now, but I hadn’t watched enough Saturday Night Live (SNL) to discover that she is a comic genius…until I watched her host the SNL primetime Christmas special as Gilly.

With Gilly – the little trouble-causing, Orphan Annie-resembling, minx – Wiig’s face becomes elastic, her voice and spacious timing are dastardly neurotic while her eyes bug right out of her head. You can tell that Wiig has fine-tuned her comic skills with more than 10,000 hours of rehearsal, improve and performance from the sheer intensity…she never breaks character (Jimmy Falon anyone?). With years of training as a member of The Groundlings, her focus and comic timing leave some of the other SNL cast members appearing amateurish and boring.

Digging up the best holiday related clips from season 1 to the present, the entire special was hilarious, but it was the Gilly character that forever sold me on Wiig’s mighty thespian powers.

The Gilly character and her childish desire to create anarchy while remaining mostly silent holds a mirror up to society. She becomes both light and dark, good and evil…and Wiig abandons her mastery of sarcasm with Gilly. Sadistic and adorable, Gilly is Wiig at her most brilliant…rolling the entirety of the dark chaos of the human condition into a character that barely speaks. It’s both creative and creepy…and I totally understand why they had Wiig host the Christmas clips show as Gilly.

I absolutely get it…and it’s genius. Look for Wiig to become SNL’s next break-out superstar.