Michael & Liz are Bloggable

I'm exactly the kind of person that would *not* pick up Tina Fey's book, Bossypants. I am a young (relatively) male who just had his wife say "you won't like this, it has a LOT of girl stuff in it". But I am a huge Tina Fey fan so I couldn't resist.

Something she talks about in the book is how woman were never looked at as funny or relevant in comedy. I'll comment on that real quick.  

I used to be one of those shlubs that thought that. You ever think back to the 80's and 90's (cuz that's as far back as I can think) and wonder where the women of SNL were? There were probably a bunch of them, but they never got any camera love? Name all the stars from SNL and the list of males grows endlessly. To be entirely honest, gender would not have even registered on my mind while listing Dana Carvey, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Dan Akroyd, Chris Farley, etc.

I actually can't tell you whether or not the women who appeared with those guys were funny. I haven't seen any clips of them because the guys hogged the spotlight. I actually remember speaking the words in the early 2000's, "I don't know any women comedians that are funny." When Tina Fey arrived on SNL, my world got rocked.

She is legitimately funny. No, I'm not adding "for a girl" on the end of that sentence, she puts most guys to shame (I say "most" because I don't have a favorite, but she's in the list of my favorites). She is inventive, creative, and uses humor much better than anyone I have ever seen before. She opened up the SNL world to women in comedy and Kristen Wig (who is also amazing) has stepped right through. I knew Tina was awesome long before her book Bossypants but it put a huge exclamation point behind awesome!

So now back to the book. The overview is that it's a story about her going from a weird philly nobody to being the Bossypants executive producer of her show 30 Rock. There's a lot of information in this book about her life, including, like Liz said, a LOT of women stuff in it. Some of it is gross and not something a guy wants to hear, but I understood most of it and once you get past that stuff, and the whole book is hilarious. Either she put a lot of effort into making the reader laugh every single paragraph or she is much funnier and talented than I had ever thought.

What I enjoyed most about the book was her lessons on improv comedy. Not only did I learn a lot about how to improv, but I actually noticed she used those skills in her writing style. I could give a million examples, but the one I love the best comes from her responses to her fan mail.

She says that the first rule of improvisational comedy is to always say "yes". Accept whatever is given to you or told to you, and go from there. Someone can say "I have a gun!", and your response cannot be "no you don't, that's your finger." Improv over. That is breaking the first rule. So remember that rule while reading her response to fan mail:

She was sent:

"Tina Fey is an ugly, pear-shaped, overrated troll."

Her response:

Dear Fan,
First let me say how inspiring it is that you have learned to use a computer.

I hate for our correspondence to be confrontational, but you have offended me deeply. To say I'm an overrated troll, when you have never seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair. I'll leave it for others to say if I'm the best, but I am certainly one of the most dedicated trolls guarding bridges. I always ask three questions, at least two of which are riddles.

She continues on in her response to further destroy the writer with humor. Disregard the brilliance and hilarity of her response, and notice how she accepted the input of being called a troll and went with it. I just about exploded with laughter when she said "when you have never seen me guard a bridge". Pure genius. She used almost every rule of Improv in her book and in her humor, and I really got a lot out of it, not just laughs.

Should you read this book? Yes, absolutely you should. It is filled with page after page of more genius. Just skimming through it, I so badly want to erase my memory,  read it again, and laugh for the first time once more. I will resist ruining any more of the book for you so you can laugh for the first time yourself.

By the way, I read the book in 2 days while on vacation. That is definitely saying something.