Up next in women being lambasted for making funny television (see also: Lena Dunham of Girls and Elizabeth Merriweather/Zooey Deschanel of New Girl), Globe and Mail columnist Lynn Crosbie takes aim at Tina Fey. Because Fey is hilarious and inarguably awesome, Crosbie immediately finds herself grasping at straws and ends up attacking her for… being ugly? Being hot once and trying to capitalize on that? Thinking she and her Saturday Night Live cohort invented female comedy?
Frankly, it’s a mess of an article. Consider her assessment of Fey’s interview with Zach Galiafianakis on Between Two Ferns:
The aggressive, even physically violent aspect of the talk show is all fabrication and Fey was being set up, of course, to be hilarious in the face of some received, absurd idea about women and humour.
But, quite by accident, Galifianakis’s final burn was uncomfortably astute.
Not about girls, but about Fey, who, because she is not funny, or hot any more, was “pretty good,” considering.
“Because she is not funny”? Lynn Crosbie thinks that Tina Fey is not funny? This is where it becomes obvious we can’t trust Crosbie’s analysis, because she is insane. But insane or not, Crosbie continues to eat up valuable space with her terrible ideas.
Apparently Tina Fey “became huge almost overnight in 2008″ with her Sarah Palin impression. Because prior to that she struggled in TV wilderness as the head writer for SNL. Crosbie continues:
She was strategically brilliant about managing this fame by playing the “Who me?” brainy former chubbo with modesty and charm, and by continuing to situate her fame in New York, where only the most passionate of reclusive, untouchable stars reside.
It’s not like she had a job and a life in New York, of course. Nor is Fey actually modest or self-deprecating. (A comedian, self-deprecating? Perish the thought!) These are both obvious ploys on Fey’s part to maximize her fame, which she knows is all too fleeting.
Crosbie bounces from reference to idea so fast she clearly couldn’t keep it together herself, and the result is a barely intelligible hodgepodge of contradictions. Early in the piece she claims Fey is “stealthily revamping herself into a fox,” which seems to be a negative. Yet she later derides Fey for publicly admitting she hasn’t always been (or considered herself) a babe. Which is it, Crosbie? Is she ugly or hot? Or she was always hot but now she’s ugly so she can’t sell hair dye? What?!
Lynn Crosbie
It’s ridiculous to say Fey has no sense of comedic or women’s history. Her memoir Bossypants mentions many of the same names Crosbie puts forward, but apparently not enough, or in the right way. Who knows? Fey’s current show 30 Rock has also dealt with the troubled past and present of women in comedy since day one, with one memorable episode — “TGS Hates Women” — dedicated to unraveling some of the more vexing questions and criticisms lobbed at Fey and 30 Rock specifically. Fey is simply praising — rightly — women she worked with for being hilarious, and for keeping open the barriers those pioneering women first broke.
Because while the Radners and O’Haras came before, and proved that women can be and are funny, the idea that women aren’t funny persists. Just five years ago, prominent writer/intellectual Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire article in Vanity Fair to dissecting why women aren’t funny. That is correct: he was not asking if women are funny, which would be ludicrous enough. Taking it as a given that women are not funny, Hitchens waxed eloquent on why this might be.
This is precisely why women are still proving and re-proving the obvious, which is that women are funny. Women are hilarious and they have at least as much capacity to be so as men. But when generation after generation forgets lessons like this, a new crop of women doing what should be a given is, in fact, still groundbreaking.
Lest we forget that Crosbie hid her erroneous argument in a thick coating of terrible writing, here is her penultimate paragraph. I still have no fucking idea how to read this sentence.
Instead of buying into her own beauty myth, Fey needs to get over the way in which she undermines other women in acts of what she calls in Mean Girls, “girl on girl crime,” then, quite simply, work through her finger-pointing (“Men say we’re not funny!”) and be that.
Crosbie, by the way, is an English professor.
And now, to remind ourselves of how great Tina Fey is, here she is on Between Two Ferns.
Globe and Mail