Inkoo Kang

Jessica Williams leans forward when she talks. Part of it is nervousness. “I’m an anxious person,” she explains after her photo shoot in Hell’s Kitchen, belying the hyperconfidence that made her a breakout performer on The Daily Show and the Comedy Central institution’s youngest correspondent in 2012. The other part’s a sharklike eagerness to insert a joke wherever possible. When I ask about whether it was tough, at the age of 22, to get along with her Daily Show coworkers, she tells me, “Well, there were always dogs running around there. So first of all I made friends with the dogs, and then I made friends with the…. No, I’m just kidding.” (Her sunny declarations of “just kidding” pop up throughout our chat.) At 27, Williams knows how to get you to laugh. Now she’s ready to conquer new worlds. Step one is Sundance Film Festival sensation The Incredible Jessica James, a millennial rom-com written as a star vehicle for her by Jim Strouse (Grace Is Gone, The Winning Season). The fictional Jessica is something like Greta Gerwig’s titular character in Frances Ha, an aspiring Brooklyn artist (in Jessica’s case, a playwright) whose passion can’t find an audience. Jessica is a lot flintier than Gerwig’s character, though. “Of course you [like me],” the scribe tells her love interest, played by Chris O’Dowd. “Everybody does. I’m freaking dope.” Williams’s IRL role as the film’s executive producer ensures the Brooklyn comedian’s voice is all over her breakthrough movie. She tells me y