Tina Fey - Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen

Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Tina Fey

A self-proclaimed good girl, comedy entertainer, writer, and producer, Tina Fey (1970-) wholly embraced her quirks before she made being geeky cool. And it is that complete and utter acceptance of herself that paved the way to her success in comedy.

She set her sights on the writer’s table at Saturday Night Live while studying drama at the University of Virginia; after college, she joined Second City in Chicago. In 1997, Fey was hired by show creator Lorne Michaels to join SNL. Two years later, she became the first female head writer in the show’s twenty- two-year history. The following year, she began co-anchoring Weekend Update with Jimmy Fallon. In the near-decade she was there, Fey pulled SNL out of its late-nineties stupor and made it a hip, must-see show again—in 2002, they even won an Emmy. At age thirty-six, Fey moved on to write, produce, and star in her own show 30 Rock, which became a critical darling and established her megastar status—all while portraying the sloppily imperfect Liz Lemon, tapping into the humor of the humanness in all of us. In 2010, Fey became the youngest person ever to receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Most satisfyingly, Fey did this right around the time of a 2007 Vanity Fair article by a male writer declaring that women aren’t funny. In the words of Fey’s cinematic cultural monument Mean Girls: you go, Glen Coco.

Working on her night cheese all the way to the top