Book-It 'o12! Book #9
Apr. 10th, 2012 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alivemagdoleneThe Fifty Books Challenge, year three! (Years one, two, and three just in case you're curious.) This was a secondhand find.
Title: Bossypants by Tina Fey
Details: Copyright 2011, Reagan Arthur Books
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.
She has seen both these dreams come true.
At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon — from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.
Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've all suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.
(Includes Special, Never-Before-Solicited Opinions on Breastfeeding, Princesses, Photoshop, the Electoral Process, and Italian Rum Cake!)"
Why I Wanted to Read It: I admit, for a long time, I wasn't a Tina Fey fan. Firstly, I was not impressed with her on "Weekend Update" either with Jimmy Fallon or (surprisingly, for me) Amy Poehler, on whom I felt she relied too heavily upon to carry bits and which had more gay jokes than I could stand.
Then she had some, let's say, "problematic" interviews wherein she appeared to come off as knocking The Daily Show which I'm slightly embarrassed as a feminist to say irked me as much as her assertion that men and women comics are different because men and women find different things funny. Of course, later it was pretty much spelled out that she wasn't really saying either of those things (about The Daily Show or about comedy), but seeing as how I'd already had a "fierce indifference" to her as someone to whom everyone seemed to adore but me (similar phenomenons: Glee, Star Wars, Harry Potter, American Idol, professional sports et large), I wasn't biting.
But her spot-on portrayal of Sarah Palin was intensely enjoyable and very welcome and I slowly started to like Tina Fey, especially the Palin campaign's consternation with her.
So when this book turned up on the thrifting rounds, I was willing to give it a read.
How I Liked It: I was assuming this book was going to be more or less collected essays of humorous observations with perhaps a dollop of memoir. Apparently, it's intended to be (more or less) an autobiography.
The book tries to cover and fill too many genres (among them memoir, "behind-the-scenes", manifesta, how-to, and humorous observations), but it more or less succeeds as a thoroughly enjoyable read on most of those levels.
The book can feel vaguely padded out at times (the inclusion of the script for the original Palin sketch is interesting but doesn't bear enough corrections/notes for it to seem necessary for it to be published) and rebuttals to selected nasty internet snark seem like surprising cheap shots (anonymous trolls saying mean/unfair/inappropriate things) no matter how tempting (to say nothing of the fact that this only encourages asshats to open their mouths since they see the famous noticing them; albeit this is considerably more dangerous than, say, Jessica Valenti devoting ink to these people due to the far smaller scale Valenti's facing). The ending of the book feels vaguely anti-climatic and largely tacked on (as it no doubt was, but that's what editors exist for, particularly for a writer of Fey's renown).
Possibly the most surprising to those that pick up this book (SNL and/or 30 Rock fans) is not Fey's surprising frankness of the behind-the-scenes stories about the Palin phenomenon (including some pretty fascinating tidbits including but not limited to Oprah's input, help from Palin's own hair and make-up team, and Palin's babysitting offer), but her frank feminism and open disgust (some of her few non-comedic moments in the book) with the frequency and entrenchment of double-standards in comedy, largely a subversive and anti-status quo medium. She crows with delight over the fact one of the most popular and most-watched SNL sketches of all time (the first Palin bit) consisted of two women ("[S]o I guess that director at The Second City who said the audience 'didn't want to see a sketch with two women' can go shit in his hat." pg. 217) and "You all watched a sketch about feminism and you didn't even realize it because of the jokes! It's like when Jessica Seinfeld puts spinach in kids' brownies. Suckers!" (pgs 216 and 217)
She also relates a surprisingly fierce story about Amy Poehler early in Poehler's SNL career.
“Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday read-through to start. There were always a lot of noisy "comedy bits" going on in that room. Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table and she and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike."
Jimmy Fallon, who was arguably the star of the show at the time, turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it."
Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second and wheeled around on him. "I don't fucking care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit. (I should make it clear that Jimmy and Amy are very good friends and there was never any real beef between them. Insert penis joke here.)
With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it.
[...]
I think of this whenever someone says to me, "Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny," or "Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny," or "Rick Fendermen says women aren't funny....Do you have anything to say that?"
Yes. We don't fucking care if you don't like it.
I don't say it out loud , of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up.
Unless one of these men is my boss, which none of them is, it's irrelevant. My hat does off to them. 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.” (pgs 143 and 144)
This book, while uneven, is a must-read for Fey fans, SNL fans, scholars (or just the interested) of women in comedy, or comedy in general (Fey lays down improv in a way that's vastly understandable even for the squeamish such as myself like don't like about hearing too much about the process for fear it'll spoil the effect).
Notable: Fey has nothing but praise for the majority of her co-workers, especially Alec Baldwin who she credits with getting 30 Rock made in the first place. So I found the following kind of interesting, wherein Fey explains her supposedly-infamous vow to "leave the earth" if McCain was elected president.
“ [TV Guide writer Damian Holbrook] asked me what I would do if McCain-Palin won the election. Would I continue to moonlight at SNL? I said in a jokey, actress-y voice, "If they win, I will leave Earth." It was clearly a joke about people who say stupid things like that. No matter what your political beliefs, everyone knows some loudmouth: "If Bush wins, I'm moving to Canada." "If Bush wins again, I am seriously moving to Canada." "If Obama wins, I'm going to shoot that *#%*@." Etc.” (pg 224)
(It should be noted that she lists Holbrook as an old friend and even features him prominently during a portion of the book on her teen years and emphasizes she made the joke after dinner, long after she thought their interview portion was over and they were talking as friends and not on the record.)
What's notable about this and Baldwin is the attention he got and the heat he took for saying almost exactly what she defines as "stupid" during the 2000 election. Still, it's admirable that she didn't find her colleague above reproach (and didn't call him out by name or make some thinly veiled reference) and still got her point across firmly.
