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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 2002, Malcolm Gladwell examines the creative process behind "Saturday Night Live"
On a Monday afternoon last spring, at a diner in Manhattan, Tina Fey recalled her first days on the job at "Saturday Night Live." She told me, "I'd had my eye on the show forever, the way other kids have their eye on Derek Jeter." As we were talking, a man in his twenties, with wild tufts of dark hair, stopped by our table, which was near the soda fountain. Over the roar of a blender, he shouted to Fey, "Can I tell you that you are amazing? I don't want to interrupt, but you are truly, truly amazing!" Fey thanked him, staring down at her plate. When her admirer retreated, she grinned. "Most of the time you're too busy to think about it," she told me. "But every now and then you say, 'I work at "Saturday Night Live," and that is so cool.' "
Fey joined the show six years ago, when Lorne Michaels, the creator and executive producer, summoned her from Chicago, where she was working at Second City, the comedy troupe. After twenty years on the air, "S.N.L." had suffered several seasons of declining ratings. Fey was known as a versatile performer with a broad range and a gift for satire, but Michaels wanted her to write for the show.
She started work in an office on the seventeenth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC's headquarters, which offered a view of the Empire State Building. She missed Chicago, but "S.N.L." 's backstage dynamics inspired her. "In that comfort zone, we say the meanest kind of things," she explained. "If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs." In 1999, Michaels invited Fey to become a head writer, and the following year she began performing in sketches and on "Weekend Update."
In addition to being the first woman to hold the title of head writer at "S.N.L.," Fey is also the first female performer to become the face of a show that other female comics, including the original cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, have cited for frat-house hoo-ha. Janeane Garofalo, who was briefly on the show in the mid-nineties (during what she described in the "S.N.L." oral history, "Live from New York," as "the year of fag-bashing and using the words 'bitch' and 'whore' in a sketch"), calls the current period "the Tina Fey regime," and its reforms impress her. "I'm assuming somebody has come in and done an exorcism," she says. Audiences and critics have responded well to Fey's influence. In 2001, Fey and the writing team won a Writers Guild Award for "Saturday Night Live: The 25th Anniversary Special." Last year, the show won an Emmy for outstanding writing, its first in that category since 1989. And this season "S.N.L." is once again attracting more viewers than any other late-night show, including the "Tonight Show" with Jay Leno and "Late Show with David Letterman."
Fey began performing on the show after Michaels saw her onstage in a sketch that she had put together with Rachel Dratch, an "S.N.L." performer, at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, in Chelsea, and proposed that she audition to co-anchor "Weekend Update" with Jimmy Fallon. Unlike Fey, Fallon--a boisterous, clownish figure--had started out as a standup comic, but they got along well, and viewers liked their priss-and-goof routine. On a Saturday afternoon last spring, Fey, Fallon, and Michael Shoemaker, one of the show's producers, along with the writers Doug Abeles, Charlie Grandy, and Michael Schur, who produces "Update," milled around a table in a conference room, as they do every Saturday afternoon of the television season, for a meeting they refer to as "bagel times." The writers "call down the jokes," reading through a dozen topical one-liners to be delivered during the three-minute segment. "Bagel times" is their last opportunity to convene before the dress rehearsal that precedes the live broadcast, which that week featured Salma Hayek as the host and Christina Aguilera as the musical guest. "Update" is always the last element of the show that the writers work on, and,...
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