INTERVIEW:Her impeccable take on Sarah Palin propelled her from late night television to international news. DONALD CLARKEmeets the talented Tina Fey, who admits it's a role she'll never live down
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 Livesketch 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 Livehad 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 Livein 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 SNLseem 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 Nightand 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 Livehas 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 Liveitself 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 Imagefor 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, Rootsand (surely a granddaddy to 30 Rock) The Mary Tyler Moore Show. One assumes that she often gets calls from old colleagues at SNLpointing 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 Nightbut 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 Nightspreads 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 Rockand 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 Rockin 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.
Date Night is in cinemas from Wednesday
