Tina Fey may be the only comedian to have a phenomenon named after her by political scientists. The Tina Fey Effect was coined in 2012 by three professors at the University of East Carolina to describe their evidence that her impression of Sarah Palin’s performance in the 2008
The Tina Fey effect: How the original Mean Girl made comedy smarter
By Stephen Armstrong
Daily Telegraph UK·
10 mins to read
Tina Fey's new Mean Girls movie is in cinemas now. Photo / AP
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Fey is often called the most powerful and influential woman in comedy, yet her humour – rapid-fire barrages of pop culture references and meta jokes about often dicey subjects – isn’t for everyone.
Her latest venture – the musical version of her 2004 hit Mean Girls – is a case in point. The original’s gags about race, body image and paedophilia have been toned down for 2024 but it’s still feminist with an incredibly small f. There’s more bitching than bonding and the sisterhood is toxic. But then, Fey has fought her way into jobs like head writer on Saturday Night Live with a casual disrespect for tired conventions like “women aren’t funny”. (Those being actual words spoken by SNL cast member John Belushi live on air.)
Men who tell her that are irrelevant, “unless one of them is my boss …” she has said. “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”
The first Mean Girls – about high school cliques and playground power games – certainly didn’t make $130 million at the box office by appealing solely to women. As stand-up Sean McLoughlin, who appeared in the Ricky Gervais sitcom After Life and supported Gervais on his recent tour, puts it: “I can’t think of a film aimed less at me than Mean Girls, but the level of her craft took a bubble gum teen comedy and created a classic.”
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And speaking of Gervais, Fey and her long-term comedy partner Amy Poehler took to hosting the Golden Globes after Ricky’s infamous three-show run of cutting jokes. And, to paraphrase Chris Christie, they smoked him. Among the few printable jokes – the supermodel/Leonardo DiCaprio gag is not suitable for a respectable newspaper – was her first of many George Clooney roasts. “Gravity is nominated for best film,” she announced in 2013. “It’s the story of how George Clooney would rather float into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.”
It hasn’t been overnight success for the 53-year-old comic from Pennsylvania. Fey’s father was a university administrator who showed his kids Monty Python when they were very young. A “greasy and squat” teenager, she developed her comedy chops in high school (“I ate weaker girls for breakfast,” she once said), graduated in drama and spent five years doing improv comedy in Chicago’s Second City troupe while working in the YMCA gym folding towels. She met her husband, musical director Jeff Richmond, there and spent what little spare time she had sending sketches to Saturday Night Live begging for a job.
Fey’s time on Saturday Night Live was brutal – both as a writer and when running the show. In her autobiography Bossypants, she says the difference between male and female comedy writers on the show was “the men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars.” She discovered this when she reached for a cup in the office and a writer explained it was full of urine because it was “just something guys did when they were too lazy to go to the bathroom. Also,” she adds, “they like to pretend to rape each other. It’s … Don’t worry about it. It’s harmless actually.”
Eventually, she made it to head writer – and co-presenter of the spoof news slot “Weekend Update”. In spite of the boys club vibe of the show at the time, her material was far more edgy and fearless than her male colleagues – blending political satire with surreal skits 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 freely in the streets. Those whores.) Off screen, meanwhile, she got into trouble for calling SNL guest host “a piece of s***” who “looks like a tranny up close”.
When she was in charge at SNL, there was less urine in the cups, but the working environment was intensely competitive. She implied as much last year when she picked up the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. She joked that producer Lorne Michaels was partially responsible for conditioning Saturday Night Live writing alumni – making a sharp reference to ex-staffers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, creators of sitcom The Other Two, which was cancelled amid multiple staff allegations over the duo’s behaviour.
“Nobody indulges writers like Lorne Michaels,” she said. “Lorne, you have unleashed an army of monsters into the world. You know it, I know it, and the crew of The Other Two knows it – oh I was supposed to change that. That’s inappropriate.”
Fey left SNL to write 30 Rock – 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, who manages a terrible personal life, a room full of idiot writers, dappy performers and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, the mercurial vice-president of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for General Electric. “The one thing about our show was that we could never portray writers as heroic,” she insisted. “They’re the least heroic, most cowardly, lazy group of people you could spend time with.”
Lemon is always yearning to go home and eat a block of cheese, but has to spend most of her working hours fighting to save her show, her cast or her boss with luck more than skill. The show combined pure visual comedy, slapstick and quick-fire screwball lines although Fey gained a mixed reputation as a showrunner.
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She encouraged young talent and made sure everyone was heard. Tracey Wigfield started her career there when she was “a shy, terrified, 23-year-old” and still works with Fey who she credits for being “really good at listening to all of the voices in the room. I remember multiple times when I would pitch something kind of quietly and no one would hear me and she would be like, ‘Wait, say that again, that’s good.’”
Donald Glover, creator of the sitcom Atlanta who is just about to launch Mr and Mrs Smith on Amazon Prime Video, had a slightly different experience, he told GQ recently. He got his first writing job on 30 Rock in 2006 straight out of university. “It definitely didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there,” he says. “I used to have stress dreams every night where I was doing cartwheels on the top of a New York skyscraper with the other writers watching me.”
Fey ultimately told him he was hired because of a diversity initiative at NBC, where adding a black writer didn’t count against your budget. “There is no animosity between us or anything like that,” he added hastily.
“She’s really smart and has been very judicious and intelligent about playing the game,” one former NBC publicist said. “There have been issues to do with culture and norms at places she worked, and places where she was a big boss. But the TV comedy world and SNL in particular is like a vault. How could a person have meaningfully resisted the overall culture or bad norms?”
After 30 Rock she launched The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt – an idea so seemingly preposterous few but Fey would have had the nerve to pitch it. It follows the eponymous heroine after she’s released from years as a sex slave captive, kidnapped and kept in a bunker with three other women. NBC commissioned the show, then panicked and would have ditched it if Netflix hadn’t stepped in.
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, perform and produce and bat away cancel culture just because she wanted to. Hence, she’s citied by the likes of Lena Dunham, Zooey Deschanel and Mindy Kaling as inspiration. Dunham’s kooky comedy owes a lot to Fey – indeed, you can see her fingerprints all over US TV and film culture.
“She’s closer to the creative process than the really big TV producers like Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, which may be a product of the fact that she appears in most of the shows she produces,” says Tom Harrington, analyst at Enders Analysis. “Her output deal with NBCU means she is more than an actor/writer who moves from project to project. She is linked to Lorne Michaels, but she’s far beyond other ex-SNL stars that leave, have a Lorne-produced film and then go back to a career of a jobbing comedic actor. Indeed, she tipped as his successor which would make her one of the most powerful women in comedy.”
Perhaps in preparation for this role, one of her favourite books is Leni Riefenstahl’s autobiography chronicling her time as Hitler’s favourite filmmaker and the creation of the propaganda movie Triumph of the Will.
“If she hadn’t been so brilliant at what she did, she wouldn’t have been so evil,” Fey told Vanity Fair in 2008. “She was like, in the book, ‘He was the leader of the country. Who was I not to go?’ And it’s like, Note to self: Think through the invite from the leader of your country.” Which is probably where the Tina Fey Effect began.
Mean Girls is in NZ cinemas now
