Jenny Slate comes out of her shell

After a brief and inglorious stint on “Saturday Night Live” — she dropped an F-bomb on her first night — Jenny Slate had a monster hit of her own with YouTube videos about a snail character named “Marcel the Shell."

Twenty-three million views later, she’s returned to the bigger screen as a bonkers mean girl on “Parks and Recreation” and a crazy publicist on “Kroll Show.” On the TV series “Married” and the indie film “Obvious Child,” Slate has become a headliner in her own right.

Slate and her husband, Dean Fleischer-Camp, wrote two popular children’s books, “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: Things About Me” and “Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I've Ever Been.” Slate reads a passage from the book in Marcel’s tiny, strange voice, which comes naturally; she talks like Marcel around the house, sometimes absent-mindedly.

But there are some rules. Slate says Fleischer-Camp “doesn’t like it when I do it to get out of doing stuff, like taking out the trash or walking the dogs. I’m also obviously not allowed to do it during romantic times.”

(Originally aired October 3, 2014)