61 pages • 2 hours read
Bossypants
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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: "A Childhood Dream, Realized"
Fey is starstruck and intimidated by Lorne Michaels, whom she meets for the first time in 1997 when she interviews for a writing position at Saturday Night Live. Although she panics at first over how to respond to a simple question about where she lives, ceasing to “remember how normal human speech patterns worked” (110), she gets the job. Over the course of nine years, they develop a relationship of “mutual respect and friendship” (111). This chapter relates lessons she learned from Lorne Michaels.
For example, a writer’s job is not “to churn up enthusiasm” but rather “to police” it (111). She explains how the props department may give you objects they think are funnier but actually are less practical. Similarly, “[a]ctors have what they call ‘ideas’” (112), which often stem from ulterior motives the writer must learn to decipher.
Fey writes that you must not be “too precious about your writing” (112); at 11:30, Saturday Night Live goes on regardless of whether it’s “ready.” She also reiterates that although “bombing” is painful […] it doesn’t kill you.” Every writer has “golden nuggets” and “shit nuggets,” and “unfortunately, sometimes the shit nuggets will make it onto the air” (113). She concludes that you can only learn from it and “go back to panning for gold on Monday” (113).
An effective writing team should be a mix of “Harvard nerds” and “Chicago improvisers” (112). The Harvard guys, she writes, “keep the Improvisers from wallowing in schmaltz” and “check the logic and construction of every joke” (115). The Improvisers, on the other hand, teach the Harvard guys “how to be human” (115).
Other lessons include making sure you look good on camera so that your appearance doesn’t distract from your acting, keeping timing perfect so that the audience doesn’t become “nervous for you” (116) and unable to laugh, and being firm but gentle with “crazy” (116) people. Michaels, she writes, “knew how to get the eggs” (120), a reference to Annie Hall that illustrates Michaels’s ability to extract people’s talents and hold them accountable while easing their fragile moods. As evidence, Fey describes the time she walked out of work after an anthrax scare in their building; that evening, Michaels calls her at home to ask if she wants to join them for dinner. Fey believes “[i]t was the most gentle, non-Bossypants way of saying ‘You’re embarrassing yourself’” (119) and appreciates that “he found a way for me to slip back in the door like my mental breakdown never happened” (120).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Peeing in Jars with Boys”
Fey is unable to come up with a sketch for her first show in 1997, in which the host is Sylvester Stallone, and submits an old sketch that isn’t selected. When she’s asked to tell Sylvester Stallone to enunciate more clearly, she nervously enters his trailer to tell him; when he’s easily amenable to the idea, she realizes “that the movie star hosts of the show were just people who wanted to do a good job and […] were eager for any guidance” (122). Producers choose to put Chris Kattan in a dress to play Rocky’s wife—as opposed to Cheri Oteri, who’d wanted the role. Fey notes that by the time she left the show, “that never would have happened” because “[t]he women in the cast took over the show in that decade” (123).
People ask Fey all the time whether “men and women find different things funny” (123). Fey writes that the true difference between men and women comedy writers is that “[t]he men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars” (124). While not all of them do, “[a]nytime there’s a bad female stand-up somewhere,” a blogger writes that “‘women aren’t funny’”; therefore, “[u]sing that same math” (126), Fey feels comfortable with the generalization about the male writers.
On Saturday Night Live, commercial parodies are taken very seriously because they are expensive to produce and can be repeated on multiple shows. She and the other head writer read dozens of sketches and decide on their favorites, then lobby the producers to try to convince them to select their choices. Fey vehemently advocates for a sketch called “Kotex Classic” that parodies the “classic” advertising trend “as if Kotex were trying to revive nostalgia for those old 1960s maxi pads that hooked to a belt” (127). The producers claim that “it would be ‘too difficult to produce’” (127). After they ask her to describe the details of the sketch, Fey realizes that they in fact “literally didn’t know what we were talking about” just as she didn’t understand “the completely normal custom of pissing in jars” (128). The sketch is ultimately selected, and Fey is grateful that “they were willing to trust us” (128).
Chapter 15 Summary: “I Don’t Care If You Like It”
Once, during a read-through with the Saturday Night Live crew, Amy Poehler “did something vulgar as a joke”—something “unladylike” (129). When Jimmy Fallon tells her to stop because it isn’t “cute” and he doesn’t like it, Poehler turns to him and announces: “I don’t fucking care if you like it” (129), then returns to her conversation. The encounter leaves Fallon stunned. Fey, however, is exuberant, for Poehler “made it clear that she wasn’t there to be cute” (130).
Fey internally makes this remark—“We don’t fucking care if you like it” (130)—whenever a famous man says women aren’t funny, stating that “[i]t is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good” (130). She encourages women not to care what men think of them unless the man is one’s boss—in which case one should find solace in a “neutral proving ground” (131) at work.
Women subjected to men’s unsolicited opinions should go “Over! Under! Through!” until they are the boss, at which point “opinions will change organically” (131). Even if opinions don’t change, she advises women to “[d]o your thing and don’t care if they like it” (131).
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Fey’s early experiences at Saturday Night Live do more than reiterate the particular challenges women face to achieve equality in the workplace: they also show how Fey and other women begin to chip away at the sometimes unconscious discrimination that forces them into boxes and undermines their talents and abilities.
When Jimmy Fallon tells Amy Poehler that he doesn’t like her joke because it isn’t “cute,” Poehler proclaims: “I don’t fucking care if you like it,” leaving Fallon “visibly startled” (129). Her refusal to be “cute” (129)—to conform to society’s ideal of the soft-spoken, delicate woman who spends all her time tending to her appearance—is reminiscent of Fey’s refusal to be ashamed of her “rounded belly,” “wad of lower-back fat,” and “[g]ood strong legs with big gym teacher calves” (108). Just as Fey is “grateful” (24) for the features that distinguish her from the feminine ideal, Poehler proudly flaunts her “unladylike” (129) sense of humor; in both cases, women defy convention in the face of objectification or stereotype. Fey frequently expresses frustration with society’s minimizing of the physicality of women’s bodies—for example, the “Growing Up and Liking It” brochure depicts menstruation with “spunky interchange” (14) that sugarcoats reality. Just as she encourages women to ignore beauty tips and look as they please, she encourages women to continue to share “unladylike” (129) jokes despite men’s insistence that women fit their impossible ideal.
Incidents like these, though minor, appear to help gradually level the playing field. In “Peeing in Jars With Boys,” Fey writes of how Chris Kattan was cast as a woman in a part desired by Cheri Oteri, something “that would never have happened” later during Fey’s tenure when “[t]he women in the cast took over the show” (123). In another instance, producers pass over a Kotex commercial parody because they “had never been handed a fifteen-year-old Kotex product by the school nurse” (127), only to eventually show they are “willing to trust” (128) Fey’s judgment by choosing the commercial to run on air.
Throughout Bossypants, Fey relates how she’s absorbed the teachings of others to use in subsequent experiences. Lorne Michaels is one of the most notable examples. She writes that she took Michaels’s advice regarding hiring “Harvard nerds” and “Chicago improvisers” (112) on 30 Rock. She illustrates his nuanced sense of comic timing when she describes his dislike of opening to a closed door. She also spends time on his delicate, patient handling of people’s emotional breakdowns, including her own. Back in “The Windy City, Full of Meat,” Fey stated that “[t]he rules of improvisation appealed to me not only as a way of creating comedy, but as a worldview” (75), a tenet demonstrated by her eagerness to constantly learn and to absorb experiences for later use.
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