Review: Bossypants

Bossypants by Tina Fey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this has helped me realize much of what makes Tina Fey so exceptional a comedian.

First, her basic shtick is to take the everyday and amplify it just a little, like turning the volume up from five to seven.

Her most famous Saturday Night Live moment, of course – even though it happened after she’d left the show as head writer and Weekend Update host – is her Sarah Palin impersonation. Magnificent as that was, it really was mostly a matter of tweaks and exaggerations. In a crazy world where an utterly unqualified Alaskan governor found herself put forward as a legitimate candidate for major federal office – something that seems almost quaint now that we’ve seen how things can get even worse – all Fey had to do was exaggerate some vowel sounds and add peculiar hesitations to her impersonation, and she laid bare the absurdity of it all.

In 30 Rock, a terrific show that serves as the key link between Arrested Development and The Office, Parks & Rec, and Brooklyn 99, she took what she knew from her SNL life and made it just a bit kookier. We saw blowhards and divas who still managed to be mostly human and, in the middle of it all, Liz Lemon gave us a barometer of what could almost be “normal.”

Second, Fey works best as part of a team. She’s up front about that in this book, but it’s also obvious in retrospect. She came up through Second City with a sketch comedy background; others came the stand-up route. You can see her being especially good at respecting other people’s ideas even if it means tossing her own. A highlight of this book is her quick summary of the rules of Second City improve technique: always say “yes” – always acknowledge a partner’s suggestion – and always say “and” after that “yes.” That is, always see what possibilities can follow from such a proposal.

So, I not only enjoy Fey’s comedy, but I appreciate her as one of the central architects of American comedy in the last couple decades.

I picked this book up by design because I’d haphazardly found and then read a couple of other SNL memoirs – Chris Kattan’s and Norm MacDonald’s. Just as Fey was arguably the best of the cast/writers of that era (maybe Will Ferrell has had a better performing career and maybe Adam McKay has had a more illustrious writer experience, but she excelled at both), this book has been heralded as the best of the SNL memoirs.

My sense is that, while it’s always going to be a pleasure to hear Fey do anything, this ultimately isn’t as interesting I’d imagined it would be.

On the one hand, my first hope for a comedy memoir is to get a sense of how a comedian came to think about the nature of comedy. Steve Martin is terrific in Born Standing Up for the way he describes a half-conscious, half seize-the-opportunity move he made from the political comedy everyone was doing to a silly, almost pratfall style that he recognized from silent movies and early television performers. Chris Kattan is surprisingly interesting in how he describes what it was like to explore physical comedy in a world geared for the television camera.

It’s fine that Fey does very little of that – she should write the book she wants to write – but I’m sorry that so influential a voice hasn’t given more thought to the mechanics of what she does so well. There’s a moment when she talks about a Lorne Michaels lesson that stands out: she says that Michaels taught her that you need a balance between (in the SNL/30 Rock context) Harvard nerds and improv veterans. Left to their own devices, Harvard nerds will write too much to please themselves while improv types will work too hard for the quick and easy catch-phrase or audience pleaser. She calls the former the equivalent of classic military strategy and the latter like fighting in Vietnam. The point is to work toward the balance.

But such comedy mechanics and insights are rare. Instead, we get a kind of conventional this-was-my-life backdrop, and it works only intermittently.

It’s nice to hear her talk about her family, but those sections point out the limits of her comic method. If she excels at exaggerating the familiar, it doesn’t work that well to exaggerate a childhood that the rest of us don’t know anything about. I believe her when she describes her father, lovingly, as a Clint Eastwood type. It just doesn’t work all that well as humor since we don’t know the extent to which she is tweaking her picture to her storytelling temperament. And it doesn’t work all that well as memoir because she doesn’t push for much depth or fresh insight.

It’s compelling to hear her talk about the persistent outrage she has felt about the way women are marginalized in American culture – and it’s great to see her alchemize what could have been justified anger into comedy – but, since this is a book, she’s talking alone. Funny as she is, her gift is to make others funny and then to become all the funny in the course of such interactions. Here, we lose that space of reaction. I love the Liz Lemon sigh when she stands in front of the irresponsible writers’ room (shout out to Judah Friedlander). She may be alone in the camera, but she’s responding to a mass of unrestrained craziness.

In this book, she’s alone on the page, all alone. Her one-liners land often enough, but that’s ultimately not her genius. In the absence of others interrupting her and helping her hone her insights, this rarely soars above a pleasant conversation with someone who’s trying a little too hard to be entertaining.

I remain as admiring of Fey as ever, but I don’t think this stands out among memoirs of comedians.


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