Tina Fey Photo: Getty
Tina Fey may be the only comedian to have political scientists named after her. The Tina Fey Effect was coined in 2012 by three East Carolina University professors to describe their evidence that her impression of Sarah Palin's performance at the 2008 vice presidential debate on “Saturday Night Live” energized Republican voters and independent candidates. against the candidate.
Fey played Palin, sharply tossing aside her awkward, homespun lines, including: “I believe that marriage is a sacred institution between two unwilling teenagers.” But when Palin herself appeared on Saturday Night Live, a show that has no direct equivalent in the UK but is something of a love child of The Spoiler and Have I Got News for You, Fey was charming behind the scenes. “She’s a person and a mom,” she told talk show host Conan O’Brien. “She is not the Devil incarnate or the Antichrist.”
That perfectly sums up Tina Fey's extraordinary career. On the one hand, she is the author of quirky, sardonic, and sometimes deeply cynical comedies that push the boundaries of acceptability—and do so without demeaning the culture. On the other hand, she is a polite, wealthy workaholic who has never done drugs or dated any bad boys. But she has no fear. One SNL sketch written by Fey mercilessly mocked the press's soft treatment of Barack Obama, prompting Hilary Clinton to ask the then-presidential candidate if he “needed another cushion” in the ensuing debate.
After Black Lives Matter, she had to remove episodes of her sitcom 30 Rock in which actors wore blackface and were accused of offensive depictions of Native Americans and Vietnamese characters. However, she did so without the usual hand-wringing: “There is a real culture of demanding apologies,” she said, “and I refuse that.”
Fey is often hailed as the most powerful and influential woman in comedy, but her humor—fast-paced streams of pop culture references and meta jokes about often risqué topics—isn't for everyone; her scripts
Her latest venture, a musical version of her 2004 hit Mean Girls, is a case in point. The original's jokes about race, body image and pedophilia have been toned down in 2024, but it's still feminist with an incredibly small f. There is more bickering than affection, and the sisterhood is toxic. But then Fey clawed her way into the head writer position on Saturday Night Live with a casual disrespect for tired “women aren't funny” conventions. (These are actual words spoken by SNL actor John Belushi on air.)
Men telling her that don't matter, “unless one of them is my boss…” she said. “It is an impressively presumptuous move to conclude that if you don’t like something, it is empirically bad. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles proving it doesn't exist.”
Tina Fey with Lindsay Lohan in the original Mean Girls movie Photo: CBS
The original Mean Girls — about high school cliques and playground power games — certainly didn't make $130 million at the box office by appealing exclusively to women. As stand-up Sean McLaughlin, who appeared in Ricky Gervais's sitcom After Life and supported Gervais on his recent tour, put it: “I can't think of a movie aimed less at me than Mean Girls, but the level of her artistry took the teenage years.” bubblegum comedy and created a classic.”
Speaking of Gervais, Fey and her longtime comedy partner Amy Poehler took over the Golden Globes after Ricky's infamous three shows of edgy jokes. And, to paraphrase Chris Christie, they smoked him. Among the few jokes in print (the supermodel and Leonardo DiCaprio gag is inappropriate for a respectable newspaper) was her first of many jokes with George Clooney. “Gravity is nominated for best picture,” she announced in 2013. “This is a story about how George Clooney would rather fly into space and die than spend another minute with a woman his own age.”
For the 53-year-old comedian from Pennsylvania, success didn't come overnight. Fay's father was a university administrator and showed his children Monty Python when they were very young. A “fat and squat” teenager, she developed her comedic chops in high school (“I ate weaker girls for breakfast,” he once said), graduated in drama and spent five years doing improv comedy with Chicago's Second City. ” while also working at the YMCA Gym Folding Towels. There she met her husband, music executive Jeff Richmond, and spent what little free time she had submitting sketches to Saturday Night Live, begging for work.
Fey's time on Saturday Night Live was brutal, both as a writer and while hosting the show. In her autobiography, Bossypants, she says the difference between the male and female comedy writers on the show was that “men pee in cups. And sometimes jars. She discovered this when she reached for a cup in the office, and the writer explained that it was full of urine because “that's just what guys did when they were too lazy to go to the bathroom.” Besides,” she adds, “they like to pretend to rape each other.” It's… Don't worry about it. It's actually harmless.”
She eventually became the head writer and co-host of the parody news channel Weekend Update. Despite the boys' club atmosphere at the time, her material was much edgier and more fearless than that of her male counterparts – a mixture of political satire with surreal parodies and plenty of self-deprecation (on the invasion of Afghanistan: “For the first time in more than two years women took off their veils and walked the streets freely. Those whores.) Meanwhile, off-screen, she got into trouble for calling an SNL guest host a “piece of crap” who “looks trans up close.”
< p>When she ran SNL, there was less urine in cups, but the work environment was very competitive. That's what she meant last year when she won the PEN/Mike Nichols Award for Writing. She joked that producer Lorne Michaels was partly responsible for grooming Saturday Night Live's alumni writers, a pointed reference to former collaborators Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, creators of the sitcom The Other Two, which was canceled amid multiple staff allegations regarding the duo's behavior.
“Nobody condones writers like Lorne Michaels,” she said. “Lorne, you have released an army of monsters into the world. You know it, I know it, and the crew of The Other Two knows it—oh, I had to change that. This is inappropriate.”
Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan in the movie “30 Rock” Photo: Getty
Fey left SNL to write 30 Rock, named after the NBC Studios address in New York, 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In the series, Fey plays Liz Lemon, the head writer of a show similar to Saturday Night Live, who has a terrible personal life, a room full of idiotic writers, dapper performers and Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy, the energetic vice president of East Coast television. . and microwave oven programming for General Electric. “The thing about our show was that we could never portray writers as heroes,” she insisted. “They are the least heroic, most cowardly and lazy group of people to hang out with.”
Lemon always wants to go home and eat a piece of cheese, but she has to spend most of her work time fighting to save her show, her cast, or her boss, relying more on luck than skill. The show combined pure visual comedy, slapstick and fast-paced screwball plots, although Fey earned a controversial reputation as a showrunner.
She encouraged young talent and made sure everyone was heard. Tracey Wigfield started her career there when she was a “shy, scared 23-year-old” and still works with Fey, whom she praises for being “really good at listening to all the voices in the room.” I remember several times I would say something quietly and no one would hear me, and she would say, “Wait, say that again, that's good.”
Donald Glover, the creator of the sitcom Atlanta, which is about to release Mr. and Mrs. Smith on Amazon Prime Video, had a slightly different experience, he recently told GQ. He got his first writing job on 30 Rock in 2006 straight out of university. “I definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” he says. “Every night I had stressful dreams in which I was riding on top of a New York skyscraper while other writers were watching me.”
Fey eventually told him that he was hired because of the security initiative diversity at NBC, where adding a black writer wasn't in your budget. “There’s no animosity or anything like that between us,” he hastily added.
“She's really smart and very level-headed and smart in the game,” said one former NBC publicist. “There were problems related to the culture and norms in the places where she worked and in the places where she was the big boss. But the world of television comedy, and SNL in particular, is like a vault. How could a person meaningfully resist a common culture or bad norms?
After 30 Rock, she launched Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, an idea so outlandish few would have thought Fey would have had the courage to present it. It follows the eponymous heroine after she is freed from years of captivity as a sex slave, kidnapped and held in a bunker with three other women. NBC ordered the show, then panicked and would have abandoned it if Netflix hadn't stepped in.
Tina Fey and Ellie Kemper in the movie “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” Photo: Alamy
In the history of American television, few women have had so much power – to host her own series, to hire and fire, to write, act and produce, and to fight off the culture just because she wanted it to. That's why people like Lena Dunham, Zooey Deschanel and Mindy Kaling call her an inspiration. Dunham's oddball comedy owes a lot to Fey – indeed, her fingerprints can be seen all over American television and film culture.
“She's closer to the creative process than really big TV producers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, which may be a result of the fact that she appears on most of the shows she produces,” says Tom Harrington, an analyst at Enders Analysis. “Her contract with NBCU means she's more than an actor/writer who moves from project to project. She's related to Lorne Michaels, but she's far superior to other former SNL stars who leave, do a movie directed by Lorne, and then return to a career as a part-time comedian. Moreover, she became his successor, which would make her one of the most influential women in comedy.”
Perhaps in preparation for this role, one of her favorite books was Leni Riefenstahl's autobiography, which describes her time as Hitler's favorites. film director and creation of the propaganda film “Triumph of the Will”.
“If she weren’t so brilliant at what she did, she wouldn’t be so evil,” Fey said in a 2008 Vanity Fair interview. “In the book she said: “He was the leader of the country. Who am I not to go?” And it's something like, “Note to self: Consider an invitation from the leader of your country.” This is probably where the Tina Fey effect began.
Recent Comments