Ain’t it funny

Tina Fey, star and creator of the sitcom 30 Rock. (Jim Cooper/Associated Press)

“Our comedy has to do more than make people laugh — it’s got to make people think,” says Tracy Jordan on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock. The character, played by Saturday Night Live alumnus Tracy Morgan, is loosely modelled on eccentric black comedians like Martin Lawrence and Dave Chappelle. Says Jordan, “I want to hold a mirror up to society and then win the world record for biggest mirror.”

That line captures the self-conscious zaniness of 30 Rock. A behind-the-scenes look at a fictional NBC comedy show, this critical hit is not just funny — it frets over what it means to be funny, and then sideswipes the navel-gazing with some wonderful non sequitur.

The Emmy Award-winner, now in its second season, is the autobiographical brainchild of former Saturday Night Live head writer Tina Fey. In it, Fey plays Liz Lemon, the besieged head writer of a sketch show called TGS. Alec Baldwin has been justly lauded for his role as Jack Donaghy, an arrogant yet likable NBC executive who regards a “woman with ambition” with the same awe as “a dog wearing clothes,” but Fey remains the show’s heart and brains.

Sardonic but self-deprecating, attractive yet with the vestigial geekiness of a late bloomer, Fey stands at the forefront of a new generation of funny women that includes standup stars like Sarah Silverman, comic actresses Amy Poehler and Kristen Wiig and writers like The Office’s Mindy Kaling and The Colbert Report’s Allison Silverman. Fey’s body of work, which includes the acclaimed high-school comedy Mean Girls, could also be submitted as Exhibit A in the argument against Christopher Hitchens’s widely discussed Vanity Fair piece on why he thinks women aren’t funny. Hitchens’s evolutionary theory is that men use humour as a tactic for wooing women; women, born with natural wiles, have no biological imperative to be funny. Comedians like Fey obliterate Hitchens’s assertion. 

What makes Fey’s comedy distinctive is that more often than not, it’s likely to have a woman in a central role. Under her watch at SNL, female comics like Poehler (with whom Fey co-hosted the show’s long-standing “Weekend Update” segment), Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch had principal parts in sketches. Fey was the writer for sketches like “The Girl With No Gaydar” and “Old French Whore!” as well as parodies of The View and The Vagina Monologues.

Like most comedians, Fey seems to have used humour to overcome adolescent unpopularity. “Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh,” she said in an interview with the magazine The Believer. “Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me.”

Head writer Liz Lemon (Fey) regularly butts heads with her boss, Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), on 30 Rock. (NBC/CTV)

A Second City alumnus and a childhood fan of The Honeymooners and Monty Python, Fey has a sense of humour that isn’t necessarily more refined or girly than that of her male counterparts. Watching 30 Rock, it’s hard to tell the episodes written by Fey apart from those written by other members of the show’s mostly male staff. According to a 2003 New Yorker profile by Virginia Hefferman, Fey has actually been accused of being “anti-woman”: “[S]ince she became a head writer [at SNL] the words ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ have flourished on the show.”

Hefferman’s article zeroes in on perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Fey’s comedy: her “moral authority.” Fey’s palpable disgust at dissembling politicians and foolish celebrities were often on display in her “Weekend Update” appearances. On 30 Rock, Liz Lemon’s sense of right and wrong sometimes gets the better of her own liberal views. In one episode, she gets an Arab neighbour in trouble with the Department of Homeland Security after seeing him act suspiciously with a video camera. (In fact, he was making an audition tape for The Amazing Race.)

While Fey isn’t afraid to joke around with the guys, a number of 30 Rock plotlines have revolved around the gender-specific challenges Liz faces as a head comedy writer. In “The C Word,” Liz overhears a male member of her staff call her the “worst name ever.” (Hint: it refers to a part of the female anatomy.) She reacts by channelling her mothering instinct, baking cupcakes and coddling her writers; they end up walking all over her. In the episode “Rosemary’s Baby,” Liz meets her heroine, a Laugh In-era comedy writer named Rosemary (played by Carrie Fisher). After visiting Rosemary’s sad apartment in New York’s “Little Chechnya,” Lemon begins to fear for her own future. “Rosemary says women become obsolete in this business when there’s no one left who wants to see them naked,” Liz confides to Jack. (His confident reply: “If you make enough money, you can pay people to look at you naked.”)

Rosemary’s observation addresses the double standard that female comedians need to be physically attractive in a way that male comedians don’t. A canny comedian like Sarah Silverman, for example, plays off the disjunction between her sweet-natured good looks and the frequently rude things that come out of her mouth. On 30 Rock, Fey downplays her sex appeal, depicting Lemon as a dateless workaholic with a bra held together with scotch tape. When Fey performed at the 2003 Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, she took a different approach. After starting the show reading fake headlines behind a “Weekend Update” desk, she told the audience she was “going to get out from behind this desk to show you the real me.” Removing her glasses, she began to sing a cooing, vampy show tune: “Let me entertain you / Let me make you smile / Let me do a few tricks /Some old and then some new tricks / I’m very versatile.” She removed her jacket to reveal what looked like a sleeveless black party dress. But then she stepped away from the desk, and the audience saw that her bottom half was upholstered with a fat suit. Finishing the rest of the song dancing in her grotesque padding, Fey satirized conventional perceptions for big laughs.

After a tentative start, 30 Rock has established a zippy pace that fuses the characterization and structure of a sitcom with the more tangential humour of sketch comedy. The show’s interwoven plotlines move seamlessly between workplace comedy (to prevent a work stoppage, Liz makes Tracy believe that he’s won a “Pacific Rim Emmy”) and stories of Liz’s less-than-scintillating love life (in the first season, Liz found herself dating a distant cousin and, later, New York’s last beeper salesman).

30 Rock’s meagre first-season ratings led some to speculate that it wouldn’t be renewed for a second season. (During her Emmy acceptance speech, Fey thanked the show’s  “dozens and dozens of viewers.”) But as U.S. television enters a period of writers strike-induced reruns, 30 Rock not only deserves repeat viewing, it almost requires it. Like The Simpsons in its prime, you have to watch episodes of this cult favourite at least twice to catch all the jokes you’ve missed while you were laughing from a previous zinger. 30 Rock makes you laugh and think. And while it might not hold any world records, thanks to Fey’s unsparing, dazzling comic sensibility, it might just be the funniest show on television right now.

Kevin Chong is a Vancouver writer.

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