Tina Fey

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Tina Fey: Queen of satire
Her Sarah Palin act has provided the US election with a hilarious backdrop. Could she prove a more effective critic than Barack Obama?
4 October 2008
Independent.co.uk

If America wakes up on the morning of Wednesday 5 November to discover that John McCain has taken the White House and a moose-shooting former beauty queen from Alaska is now vice-president of the most powerful nation on Earth, there will be only one stronghold of the liberal elite that isn't reduced to outright mourning. That will be the New York headquarters of NBC in midtown Manhattan, where a select handful of TV executives will be punching the air, re-examining their share options and celebrating the fact that their employee Tina Fey can carry on as the hottest property in US broadcasting for another four years.

Fey is a comedian, actress, and head writer for NBC's hit shows Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, who won no fewer than three gongs at the recent Emmy Awards. More pertinently, she is responsible for the hugely funny impersonations of Sarah Palin that have propelled SNL to record ratings, become some of the most-watched video clips on the internet, and driven a fair portion of the agenda of the presidential election race in the process.

Clad in thick spectacles and pastel-coloured jackets, and helped by their uncanny physical similarities, Fey and her merciless send-ups of the former beauty queen from Wasilla have done more to undermine Palin's campaign for the vice-presidency than the efforts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the entire Democratic Party attack machine combined.

The outwardly-shy 38-year-old is now feted by the Washington press corps for providing a valuable satirical counterpoint to the Republican campaign, successfully deconstructing such central pivots of their ticket as Palin's claim that Alaska's physical proximity to Alaska makes her an expert on international affairs.

"Every morning when Alaskans wake up, they look outside and see if there are any Russians hanging around, and ask them what they are doing there," said Fey's version of Palin, in a hilarious send-up aired a fortnight ago. "And if they can't give a good enough reason, it's our responsibility to say 'Shoo!' and get them out of there."

Her sketches, which are now being quoted at dinner parties across the land, might explain why, in the words of USA Today, political commentators now believe that making voters forget the "Tina Fey Factor" provided Sarah Palin's chief challenge in the run-up to Thursday's vice-presidential debate.

The San Francisco Chronicle said the election could now turn on Palin's ability to make viewers forget the "cultural caricature", advising her in the debate to "acknowledge Fey's impression to help deflate its power". The Washington Post, for its part, noted sternly that some of Palin's recent gaffes have been so significant that Fey has taken to quoting her verbatim.

The Tina Fey phenomenon isn't just constrained to the political arena, though. In addition to her uncanny ability to satirise a politician who has a propensity to spout gobbledegook, she is currently helping to pioneer an important comic movement. To her fans, Fey is in the vanguard of a generation of sassy female performers who are now setting the agenda in US comedy. Together with her occasional collaborator Sarah Silverman, another edgy and sometimes potty-mouthed star, this makes Fey one of contemporary America's most alluring feminist heroes.

Her emergence in such lofty realms goes back to the critical and commercial success of 30 Rock, a sitcom she created and stars in, which won four awards at last month's Emmys, of which three went to Fey personally. When she stepped up on stage having achieved hat-trick of awards, she provided one of the evening's most memorable one-liners, saying that the trophy for Outstanding Comedy Series "actually belongs to everyone, so I don't like it as much as the other two".

The programme is set in the offices of a television company similar to NBC, and debuted exactly two years ago. It is said to have been inspired Fey's real-life experiences behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live, which she joined as a writer in 1997.

Its title is a corruption of NBC's head office address, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Fey plays a neurotic head writer at the network who is constantly forced to sacrifice her artistic credibility to navigate between her hopeless co-writers and right-wing boss, who is played by Alec Baldwin, in a role that has reinvigorated his career. The success has allowed Fey to start making waves as a film actress. Her debut film Baby Mama made more than $63m, and she is scheduled to return to the big screen next year in a new Ricky Gervais title, This Side of Truth.

The irony of Fey's recent rise has been that the lion's share of her original success came behind, rather than in front of camera. Born in 1970 and brought up in middle-class Pennsylvania, her route into showbusiness came via Second City, a small but well-regarded improvisational theatre in Chicago, where she took evening classes in the early 1990s, after graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in drama.

"I had a vague notion Second City was there in Chicago, and I just wanted to be near it, to see what I could do," she recalled, during an interview with The Washington Post in 2004. "This is where I met all my dearest friends in my life now. I met them all at that time." Among those "dearest friends" was Fey's future husband, composer Jeff Richmond, whom she married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony (a nod to her mother's ancestry), and with whom she now has a three-year-old daughter, Alice. The couple moved to New York in 1997, so Fey could make her debut as a writer for Saturday Night Live.

Within two years, she had been promoted to head writer, the first female to take the role in the show's 33-year history, which at the time was considered a signal appointment. The programme's producer, Lorne Michaels explained her rise by complimenting her ability to "get things done", and saying her jokes were distinguished by "intelligence and attack, an attitude. There's something for you to enjoy after you've finished laughing".

Michaels was also a central figure in Fey's next leap, to become a major screen personality. Having seen her perform a sketch she'd created with Saturday Night Live colleague Rachel Dratch at a New York theatre, he persuaded her to audition for the presenter's role in the "Weekend Update" segment of the show. When Fey made her debut in the slot in late 2000, she began to gain a following. Viewers loved her spectacles and her prim demeanour, and became fascinated by the scar on her left cheek – about which she once told The New York Times: "It's a childhood injury that was kind of grim. And it kind of bums my parents out for me to talk about it."

The Washington Post started describing her as an "anchor minx", while gossip magazines dubbed her a TV "hottie". (She claims to have kept the cuttings to show to her children.) Soon she had become a minor sex symbol of late-night TV. "There's a group of people who feel Tina can do no wrong in my eyes," Michaels has said. "But that's because she's just wrong less often than other people."

Now, though, Fey has achieved mainstream success, thanks both to the growing critical acclaim showered on 30 Rock and universal appeal of her Sarah Palin impersonation, which perfectly mimics the Alaska governor's yokelish accent, and perfectly replicates her propensity to wink uneasily yet vaguely seductively at the camera when she lands in a tight sport.

Although it's a job that NBC would be happy to have her doing for some time, Fey – one of the many Hollywood liberals hoping for a Barack Obama victory – has selflessly claimed that she hopes to put an end to the potentially lucrative role. "I want to be done playing this lady by 5 November," she said backstage at the Nokia Theatre after the Emmy Awards. "So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady, that would be good for me."

A life in brief

Born: 18 May 1970, in Pennsylvania.

Early life: Grew up outside Philadelphia with her parents, a paramedic and a housewife, and one brother. A lover of comedy from an early age, she found she could amuse her friends at school. Studied drama at the University of Virginia, graduated in 1992 and moved to Chicago where she started working and taking classes at the Second City improv club.

Career: In 1995 she was discovered at Second City by 'Saturday Night Live', eventually becoming the first female head writer in the show's history. In 2004 she wrote the hit film 'Mean Girls', starring Lindsay Lohan, and she gave up the 'SNL' head writer job in 2005. She now writes and stars in NBC's Emmy-winning series '30 Rock'.

Family: Married to Jeff Richmond, a director at Second City. They have a daughter, Alice Zenobia Richmond, born on 10 September 2005. All three live in New York City.

She says: "Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity."

They say: "Tina has a gift of knowing how to push things as far as she can and still be on a network." Alec Baldwin, star of '30 Rock'

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I'm not sure if calling her 'The Queen of Satire' is fair - but I've only seen her doing the Palin sketches, so I don't know if she's got a wide range.

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Tina Fey's Scar From Childhood Slasher Incident
A stranger cut her when she was a toddler playing in her front yard
December 1, 2008

From the multiple Emmy wins for "30 Rock" to the Sarah Palin impersonations on "Saturday Night Live," comedian Tina Fey has become a name and face that everybody has come to recognize this year.

Being thrust into the spotlight has drawn attention to a thin scar on the left side of her face, which Fey explains in the January issue of Vanity Fair was the result of a childhood attack. "It's impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it," says the 38-year-old comedian. When Fey was only 5 years old and living in Upper Darby, Penn., a stranger attacked her out of the blue. Explains her husband, Jeff Richmond: "It was in, like, the front yard of her house, and somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen."

Fey dealt with the trama well though and didn't think of the resulting scar until adulthood. "I proceeded unaware of it. I was a very confident little kid. It's really almost like I'm kind of able to forget about it, until I was on-camera," says Fey, who often shoots scenes with her right side to the camera.

Also in the interview, the 5-foot 4-inch actress reveals how she had to lose 30 pounds when she started at "Saturday Night Live" and addresses the criticism about her spoof of vice-presidential candidate Palin. "What made me super-mad about it was that it seemed very sexist toward me and her," she says. "The implication was that she's so fragile, which she is not. She's a strong woman. And then, also, it was sexist because, like, who would ever go, 'Well, I thought it was sort of mean to Richard Nixon when Dan Aykroyd played him,' and 'That seemed awful mean to George Bush when Will Ferrell did it.'"

Fey currently portrays Liz Lemon, the head writer of a fictional sketch comedy series on her show "30 Rock." Her big-screen writing and acting credits include "Baby Mama" and "Mean Girls."

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Tina Fey and the success of 30 Rock
The writer, actor and American female comedian has a pedigree that goes back to sitcom 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live
Stephen Armstrong
timesonline.co.uk

When Tina Fey was growing up in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s, aged five or six, her dad would let her and her brother stay up to watch late-night comedy. Mr Fey didn’t seem bothered by the lateness of the hour or the grown-up content — Fey remembers watching Monty Python, Mary Tyler Moore, George Burns, Carol Burnett, Rhoda, and Laverne & Shirley. The only parental controls were quality. He let his children watch the classic 1950s sitcom about domestic strife, The Honeymooners — “But not The Flintstones, because he thought that was a cheap rip-off of The Honeymooners,” she giggles.

What she remembers from that time, as she sits in her New York office during a break from a writer’s day on her hit sitcom 30 Rock, is how different female comedy parts were. “Mary Tyler Moore was a working woman whose story lines were not always about dating and men.” She seems slightly surprised at her own statement. “They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about.”

So when Fey set about creating 30 Rock’s lead character, Liz Lemon — the head writer on a sketch show that tangentially resembles the US comedy institution Saturday Night Live — she thought back to those dark 1970s nights, snuggled on the couch laughing with her dad, and she set out a list of ground rules that, even as she desperately clarifies them later, underline one of the problems in comedy today.

“We wanted to make sure that everything we did with Liz Lemon rang true on some level — to me or to one of the other women in the room,” Fey explains. “And we did kind of know we were going into her as . . . well, as the opposite of a Sex and the City character. She’s not about wish fulfilment or fantasy. I personally am a big fan of SATC — but it’s pretty and it’s fun to watch, like candy. One is a fairy tale, and the other is a grim fairy tale.” She pauses, wonders if she’s been too rude, and rushes in with: “I do really enjoy Sex and the City in spite of what I just said.” Another pause. “I think I identify with Miranda. The redhead lawyer. I enjoyed her story lines most.”

When you flick through previous interviews with the new queen of comedy, it’s clear most journalists have worked out why she dodged the fairy tale and chose Miranda, the sharp-talking lawyer, as her favourite — it’s all about genetics. Fey’s dad has a German background, and her mum is of Greek stock. Hey, those crazy Greeks with their flapping hands, magazine opinion has it, crushed by the German genes, with their cold, ruthless streak. Fey’s career took her from performing live improv theatre in Chicago straight onto the writers’ table at Saturday Night Live, coming up with the smarts in the heart of Manhattan. She also lost a bit of weight and tidied up her hair once she arrived, a doggedly pursued process that has — seriously — been compared in print with Leni Riefenstahl’s makeover of the Third Reich. One writer described Fey as a “sprite with a Rommel battle plan”.

All of this is kind of hard to square with the cute, dark-haired, 5ft 4in but slim and toned woman with a sly grin and regular fits of giggles giving this interview. If this woman had made Triumph of the Will, she would probably have tickled the Ubermenschen as they stretched their arms forward until they dropped their pose and doubled up laughing. Fey is working on a project with Sacha Baron Cohen about a Jewish musician joining a punk band, and spent three months of 2008 ripping Sarah Palin to pieces with terrifyingly perfect impressions on SNL. Rommel? Not really.

It’s worth a brief aside on the Sarah Palin thing. Fey’s uncanny version of McCain’s running mate has been credited with everything from boosting 30 Rock’s ratings, and thus saving it, to gaining her recognition outside the hardcore comedy crowd that has long adored her. (And maybe adored her a bit too much. On a recent junket, a journalist said he’d been watching 30 Rock nonstop on DVD, and there was something he needed to know: what was the import of the framed photo of the two thermostats sitting behind Liz Lemon’s desk? “Well,” said Fey, “that was put there by our very talented set dressers, and I guess it’s supposed to look like comic boobs.” “Oh . . . okay,” said the journalist, seemingly downcast. “I thought maybe there was some kind of a connection to you, and it had a hidden meaning.” “That one has — there’s just no hidden meaning there,” she consoled him. “It’s comedy boobs.”)

Certainly, via YouTube the Palin skits played out to millions around the world, all grimly fascinated by the appeal of a woman described by the right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh as: “Babies. Guns. Jesus. Hot damn!” It’s not something Fey is entirely comfortable with, however. This isn’t only down to her liberal politics — her parents were Republicans, but she was on the picket line during last year’s writers’ strike — it’s also to do with how she fought her way up.

“I had a great time doing it,” she explains carefully, “but it was one of the strangest things that’s ever happened to me. You can grow up thinking, ‘I want to be on SNL one day’ or ‘I want to be in a movie some day’, but you never think, ‘I hope there’s a politician who looks just like me.’ So much of everything I’ve ever done has come out of hard work and just hanging in there, being the last one standing at the bar — and then to have that fall in my lap was just crazy. Having done plays in Chicago for two actors and then all of a sudden people are just saying, ‘Yes! Put the outfit on! You can say whatever you want!’ ” And she almost shivers at the thought.

Because, whether it’s the Greek Parthenon-building genes or the German opera-writing genes or, who knows, growing up a bit dumpy at a high school full of sculpted cool kids, Fey has worked very hard to get where she is today. Consider the CV: 38 years old; movies such as Mean Girls ($130m at the box office) and Baby Mama ($64m) under her belt; head writer and face of the most successful comedy show in history; writer, producer and star of her own sitcom; five Emmy awards, three Golden Globes. All of it, to an extent, prompted by mean kids mocking her natural adolescent awkwardness. She used her brains and her wit and her drive to swim the shark-infested playground pool — no way is she going back to that “what you look like is what you are” agenda.

She recalls starting to use the funny stuff she’d been so avidly consuming at home as a weapon at school when she was about 12 or 13. “You start to try and use that as a way to draw attention away from just how greasy you are. And squat. It’s good deflection,” she shrugs. She was like Janis in Mean Girls: she didn’t run with the cool crowd, but she was sharp enough to keep the bullies off her back and avoid being plucked from the herd by scavengers. She was pretty sporty, but found an outlet for all those pent-up years of late-night comedy-watching in an anonymous column in the school newspaper, written as The Colonel. Mostly poking fun at students and staff, she sailed close to the wind with double entendres that sometimes became a little too single. “Anals of history”, for example, proved especially trying to the school establishment.

From there it was an uneasy drama degree at the University of Virginia, followed by a revelation when she joined Chicago’s The Second City improv troupe. “I studied the usual acting methods at college — Stanislavsky and whatnot,” she has said, “but none of it really clicked for me. At The Second City, I learnt that your focus should be entirely on your partner. Suddenly it all made sense.”

Indeed, The Second City gave her pretty much everything she wanted. She met her husband, Jeff Richmond, a composer on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, while there. She mastered her trade. And then, in 1997, SNL’s head writer, Adam McKay, reached over from New York City and pulled her onto his team. For American comedians, Saturday Night Live is . . . well, imagine the Blue Peter studio had also recognisably hosted Monty Python, Not the Nine O’Clock News, Harry Enfield and Ben Elton’s Friday Night Live, The Day Today and The 11 O’Clock Show. If you are interested in comedy, you will have watched that familiar shiny floor every week of your life. You will have seen it spawn The Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World, Coneheads and A Mighty Wind, as well as launch the careers of Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, Robert Downey Jr, Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi et al. Now imagine you were offered a job writing for the show. Nervous?

“Stepping into the studio for the first time was momentous,” Fey admits. “The only equivalent would be doing The Tonight Show — stepping into the show that I grew up watching. And it has a live audience. Even with a taped audience, you can get them jacked up and they know it’s their job to pretend they like it. But especially in New York, that live audience is a real proving ground.” The brutality of this natural selection helped her develop her comedy voice — which, she was slightly surprised to find, was really all about the sisterhood.

“I think there’s a huge overlap in the middle, where funny is just funny — everyone gets it and laughs at that,” she explains. “But then I think there are certain kinds of jokes that women prefer and certain kinds that men prefer. Like, men will gravitate towards screaming and bears fighting robots. On the female side, if left alone, we will drift towards more and more character detail and minutiae. The tiniest behaviour will amuse us.”

After making head writer on SNL, she became a performer on the show. She played the Bush twins with Baby Mama buddy Amy Poehler, but she feels she slightly missed the mark on her favourite target: the sex industry.

“I am obsessed with things like strippers and Playboy Playmates,” she says with a short laugh, so you’re not sure if she’s joking or not. “I’m obsessed with portraying that as how grim I think it is. My friend Stephnie Weir did the best version of a sketch that I was always figuring out how to do. She did it perfectly, playing a stripper at a bachelor party who had to bring her kid because the babysitter fell through. The discomfort of that really makes me laugh.”

When Fey pitched 30 Rock to NBC in 2002, she originally set it at a 24-hour news channel. Kevin Reilly, NBC’s then entertainment president, encouraged her to bring it closer to home — to write what she knew. “A portion of 30 Rock is autobiographical,” she admits. “Our world is a little more bent, but the relationships reflect the kind of overfamiliarity and competitiveness mixed with friendship mixed with contempt. It’s a very, um, specific kind of workplace. The one thing about our show was that we could never portray writers as heroic,” she chuckles. “They’re the least heroic, most cowardly, lazy group of people you could spend time with.”

She explains that 30 Rock’s fast-talking style “comes from the fact that our show needs to be two and a half minutes longer than it is — I’m trying to fit five pounds’ worth of ideas into a two-pound bag”. She was stunned when Alec Baldwin agreed to play the part she’d written for him, and she’s proud she’s found work for so many Second City alumni in the cast.

Outside work, she has a daughter — famously returning to work with the line, “NBC has me under contract. The baby and I only have a verbal agreement” — and has spoken about having another child, but right now she has an exhausting schedule. She begins filming Date Night with Steve Carell next month, and has joined the cast of the animated film Master Mind for DreamWorks alongside Robert Downey Jr. “I work, and then whenever I have any other time, I’m with my daughter, and then I go to sleep,” she says. “I think you basically have to abandon the dreams of having any other adult activities in your life. You have to go to sleep whenever your child goes to sleep. That’s basically how we’re doing it.”

So now that she’s the most powerful woman in comedy, why hasn’t she lost her initial defensive need to bite back with humour? Why still have that drive? She begins carefully: “I try to keep learning, but I do think there is some . . .” She pauses, then makes a curious switch into the third person. “If you ask someone else, they would probably tell you there is something to do with gender and telling the truth about women. At least, as truthfully as I can see it. To let them be flawed in the way they are flawed. I don’t know. I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. And I don’t think anyone’s really doing it.”

And for a moment she’s curled up on the sofa in Pennsylvania, watching all those smart funny women on late-night TV, with her arms around her daddy, thinking just how great that world must be to live in. And how disappointing that she’s now the only one who cares. The moment passes, and I ask for advice for British newcomers to the show — who may have come to 30 Rock through the Palin skits, the internet or her movies. “Well,” she smiles, “just relax, sit down, have a glass of wine, take your pants off and watch it.”

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It's a Fey world
Her impeccable take on Sarah Palin propelled her from late night television to international news. DONALD CLARKE meets the talented Tina Fey, who admits it's a role she'll never live down
The Irish Times -
April 17, 2010

IF THERE WERE such a body as the International Union of Political Satirists then it would, by now, surely have erected a statue to Sarah Palin. The departure of the walking malapropism that was George Bush was supposed to have made life unmanageable for members of this supposed IUPS. One imagines the gang all sitting in the clubhouse crying pathetic tears into their martinis. But, hang on a minute. Who’s this stomping her way down the western seaboard? It’s the moose-hunting, liberal-baiting, bible-thumping governor of the US’s most obscure state. The IUPS is saved.

The person who profited most from Ms Palin’s arrival was the talented Tina Fey. To that point, Ms Fey, a dark-haired, sharp-featured Pennsylvanian, was modestly well known as a key player on the Saturday Night Live sketch show and as co-creator and star of a relatively new sitcom entitled 30 Rock.

Her sing-song, faux naïve impersonation of Palin on SNL – “I can see Russia from my house” – changed all that overnight. Fey achieved what every comedian must secretly long for: she went from appearing on late night television to featuring on the six o’clock news.

“Well, it definitely allowed people to see me who had never seen me,” she agrees. “I guess it’s going to be a permanent thing – which I don’t mind. When I die, the clip they will show at the Emmy Awards will be that one. It’s like it’s on my permanent record.”

That seems like a very mature attitude. Fey has achieved a great deal in her 39 years, but it would be churlish to resent the fame that one particular performance has brought. She really does seem like a sober, upright sort of person.

In her latest film, a nippy comedy entitled Date Night , Tina stars opposite Steve Carell as one half of a suburban couple who, while making a rare trip into New York City, get caught up in a maelstrom of urban depravity. Fey is somewhat less prissy than her character, but she seems no less ordered and disciplined. Indeed, during a recent interview with the New Yorker, she admitted to being a bit of a square.

This is an interesting comment from somebody who came up through Saturday Night Live . In the 1970s and 1980s that show was famous for spawning such boozy, druggy talents as John Belushi and Chris Farley (both of whom died prematurely). These are less hedonistic times, but the comedy circuit is still regarded as a fairly sodden environment.

There can’t be too many squares on the chortle-bus. “Oh, I was and am very square,” she says with a straight face. “I was never a drinker. I never tried drugs in my life. I have a lack of curiosity that’s kept me safe. I guess I am kind of similar to the character in Date Night . Mind you, Saturday Night Live had changed – it had quietened down by the time I arrived in the late nineties. But I must be honest and say that I was still the squarest one there. That said, I didn’t feel like an outsider. I had great friendships with all those guys.”

Her parents will be so proud to read her non-confession. Fey comes from a stable background in the residential outskirts of Philadelphia. She worked hard at school and took a degree in writing plays and acting at the University of Virginia. With her diploma safely on the mantelpiece, Tina dallied with the notion of doing graduate work but, already infected by the comedy bug, elected instead to move to Chicago and make an attempt to work her way into the famous Second City improvisational comedy troupe. She now happily admits that improv became like a drug to her. When she eventually secured a regular spot with Second City, she felt that she’d come home. “I was lucky in that my parents were very supportive,” she remembers. “They never tried to push me into another career. My father is an artist as a hobby – he has written a few books – and he understood this impulse that was driving me. They never said: ‘Oh dear, why don’t you study entertainment law instead? That would be just as much fun as being on television’. ”

Tina doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who stands on tables and sings Abba songs at parties. Polite, but very measured, she seems surprisingly introverted for someone who lives her life so publicly. Was this always the case? Did the seven-year-old Tina, when attending children’s birthday parties, elbow the balloon-animal maker aside to recite her latest poem?

“No. I really don’t think so,” she says. “I was a pretty shy kid. I find a lot of women in comedy were obedient, good students. It’s interesting. Whereas, with men, going on stage is often a way of challenging excess energy, with women it’s often a way of drawing out quieter people and finally allowing them to break loose. There’s a real contrast there.” She would have had a chance to ponder that contrast when she went to work – first as a writer, then also as a performer – for Saturday Night Live in 1997. Janeane Garofalo, the bolshie actor and comedian, claims that, when she worked on the show in the mid-1990s, it was a festival of “fag-bashing and using the words ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’.”

Garofalo credits Fey with making SNL seem a little less like the emanations of a male locker room. “I am not sure I can reply to that,” she says. “The personnel changed before I came. By the time I got there you had people like Will Ferrell, who is a hero of ‘manly’ comedy, but is very sweet and gentle. Then there were women like Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler who, frankly, wouldn’t take any shit from anybody.”

The issue of women in comedy is still, well, an issue. Before I meet Tina, I saunter into the press conference for Date Night and encounter a journalist asking why so few female actors get their names above the title in mainstream comic features. These days, he puffs, it seems to be just Tina and Sandra Bullock.

“Yeah, me and Sandra Bullock. That’s how I see things,” she laughs. “There have always been plenty of female comics on TV but they have had problems making the jump to features. I don’t think it’s an institutional problem. The barriers between TV and movies are coming down though. There’s no longer any stigma to television.”

At any rate, Saturday Night Live has always offered female comics space to thrive. As well as Garofalo and Fey, the show has nurtured such talent as Jane Curtin, Laurie Metcalf, Gilda Radner and Sarah Silverman. Those performers have, however, had to move into movies or sitcoms to achieve international fame. Saturday Night Live itself has never really registered outside north America. Indeed, Fey’s Sarah Palin aside, it’s hard to think of a single SNL routine or character that has made a noise on this side of the Atlantic. “When I first saw Sarah Palin I thought: well, she has brown hair and glasses,” Fey says. “My husband said we looked alike but I didn’t see it. Then all these phone calls kept coming in saying the same thing. So, I had to accept it.”

Fey’s version of Palin – playing opposite Amy Poehler’s Hillary Clinton – emerged fully formed on its first outing. Fey played up the governor’s flirty wink and had great fun with her bogus folksiness. The routine was so effective that, in order not to seem a bad sport, Palin eventually felt obliged to appear on the show opposite her heightened doppelgänger. We have a fairly clear idea what Fey thinks of Palin’s politics (she’s not a fan) but I am interested to hear what she thinks of her as a person. “I certainly wouldn’t claim to know her,” she says. “I met her briefly. She is very confident. She was very pleasant. She has the kind of charisma and personality you need to be a good campaigner.”

Satirists can have an enormous impact on the public’s perception of a political figure. To this day, David Steel, former leader of the British Liberal Party, blames Spitting Image for convincing the public that he was hopelessly subservient to his coalition partner David Owen, leader of the SDP. I wonder if Fey ever feels any guilt for sticking the knife into Palin.

She bristles slightly. “I didn’t feel guilty at all,” she says. “As a political figure, she is fair fodder for political sketches. The thing I find the strangest is that I get this question a lot. Would you ask Will Ferrell if he felt guilty about his impersonation of George Bush?”

I understand where she’s coming from. Some whingers on the right seemed to believe that Palin was being singled out for satire because of her gender. (“Oh, you know what the ladies are like about one another.”) As it happens, however, I did indeed once ask Ferrell just that question and his answer was interesting: he said that, if anything, he felt guilty about making Bush seem a little too harmless.

“Yes? Well, that’s good to hear. I do feel that some of the criticism levelled at me was because we just weren’t used to a woman who was that much in the political running. But we all felt a responsibility to ensure that the joke was a fair hit – that there was truth in the joke.”

As the Palin sketch gained traction, 30 Rock, a sitcom about the making of a show that looks very like SNL , began to gather significant audiences and hysterical acclaim. Now going into its sixth season, the series – which features a sparky double act between Fey and Alec Baldwin – has received a dizzying number of Emmys and, in 2008, won a Peabody Award for “excellence in radio and television broadcasting”.

Previous recipients of that gong have included The Sopranos, Roots and (surely a granddaddy to 30 Rock ) The Mary Tyler Moore Show . One assumes that she often gets calls from old colleagues at SNL pointing out suspicious similarities between contributors to their show and the characters in 30 Rock .

“Not so much. You know, I was so foolish it didn’t occur to me they would be watching and getting pissed off. We use the dynamic of Saturday Night but there never has been a time when we’ve sat down and said: let’s do something about what this guy did then. The characters became themselves very quickly. They went straight from being amalgams to being separate personalities.”

At any rate, if anybody does complain too aggressively to Fey, she can always dry her tears with one of the huge wads of money that must lie around her big apartment. As Date Night spreads around the world, Fey emerges as one of the key performers of her age. Whereas the 1960s had hippies cracking jokes about squares on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In , the more buttoned-up, less optimistic 2010s have the polished, repressed comedy of Fey and Carell.

Fey’s personal life seems as structured as her polished public persona would suggest. Married to Jeff Richmond, a producer and composer on 30 Rock , mother of Alice Zenobia Richmond, she lives an apparently unfussy life in the upper west side of New York City. It must, however, be hard remaining so sane when she is under such pressure. There are 22 episodes in each series of 30 Rock and she also has to find time to shoot the occasional movie.

“I have a few crack-ups a year,” she says. “But I try to have them at home. I seem to be able to average a movie every other year. That’s how it works for me and my family. This will be one of the years when I don’t make one. We’ll have a holiday. Then we are back into the writers’ room for 30 Rock in June. I have tried as hard as possible to protect the weekends. But, when we do work, we work about 15 to 16 hours a day.”

Phew. If there really were an International Union of Political Satirists they might be lobbying to have her hours slashed to that of the typical slave labourer. On the other hand, she has the look of somebody who is not happy when idle.

“I don’t know. I have learned that I don’t like to multi-task. So I won’t be doing more than one thing at a time.” Good luck with that, you busy, busy person.

[faceless]

Tina Fey: The queen of comedy
The 39-year-old American is the most powerful funny woman in the world and her show 30 Rock the best sitcom on the air
Stephen Armstrong
timesonline.co.uk
25th April 2010

The toughest comedy critic in the world is Jonathan, the floor manager at my gym — a comedy addict who, to my knowledge, only truly rates early Eddie Murphy, two Ben Stiller lines and five episodes of The Office. If you can make Jonathan laugh, you’re officially hilarious. Tell him you are writing about 30 Rock and he will pause, nod in respect, then say: “30 Rock. Now that is funny.”

The sitcom 30 Rock is the creation of Tina Fey, a 39-year-old from Pennsylvania whose comedy pedigree is flawless. Her superfast reflexes were primed at Second City, in Chicago, one of the world’s leading venues for improvised comedy; as a former staffer on the American television comedy show Saturday Night Live, she was the first woman to serve as its head writer. In Hollywood, she actually gave Lindsay Lohan material to thrive on, as writer of the hit film Mean Girls, in which she also acted. She stirred up the American elections with her spot-on spoofs of Sarah Palin, surely destined for a welcome comeback, and has won close to 20 top awards, including Golden Globes and Emmys.

Now she is one of the leads in Date Night, a romantic comedy-cum-thriller co-starring Steve Carell, star of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and the American Office. In its opening weekend, the film came a close second to Clash of the Titans, taking $25m, and could go on to take $100m in the States alone, despite a so-so script and an off-the-peg premise. Carell, it’s true, has some box-office mojo, but it hasn’t worked well recently. (Get Smart? He didn’t.) Yet for all its faults, Date Night proves the power of Fey. She is the most powerful woman in comedy, and close to being the funniest comedian, period. Which, in one of her scripts, might cue up a smutty gag.

How did this happen? Mainly because 30 Rock is so terrifyingly, intelligently funny. Named after the address of NBC Studios in New York, 30 Rocke­feller Plaza, the series stars Fey as Liz Lemon, head writer on a show not unlike Saturday Night Live, called TGS with Tracy Jordan. TGS stands for The Girlie Show, the show’s long-standing name; but when Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, the mercurial vice-president of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric, arrived at NBC, he forced Lemon to hire the deranged male movie star Jordan — a process that involved her joining strippers in a pole dancing club. In a blitzkrieg of snappy dialogue, the show concentrates on the erratic and usually sociopathic private lives of TGS’s cast and writers.

Fey is a more stable version of Lemon. Born outside Philadelphia to respectable middle-class parents, she developed her comedy chops in high school “to draw attention away from just how greasy and squat I was”. Instead, she used her brains and wit to swim the shark-infested playground pool — which became the inspiration for Mean Girls. She has been married to the composer Jeff Richmond since 2001, and her daughter, Alice, was born in 2005.

There’s nothing remotely greasy or squat about Fey ­now — she’s slim, but not TV skinny, and when she featured in Maxim’s Hot 100 list, she carried off fishnets with aplomb. Lemon dresses down so fanatically that one colleague assumed she was gay simply by looking at her shoes. Fey wears glamour with more confidence, but she does sport black glasses, like her fictional avatar. These frames have helped to cultivate a devoted nerd following, but Fey only needs her specs for reading distant cue cards —­ she first wore them as a news anchor on SNL’s Weekend Update, and now they are her trademark. As a result, there’s a running joke in 30 Rock that Lemon doesn’t need glasses at all.

When she pitched 30 Rock to NBC in 2002, she was still head writer on SNL and wanted to write that primetime staple, a workplace sitcom. “It’s just a very, um, specific kind of workplace,” she explained when I talked to her last year. “30 Rock is a little more bent, but its relationships reflect the overfamiliarity and competitiveness, mixed with friendship and contempt. The one thing about our show was that we could never portray writers as heroic. They’re the least heroic, most cowardly, lazy group of people you could spend time with.”

Fey’s sketchwriting history is palpable in the speed and volume of quickly resolved gags in each show, which jostle for space within some longer-running stories. Baldwin’s Donaghy has some of the choicest arcs, coping with a maniacal mother who tried to send him to Vietnam when he was 12, to make a man of him, and suffering demotion when the microwave programming division is taken away from him. Season two sees Donaghy battling for control of NBC, considering running for office and developing a bomb that would cause enemy soldiers to “go totally gay on each other”.

In season three, he pairs up with a deliciously, self-parodyingly sultry Salma Hayek. Lemon’s wayward star, Tracy Jordan — played by the comic Tracy Morgan — has a career that closely resembles Eddie Murphy’s. With antic colleagues like these, Lemon inevitably struggles to maintain any functioning romantic life and relies heavily day to day on Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), a camp and relentlessly optimistic page from an iffy Bible Belt background who sometimes cries because he “loves television so much”. The show has attracted countless A-listers, who cameo, usually as themselves, including Jerry Seinfeld, Al Gore and Oprah Winfrey. But Fey is the star.

In the history of American television, barely a handful of women have had this much power — to run their own series, hire and fire, write and rehearse, perform and produce. Fey told me she was keen to avoid doing a “why are there no funny women?” routine, although she conceded some difference between the sexes when it comes to humour. “I think there’s a huge overlap in the middle, where funny is simply funny and everyone gets it,” she explains. “But then I think there are certain kinds of jokes women prefer, and certain kinds men prefer. Men will gravitate towards screaming, and bears fighting robots. Females, if left alone, will drift towards more and more character detail and minutiae. The tiniest behaviour will amuse us.”

Mothers have always been part of her material — one of her early SNL sketches was a spoof commercial for Mom Jeans, with “these really high-waisted zipper jeans where you give up on being a woman”. With Lemon, she says: “We wanted to make sure that everything we did with Liz rang true, and we were going into her as the opposite of a Sex and the City character. She’s not about wish fulfilment or fantasy. Sex and the City is a fairy tale, 30 Rock is a grim fairy tale.”

If she confesses to any sort of comedy fixation, it’s with strippers. “I’m obsessed with portraying that trade as being as grim I think it is,” she explains. “I keep thinking, ‘What are they doing for the other 22 hours?’”

Recently, however, there’s been an online spat that has spilled over into the press about the “negative” way her writing portrays single women. Some have criticised Lemon as a needy cliché, poisoning her ex when she finds he’s getting married. When she guest-starred on SNL recently, a couple of sketches about female sexual predators confirmed the sisterhood’s fears that Fey was betraying them. Yet that is too simple a reading of her work. Lemon has, it is true, poisoned a former boyfriend. She has also torched the NBC building after a tough day at work, phoned in a bomb threat to Penn station and tried to close down a charity she thought was insufficiently grateful for her donation. Fey’s characters have fought muggers, presented the news and run for president.

Indeed, the single girl/relationship story lines are her least favourite. “There’s a certain contingent in our writers’ room. They’re always pitching them, and I’m always saying no — no more love stories. I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other. I think Mean Girls was a real attempt to explore that — to let them be flawed in the way they are flawed.

“That’s what I liked about [the sitcoms] Mary Tyler Moore or Rhoda when I was growing up — they were working women whose story lines were not always about dating and men. They were about work friendships and relationships, which is what I feel my adult life has mostly been about. Hopefully, it will keep changing as I keep learning, but I do think there is something to do with gender and telling the truth about women in my comedy. At least, as truthfully as I can see it.”

Sadly, in Date Night’s final edit, her best lines are relegated to the end-of-reel bloopers. Fey and Carell’s shared history in Second City — both have been members of the improv troupe, although not at the same time — means that when they went off script, they got funnier. Even so, the film gives her moments to play the harassed working mother. The plot is a screwball update of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, in which Fey’s Claire and her suburban husband, Phil, nick a no-show table at a hip Manhattan restaurant, leading to their being pursued across town by the mob, bent cops and a shirtless Mark Wahlberg. When Phil looks to fizz up their love life by asking Claire about her fantasies, she confesses: “I sometimes fantasise about being alone.” When he screams that they’re going to die, she cries: “I don’t want the kids to live with your mother.” There’s a whole routine about her confusing “whacked off” with “bumped off”.

She explained why she went for Date Night — and it wasn’t the money. (Mean Girls grossed more than $130m.) It was because, as a working mother, she wanted to see a movie in which women like her could be heroes. “The idea that it was a married couple appealed to me because I felt like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we are in real life.’ If you are a working parent, you want to be at home to put your kid to bed at night. By the time our daughter is off to sleep, it is 10 o’clock, and all you are thinking is, ‘Oh my gosh, she is going to wake up so early, I don’t want to be hungover when that kid wakes up.’ So I know the feeling you get when you are going out for a date night, but are so tired that you are actually envious of the baby-sitter settling in to watch TV and order food, and you are thinking, ‘Why can’t I stay in with the baby-sitter?’”

That’s the irony of the attacks on Fey’s writing from angry women commentators. Post-30 Rock, which began in October 2006, anyone asking if women can be as funny as men looks like an idiot. In this country, for example, we have Miranda Hart’s BBC2 sitcom, which slew critics and audiences alike, and was recommissioned instantly. You can draw up a healthy list: Ruth Jones, the real funny person behind Gavin & Stacey; Shappi Khorsandi and Sharon Horgan, both developing sitcoms for the BBC; the deceptively demure Sarah Millican, whose sweet line in bawdy has made her national tour this autumn a virtual sellout already. Zoe Lyons, Laura Solon, Katy Brand and Lucy Porter are currently filling theatres. Any minute now, a female stand-up will sell out the O2, and every barrier will have imploded. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Fey created this wave of success, but she’s the high priestess of a new wave of women who are in control of their comedy in a way that’s barely been possible before. You can probably name the exceptions. (Chiefly, that would be Lucille Ball, back in the dawn of the television age.)

For Fey, the row is at best irrelevant. She wants to get back to writing movies — she’s currently working with Sacha Baron Cohen on a film about a Hasidic Jew who joins an extreme-noise punk band (it’s based on a true story). At the end of our interview, I asked her if she had any advice for British viewers of 30 Rock. “Isn’t the show on at, like, 2.30 in the morning there?” she laughed.

“Just relax, sit down, have a glass of wine, take your pants off and watch it.”

Date Night is on general release; season four of 30 Rock is on Comedy Central on Mondays at 10pm

[Colston]

I love her...