EWK

She started work in an office on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC’s headquarters, which offered a view of the Empire State Building. She missed Chicago, but “S.N.L.” ’s backstage dynamics inspired her. “In that comfort zone, we say the meanest kind of things,” she explained. “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.” In 1999, Michaels invited Fey to become a head writer, and the following year she began performing in sketches and on “Weekend Update.”

WHAT TINA WANTS
by Maureen Dowd | Vanity Fair | January 2009

Tina Fey has rules. They’ve guided the 38-year-old writer-comedian through marriage, motherhood, and a career that went into hyperdrive this fall, when her Sarah Palin impression convulsed the nation, boosting the ratings of both Saturday Night Live and her own NBC show, 30 Rock. Backstage at S.N.L., where “Palin” met Palin, and at the home Fey shares with her husband and daughter, the author reports on how a tweezer, cream rinse, a diet, and a Teutonic will transformed a mousy brain into a brainy glamour-puss.

Being a New Yorker myself, I can appreciate this quote, from her Proust Questionnaire in the May, 2011 issue of Vanity Fair,

What do you most value in your friends?

A willingness to come uptown.

And her new book is also worth mentioning.

BOSSYPANTS
by Tina Fey | April 2011

Tina Fey’s new book Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funniest chapters feature the differences between male and female comedy writers (“men urinate in cups”), her cruise ship honeymoon (“it’s very Poseidon Adventure“), and advice about breastfeeding (“I had an obligation to my child to pretend to try”). But the chaos of Fey’s life is best detailed when she’s dividing her efforts equally between rehearsing her Sarah Palin impression, trying to get Oprah to appear on 30 Rock, and planning her daughter’s Peter Pan-themed birthday. Bossypants gets to the heart of why Tina Fey remains universally adored: she embodies the hectic, too-many-things-to-juggle lifestyle we all have, but instead of complaining about it, she can just laugh it off. –Kevin Nguyen