Hannah Einbinder is ready for her next act

Before landing on “Everything Must Go” as the title of her first stand-up special, Hannah Einbinder considered a moniker more closely connected to her atypical outlook: “The Neurodivergent Hour.”

Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, the 28-year-old “Hacks” star has long wielded comedy as a tool for combating what, until recently, she would describe as “intense self-loathing.” While Einbinder has happily progressed in the self-esteem department, her special — filmed last month at El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles ahead of a mid-June release on Max — was forged over many years of stepping onstage to escape her swirling doubts and insecurities.

The climate-conscious comic calls the hour a “micro- and macro-examination of life on Earth.” Personal anecdotes blend with ecological observations about the state of the planet. Some carefully fashioned bits utilize mixed media and music. Einbinder also dons a variety of characters and affectations.

“I mean for the hour to capture the attention of someone with a brain like mine,” Einbinder says during a recent video chat from Los Angeles. “It started as relief for myself, from myself. Now, I really do want, for an hour, to give people a break from what lies beyond their doors.”

Einbinder’s special arrives on the heels of another long-anticipated release: Season 3 of “Hacks,” which premiered Thursday on Max after a two-year hiatus. Einbinder plays Ava Daniels, an alt-comedy writer hired to punch up material for fading stand-up giant Deborah Vance, in the acclaimed series, which already has earned co-star Jean Smart a pair of Emmys and Einbinder two nominations.

A stand-up first and foremost, Einbinder had barely acted before booking “Hacks.” But when Smart read opposite her for a pandemic-era chemistry test in a darkened soundstage, the actors separated by plexiglass, their bickering comedy proved deliciously combustible. Over the first two seasons, the actors mined no shortage of laughs and camaraderie from the characters’ cavernous generation gap. As Ava has matured, so has Einbinder’s on-screen craft.

“It’s wonderful to watch her gain such enormous confidence as an actress,” Smart says. “I mean, it’s kind of astonishing. She’s a complete natural. She is absolutely, organically in the moment.”

Einbinder’s uncanny instincts shouldn’t surprise: Her mother is original “Saturday Night Live” cast member Laraine Newman, and her father, Chad Einbinder, is a commercial director and former comic. When Einbinder made her stand-up debut as a student at Southern California’s Chapman University, opening for Nicole Byer, she poured a glass of whiskey for a dash of liquid courage but never took a sip.

“I just had it in my hand, and I walked out onstage and every ounce of nerves that I had totally dissolved,” Einbinder says. “I felt this feeling that I had never felt before but, of course, would go on to feel all the time performing, which is that I was out of my own head. That was something I so desperately needed at the time.”

Raised as a third-generation Angelino in a liberal Jewish household, Einbinder wholeheartedly embraces her L.A. roots. (“I really am the person who dreads ever getting on a plane,” she says, “because not inhaling a certain amount of smog disrupts my equilibrium.”) But she does recall enduring a fraught upbringing, to the extent that she can remember it at all.

As a child, Einbinder was placed in classes for students labeled “learning impaired.” Prescribed Adderall, she smoked heavy amounts of marijuana as a teen to tamp down the stimulant’s effect and slid into a yearslong stupor. It wasn’t until Einbinder cut off her Adderall regimen, while trying out for Chapman’s improv team, that the fog lifted.

“It was like night and day,” Einbinder says. “I snapped back in.”

Many viewers’ introduction to Einbinder was a March 2020 set on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” in which she took on a femme fatale persona, shared that Newman got pregnant with her at age 42 and, pausing for dramatic effect, explained: “Before that age she was … busy.” Einbinder has since made conceptual comedy — offbeat, stoner-adjacent and undefinably uproarious — a staple of her sets.

Einbinder’s sardonic wit is apparent over the course of the early-morning call, the timing of which she drolly downplays. “I’ve been up for hours,” she quips, “the fear of generations coursing through my veins.” Yet Einbinder can’t help but exude sincerity. Speaking before a bookshelf adorned with a menorah, a California license plate and the satirical text “A Very Gay Book,” Einbinder wells up when reflecting on her lost teenage years, alternately sniffling and chuckling while blotting tears with her hoodie.

“There’s a sweetness, almost an innocence about Hannah that contrasts sharply with her sagacity,” comedian and friend Chelsea Handler says over email. “That is what you see when she is onstage.”

This reporter has seen Einbinder perform twice. The first time, a headlining set at the DC Improv in June 2022, was a crisp and polished hour. The second, a 20-minute workshopping set last July at Los Angeles’s Largo at the Coronet, was a shaggier affair. As Einbinder worried the audience wasn’t getting its money’s worth and pivoted to her established material, she theatrically banged her head on a piano and apologized to any L.A. regulars who already knew the punchlines.

In naming her special “Everything Must Go,” Einbinder means it for an hour of material she has no plans to repeat. When it came time to film the special — captured over two performances on April 20 — the logistical demands of accommodating the cameras reduced the theater’s capacity from more than 700 to around 250, largely morphing the crowd into an intimate collection of her closest confidants. Einbinder’s friend Sandy Honig directed the special, and cinematographer Adam Bricker was among the many “Hacks” cohorts in the crew. As Einbinder both celebrated the hour and recognized she would never perform it again, she came to describe the occasion as “a wedding and a funeral all in one.”

“The command of the stage and the audience was just incredible,” says Smart, who attended both performances. “But, I mean, that’s her home. I told her, ‘You have completely found your voice. It’s in your bones.’ There is something about her that is absolutely unlike anybody else.”

If “Everything Must Go” was a mountain Einbinder long endeavored to scale, “Hacks” was a cliff she plunged off without looking. Even though she only aspired to be a stand-up comic, acting provided a clearer path to meaningful income. So Einbinder plugged away on the audition circuit, going through the motions until the “Hacks” pilot script and its incisive portrayal of comedy culture sparked her interest.

As bisexual comics with highly progressive politics, Einbinder and Ava have obvious similarities. Once Einbinder was cast, some of her quirks — such as her love of matcha and mushrooms — found their way into the script. (“But not the crazy kind of mushrooms, which are also great and very palpable tools for healing,” Einbinder dutifully clarifies.) Still, Einbinder seems mildly mortified by the notion that she and Ava are one and the same, making clear that she doesn’t share the character’s bratty insolence, confrontational edge or penchant for serial oversharing.

At least, not the Einbinder of today.

“Ava is like how I maybe was when I was taking Adderall and I was super aggro,” she acknowledges. “I’d, like, start a fight with a frat guy at a party. I really was that girl. So I would say that as I have connected to my core softness, that part of Ava is so unlike me.”

With Ava’s emotional evolution have come more opportunities for Einbinder to tap into her inherent compassion on-screen. As Season 3 kicks off, following Deborah’s decision to fire Ava and push her out of the nest in last season’s finale, the character has landed on the staff of a John Oliver-esque satirical news program. Ava has found tenuous peace in her personal life, as well. But feelings of abandonment still simmer for a character with more heart than her cutting persona may let on.

“There’s such an empathy and sensitivity that radiates from Hannah,” says writer Jen Statsky, who co-created “Hacks” with Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello. “She’s such a good person in her actual real life and such a wonderful listener, and she’s so emotional and in tune with other people’s emotions. That really comes out on-screen.”

Discussing her life-imitates-art rapport with Einbinder, Smart adds, “I have found myself turning to her at times when I’ve really needed to talk to somebody about deeply personal things. There’s just a love there and a trust that’s very rare. I feel maternal toward her, but at the same time, I feel like we’re the best of friends. It’s just a lovely thing.”

Noting that the “Hacks” team envisioned a five-season road map from the start, Einbinder understands her time as Ava will be up sooner rather than later. Now that she’s put a stand-up set on tape, Einbinder is envisioning her next act — both non-“Hacks” acting gigs, which she says are percolating, and the next special.

Building another hour from scratch is no small feat, especially for a comedian with gags as intricate as Einbinder’s. Case in point: When she opened for Handler in Denver a few years back, the combination of altitude sickness and her dense material left Einbinder sucking air from an oxygen mask in the green room between sets. “I struggle at sea level sometimes to get all my words out,” she says. “So it was really an effort, and I was really out of breath up there.”

As Einbinder relays the anecdote, she realizes in real time that she missed laughs that were there for the taking. “Frankly, I should have gone on with the mask and the tank,” she muses. “That would have been funnier. Next time, I suppose.”

Even now, years too late, she can’t help but think of a good bit. Such is a mind whose comic gears never stop spinning.