Tina Fey Peels The Onion (Tears of Laughter, Shurely...)

Admit it. You've got a little comedy crush. Don't you?

Me too.

So you'll likely enjoy this interview with Tina Fey by the Onion AV Club almost as much as I did.

Here's an excerpt:

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch The Flintstones if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of The Honeymooners. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old Honeymooners. So there was some discerning taste. And we certainly did other stuff, but yeah, we watched a lot of TV.

AVC: Had you always intended to go into comedy?

TF: For a pretty long time. Probably from middle school on. I remember me and one other girl in my 8th-grade class got to do an independent study because we finished the regular material early, and she chose to do hers on communism, and I chose to do mine on comedy. We kept bumping into each other at the card catalog. The only book I could find was Joe Franklin's Encyclopedia Of Comedians, which stopped in the '50s, so I read up on guys like Joe E. Brown.

F: Yeah, huge mouth.

AVC: Were your initial intentions to become a writer or a performer?

TF: I think everyone's intentions are to become a performer at first. But by the time I was in high school and college, I discovered that I liked writing and that I was probably a little better at it. And then when I went to Chicago, and I got to be an improviser and do Second City, that was the best blending of the two, because I was creating my own material and then performing it.

Sounds like a great family to grow up. And see the history and the research? When people say, "I want to be in comedy" -- THIS is actually what I'm looking for. A sense of history. Not, "I think Dane Cook is a genius." Once upon a time, all of us wannabes did this kind of due diligence. Now I meet people -- regularly -- who want to go into comedy and have never heard of, never mind seen, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges...

Oi. I could go on.
But instead, I'll just gaze anew on my comedy crush. Ahhh.

Ooh...look, a pithy quote on craft:

AVC: What is the difference, from a craft perspective, between writing a screenplay, writing a sitcom, and writing a sketch?

TF: Of the three, sketches are the most different, because you're not dealing with story at all, and it will kill you if you try. With the other two, you have to tell a story in a long form or a super-short form. When I wrote Mean Girls, I went into it knowing, "Okay, I don't know anything about story; I really have to try to learn." I did what everyone does: I read books. Same thing here with 30 Rock. Luckily, I'm surrounded with a writing staff that has more experience in the sitcom form. It's a good mix, because they know how to break a story into a half-hour, but at the same time, we're avoiding bad habits or getting into a rut, because a few of us have less experience and aren't locked into any specific way of doing things

AVC: How would you describe your responsibility as a writer vs. your staff's responsibility?

TF: The pilot I wrote by myself, and then from the second episode on, the way we've done it is to work as a group talking down the beats of the story. Especially before we start shooting, when I can actually be in the room all the time. We take a few days to break the "A" story and "B" story and "C" story for each episode, and then we assign one of the more senior writers to do an outline. Then, once the outlines are approved by the network, we assign usually the same person to write a draft. And whoever writes the draft is credited for the script. But still, you bring the draft back to the table and get more jokes from everybody. It's very much a group effort.

It's funny, because my instinct is to throw everybody's name on all of the scripts, because that's what we did at SNL. If someone contributed even one joke, you'd throw their name on the script. And all the sitcom guys are like, "No, no, that's not how it works." There's a whole other protocol. Whoever writes the first draft, no matter how much it gets rewritten, that's their draft. I'm still learning about all this stuff.

AVC: It sounds like you don't necessarily care about being a comedy auteur, per se.

TF: I just want the episodes to be good. It would be overly controlling to say, "I want my name on every episode."

Ahhh.

All of the good ones...