Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics

2. Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism: Picturing Tina Fey

59 Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism PiCtuRing tina fey SPECS APPEAL Tina fey is the MOst CeRebRaL Of the wOMen COMics treated in this book, known for her wit as the acerbic anchorwoman on Saturday Night Live and for the sophisticated humor of her NBC sitcom 30 Rock, hailed by critics as a brilliant satire of network television. She is also the only one who had formal schooling in theater. Born in 1970, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in drama in 1992 and then trained in improvisation with the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago. She joined SNL as a writer in 1995 and made her television debut five years later as the conservatively dressed co-anchor of its “Weekend Update” segment, the first of a series of “geek girl” characters she would play. The most developed of these is her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, the brainy writer who eats Three Musketeers bars for breakfast and repairs her bra with scotch tape. Fey has never been associated with the foul languageor lower-body humorof Kathy Griffin, Sarah Silverman, and Margaret Cho, nor does she engage in the full-body mimicry that Wanda Sykes performs or the slapstick goofiness of Ellen DeGeneres. Instead, Fey is known for brilliant one-liners and her signature black-rimmed eyeglasses, emblem of the sharp-sighted intellectual. The eyeglasses became the central prop in the media buzz that has relentlessly focused on Fey’s looks, an ironic turn for a comic famous for her wit. When Fey became a regular on “Weekend Update,” she soon was beloved for her “sassy sweetness—cloaked in stage-prop smarty-pants glasses,” as one reviewer put it. “Men wanted to date this cute, hilarious nerd; women wanted to be her” (Mitchell, 88). Fey’s choice to wear glasses— rarely seen on women in television—confounded the cliché from hunc h a p t e r t w o 60 P R E T T Y| F U N N Y dreds of movies in which the heroine removes her glasses and becomes instantly gorgeous, a beautiful sight rather than someone who can see. Instead , Fey kept her glasses on and delivered “poison-filled jokes written in long, precisely parsed sentences” (ibid.). By 2001 Entertainment Weekly was reporting the regard Fey had won for these “precisely crafted, pertly delivered zingers” but also for being “hot” and turning eyeglasses into sexy accessories (Baldwin). Journalists dubbed her “the geek goddess” and “the thinking man’s sex symbol” and touted her “specs appeal.” The glasses became such a trademark that Fey and Amy Poehler used it as a joke in their acclaimed 2008 political sketch on SNL in which they impersonated Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, respectively. Poehler as Clinton angrily objects to Palin as a sexy figure who strutted into national politics with a “pageant sash and Tina Fey glasses” (Fey, Bossypants, 214). The joke alluded to the way former beauty queen Palin was described as a “Tina Fey look-alike” long before Fey agreed to impersonate her on SNL. When Tina Fey debuted in 2000 as co-anchor of “Weekend Update” on Saturday night Live, her black eyeglasses became her trademark as “geek goddess” with “specs appeal.” Photo courtesy of Photofest. 61 ~ Feminism, Postfeminism, Liz Lemonism Because it soon became evident that despite the eyeglasses Palin was no intellectual, Fey’s impersonations effectively played against the brainy “type” she’d established on “Weekend Update” and 30 Rock. The performances as Palin launched Fey into national politics and prominence. In polls conducted by the American Research Group in October 2008, voters repeatedly referred to Fey’s impression of Palin even though no poll question mentioned Fey (Teinowitz).1 Mocking Palin’s lackof knowledge about international relations and geography, Fey’s line “I can see Russia from my house!” was repeated so often that Palin later had to protest that she never actually made this claim.2 Fey was a household name by 2010, featured as a cover girl for magazines from Mirabella to Vanity Fair. The moniker ubiquitously used to describe her was “sexy librarian,” the stereotype illustrating mild astonishment about desirabilityand studiousness in the same female body. Not surprisingly , the perceived contradictions around Fey’s persona were pegged as part of the pretty or funny binary for women comics. “In an industry in which a woman can be either gorgeous or funny but rarely both...