More Tina Fey

I can't decide who I love more lately, Rachel Maddow or Tina Fey. Isn't so amazing that smart women are the talk of this election cycle?

Tina's going to be photographed for the cover of Vanity Fair by Annie Leibovitz - solo. Here's some great quotes from today's big USA Today piece on her.

In an industry in which a woman can be either gorgeous or funny but rarely both, she's the rare exception. Fey can star in her own American Express ads, chasing Martin Scorsese through an airport, and rock a fancy David Meister frock on the red carpet. But she's still a comedy nerd, not entirely at home in the spotlight and still most comfortable in her broken-in Dansko clogs, which she slips into on set when the camera stops rolling.

And therein perhaps lies the key to Fey's appeal. Even when she was first garnering attention for her writing on Saturday Night Live, Fey came across not as a ham, but as the smart, polite girl next door — even as she gently layered on the sarcasm and wit.

"She deals with (fame) the same way she deals with everything else. She just works harder," says Lorne Michaels, executive producer of SNL, where Fey became the show's first female head writer. "She's strong and she's smart, which is a very appealing combination. You trust her way of looking at the world. There's nothing strident about her. She knows who she is."

Here's her on last night's SNL Weekend Update Thursday with Will Ferrell playing George W. Bush.

Don't forget that next Thursday night is the premiere of 30 Rock. You can see the whole episode now on Hulu. But this show needs out support so everyone should tune in next Thursday at 9:30pm on NBC.

Tina Fey Rocks Part 2

I just can't get enough of Tina Fey. Loved her on SNL on Saturday night this week doing Sarah Palin again. Just in case you missed it. (as of Sunday at 5pm over 569,000 had viewed this- awesome.)

I couldn't embed it so you have to click through: Tina Fey Does Sarah Palin

Also check out this great piece on her career from the NY Daily News. Interesting tidbit that I learned- she's been a member of Weight Watchers. Now I love her even more.
The rise of Tina Fey: From 'SNL' to sitcom phenom and box office draw (NY Daily News)
photo credit: Djansezian/AP

The Sexist Emmy Awards

I was traveling all day yesterday without internet access so here's my delayed wrap up from the Emmy Awards. Firstly, the show was so goddamn boring. The ratings sucked - only 12.2 million people watched. Secondly, from the get go, I thought it was extremely sexist. TV, unlike film, gives me hope because it does embrace women in leading roles. But clearly there was a disconnect between the women who were honored onstage and the pathetic, sexist writing that dominated the show.

The whole opening bit with the reality show hosts was HORRIBLE and went to the dark side when Heidi Klum's tuxedo was pulled off by William Shatner to reveal black Daisy Duke shorts. Gross.

But the saving grace was Tina Fey, and boy do I love her. She won 3 freakin Emmy Awards. Best writing, best actress in a comedy, and best comedy show. All the talk was about Mad Men and how basic cable is the new HBO, but to me Tina is the story. She is a Juggernaut.

But, people you have got to watch her show. Think of 30 Rock as a women's film. You gotta support it. I am very serious about this. The ratings for this show are not great, but NBC didn't have much in the pipeline this year and they also believe in the show so they stuck with it.

YOU MUST WATCH 30 ROCK. It is totally feminist, and totally subversive. Tina Fey is the real deal. A writer and actor who looks and thinks like a normal person.

Alec Baldwin who is absolutely hysterical on 30 Rock and won best actor in a comedy said this about Fey after calling her the Elaine May of her generation:

We have the greatest writers, but the show was created by one woman. This was Tina's idea. This was Tina's thing. She is the head writer. She is there every day, even when she's not shooting as an actress. She goes back and forth between acting and writing. We're very, very lucky.

Sometimes the crazy man actually sounds sane.

Not that I needed any more reasons to love her more, but I do for saying this about playing Sarah Palin on SNL.

I want to be done playing this lady Nov. 5. So if anybody can help me be done playing this lady Nov. 5, that would be good for me.

Other awesome women winners:
Glenn Close- Actress, Drama, Damages. Close gave a great shout out to all her fellow nominees who by the way were all over 40. She basically said that her award shows that "complicated, powerful mature women are sexy and high entertainment and can carry a show. She called them all "The sisterhood of the TV drama divas."

Jean Smart- Supporting Actress, Comedy- Samantha Who?
Dianne Wiest- Supporting Actress, Drama- In Treatment
Paula Weinsten- Producer, Made for TV Movie, Recount
Laura Linney- Actress, Mini Series or Movie, John Adams
Eileen Atkins, Supporting Actress, Mini Series or Movie, Cranford
Tricia Regan, Director, Non-Fiction Special, Autism the Musical

Check out this smart piece from Sarah Warn at After Ellen:

Women were almost completely absent from all the directing and writing categories (in other words, any categories that were not gender-specific). There were no women nominated in the categories of Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special or Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series (all the nominees were white men), and there was only one woman nominated in the categories of Outstanding Director for a Drama Series (Arlene Sanford, for an episode of Boston Legal), Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series (Robin Veith for Mad Men) and Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special (Heidi Thomas). None of them won.

If visibility was bad for women overall, it was really bad for women of color.

After Ellen's Emmy Wrap Up

Women Make Tina Fey Comedy Number 1 at the Box Office

Women went to the theatres this weekend and made the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama $18.3 million this weekend. A whopping 68% of the audience was WOMEN so we proved women we are moviegoers and we can definitely open a movie. 55% of the audience was over 25 so that means that us older women (yes, Hollywood thinks you are old if you are over 25) attended the film.

Members of my girl posse and I went to see the film and we enjoyed it. I still wish that Tina would have written it (the film was written and directed by SNL writer Michael McCullers) cause, at times, it felt that they were trying to hard to be funny. But Tina is awesome. (and if you don't watch 30 Rock on Thursdays on NBC, you are seriously missing something really funny.) The thing about Tina is that she's funny while being awkward and uncomfortable and unsure of herself which is the crux of her appeal. While the funny guys of Judd Apatow's comedies are pathetic schlubs that no girl would want to be with (but who always seem to get the girl), Fey is the real girl who is insecure in life while confident at work AND she's funny, so it's a winning combination. After this weekend both Tina and Amy's phones should be ringing off the hook with new jobs.

Tina plays a 37-year-old-woman who has been "getting promotions instead of getting pregnant" and finds out she can't have kids. She hires a surrogate through a questionable agency run by the freakishly fertile Sigourney Weaver and is matched up with Amy Poehler, a poor woman looking for some fast cash. Honestly, they don't really do a service to surrogacy since it is a serious process, and most surrogates are women who have previously had kids and are carefully vetted. But it's a movie, and a comedy, so we'll let a lot of that go.

What was great to see was comedy vets from SNL and The Daily Show supporting the work of Fey and Poehler. I'm used to seeing the boys support the other guys so it was great to see them support the girls. Steven Martin also gets in on the game and plays the new-agey boss of Tina. Tina also has a love interest in the adorable Greg Kinnear. Their relationship is so different from typical comedy relationships because they actually seem like they could be a couple. They are around the same age and they have things in common, and oh yeah, he actually has a job and doesn't get stoned all day. He's a mature adult which, you know, is more attractive to women looking for a partner in life.

I'm not saying this is a perfect movie, cause it's not. But I have to say that I was so happy to go to a movie where I didn't want to throw something at the screen, and when I left I still had a smile on my face.

Who Says Women Aren't Funny?

Over a year ago, Christopher Hitchens, the misogynistic blowhard had an essay in Vanity Fair entitled Why Women Aren't Funny. The article pissed off a lot of people including me and now a little over a year later, Vanity Fair takes a look at the other side with its April cover story Who Says Women Aren't Funny.


Firstly, it pisses me off that just because Hitchens says women aren't funny that we now have to defend ourselves. It just plays into the bullshit that feminists are humorless. Alessandra Stanley (who writes about TV for the NY Times) goes behind the scenes with some of today's funniest women to look at how comedy has evolved since the days of the big screen screwball comedies which featured some of the highest profile women of the time. As Stanley says, today's comedians are found on TV, not film (because we all know that there are hardly any funny (or even non-funny) women starring on the big screen today.

The leader of today's funny women is feminist Tina Fey who parlayed her role as head writer on Saturday Night Live into the comedy 30 Rock, which she created, writes and stars in. (Shame on you if you don't watch this show, it is fantastic and funny.) She's about launch a new female buddy comedy Baby Mama co-starring Amy Poehler which will open the Tribeca Film Festival in NY on April 23rd.

Here are some quotes from the piece:

It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn't be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty- even sexy- to get a laugh. At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.

Comedy used to be about women making fun of themselves as well as everyone else, and you couldn't really make fun of yourself if you were too pretty (think of Gilda Radner). The pretty girls get everything. Now, the one place where looks didn't matter as long as you made them laugh, is being taken over by the pretty girls. Come on. What's left for the rest of us?

How this evolution happened is not entirely clear. The backlash school of feminism would argue that it’s the tyranny of a looks-obsessed culture that promotes sex appeal over talent, be it in comedy, pop music, or even sports.

Is there a backlash school of feminism? Are there classes available? Give me a break. It's not the backlash school of feminism that thinks our culture is looks obsessed -- it's the WHOLE CULTURE that KNOWS that we are obsessed with looks.

There has been an epochal change even from 20 years ago, when female stand-up comics mostly complained about the female condition—cellulite and cellophane—and Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr perfectly represented the two poles of acceptable female humor: feline self-derision or macho-feminist ferocity.

The younger women on TV today owe their careers to Joan Rivers and Roseanne and don't forget Joy Behar and Rosie O'Donnell and the many other women who worked the clubs when it was all guys. They pushed the envelope and made it acceptable for women to be funny. They were funny and feminist. Stanley mentions Wanda Sykes and Maya Rudolph in her piece but hardly any other women of color. And also, where is Julia Louis-Dreyfus? I love The New Adventures of Old Christine that stars Dreyfus and Sykes.

It’s not that these girls are better than the girls who preceded them,” says Fran Lebowitz. “They’re luckier. They came along at a time when the boys allowed them to do this. In comedy, timing is everything.”

So glad to see we still need permission to be allowed to be funny.

At the moment, though, big-budget comedies are still a reach for most women. Comedians such as Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, and Sacha Baron Cohen are major movie stars in a way that their female counterparts are not. Looks, for them, aren’t important: pudgy Jack Black and Seth Rogen are tapped as romantic leads opposite Kate Winslet and Katherine Heigl.

Nobody knew who the hell Sacha Baron Cohen was before Borat. It seems that the films are trying to apply to the lowest common denominator (namely the young boys who are maybe too immature to understand nuanced comedy.) But the real question is, why are women allowed to be funny on TV and have to be the killjoys in films?

Poehler argues that, despite the changes in television and comedy clubs, Hollywood has made it harder than ever for comediennes to play leads in romantic film comedies. “I guess I’m not able to play the girlfriend of guys my own age anymore,” she says. “I play the bitchy older sister. And who doesn’t love the bitchy older sister who gets it in the end?” Poehler speaks wistfully of the days—20 years ago—when “Lily Tomlin and Bette Midler could open a movie, Teri Garr and Diane Keaton were movie stars and they looked like they lived in your building; you felt you could kind of know them.”

Amen, Amy.

It’s oddly cultural but not really much of a mystery: ticket sales are driven by young men (18–24), whereas television, especially network television, is more of a woman’s world. (Female viewers outnumber men by approximately 30 percent during prime time.) So it is something of a milestone that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have teamed up to make Baby Mama, a comedy about a single career woman (Fey) who wants a child and hires a working-class surrogate (Poehler), who moves in; they then clash like The Odd Couple. In a market that favors boy-girl romantic comedies such as 27 Dresses, a female buddy picture is bold. There have not been many successful ones since Bette Midler and Shelley Long starred in Outrageous Fortune in 1987. (Thelma & Louise had its funny moments, but that final pratfall was deadly.)

Fey says she is aware of the risks. “Women drive what’s on television, and husbands and boyfriends decide on movies,” she said. “I’m doing it backwards: I have a TV show for men and a movie coming out for women.”

I am so incredibly sad that the last female buddy comedy that they could think of to mention is 20 years old. somebody please help me understand why we can be funny or star in TV shows but cannot be funny or star in films. Let's all decide to go and see Tina Fey's movie on opening weekend to support her and her work! Anyone want to come with me?

Tina Fey Rocks!

Tina did a great job hosting Saturday Night Live last weekend. If you missed it check out this link here (from the great feminists at Salon's Broadsheet) where Tina riffs that "bitch is the new black" cause bitches get stuff done!

Bitch is the New Black