Tina Fey

Fey, who’s got enough Emmys, Golden Globes and Mark Twain awards to suggest that she doesn’t need to aspire to anybody else’s career, certainly has plenty she can do outside of the Liz Lemon domain. The New York Times this week called her new book, “Bossypants,” “dagger-sharp” and “extremely funny.” She was in two movies last year, as a beleaguered bridge-and-tunnel type in “Date Night” and as the voice of Roxanne Ritchie in “Megamind.” She’s an accomplished screenwriter and producer. Baldwin’s right, even if absolutely nothing else she’s ever done — and I’m including “Mean Girls” here — touches the genius of “30 Rock,” she’ll still be great.

The rest of the show’s team has similarly bright prospects. Alec Baldwin was a movie and stage star — and one of “SNL’s” most beloved recurring hosts — long before he became Jack Donaghy. Tracy Morgan hosts and produces SyFy’s “Scare Tactics,”  and has a robust stand-up career. Jack McBrayer is in every third movie that comes out. And television and Broadway veteran Jane Krakowski is due any moment to have her first child.

But what about us? Even the prospect of one more full season cannot mitigate the pain of the prospective loss of “30 Rock,” a show that still, in its fifth season, remains one of the sharpest, boldest comedies on the air. What other series would attempt a live episode — with Julia Louis-Dreyfus occasionally standing in for Tina Fey? Or do a whole show as a fake episode of a reality train wreck called “Queen of Jordan”? What other series would have a character offhandedly remark, “Where are my manners — would you like some meth?” And who but “30 Rock” would not just toss in a devastating parody called “Gay Sports Center,” but do it on the same episode that “Sports Night” creator Aaron Sorkin was guesting? These are dark times, especially for those of us still carrying around all that “Arrested Development” grief.

Despite its accolades and loyal following, “30 Rock” has never been a ratings blockbuster. Tina Fey has more than once joked that she’d always assumed she’d have been long since canceled by now. But what makes the show so vital and refreshing is that it’s unlike anything else on the air. The frequently pitch-perfect domestic tribulations of “Modern Family,” the romantic entanglements of “How I Met Your Mother,” and the workplace indignities of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office” have their satisfactions, but for pure, absurd delight, you’ve got to go to FX to even come close. That’s why to imagine a world with no Funcookers, no Sandwich Days, no gaybies, no Wesley Snipes, is to hear the sound of laughter dying.

Yet all things in life are transitory — even “Lost” and “24″ had to wrap it up eventually. Fey, who turns 41 next month and has written eloquently  of her conflicted desire for a second child, may have a non-career-related incentive to take a break from the rigors of a weekly series. She’s as much as said that she can’t run “30 Rock” and take time to have a second child; perhaps she’s decided that it’s now or never time.

Whatever the motivations — and there are likely many — it’s probably better to go out while the show is still at the top of its game rather than limp along like some New York-centric sitcom version of “Battlestar Galactica.” If “30 Rock” really does bow out in 2012, it will have given us six memorably hilarious seasons and introduced the word “whuck” into the lexicon. It will have changed forever our understanding of “diabetes repair” and the intricacies of the NBC page program. If Fey and company are wise, they won’t try to go out with some horribly overambitious finale, like “Cheers” and “Seinfeld” did. They’ll just be funny, right up to the last moment, on a spring night a year from now. And while nothing can ever replace the Rock, is it too early to start wishing that Fey won’t stay away too long, and that some genius out there right now is developing “Queen of Jordan” just in time for, say, June of 2012?

Despite the intensity of her work — from her scathing Sarah Palin to the biting jibes about race and gender that make “30 Rock” indispensable — Fey has rarely mined the rich, often terrible fodder that the day-to-day grind of parenting provides. Her television alter ego Liz Lemon has a pathetic romantic life and a baby fever that’s going nowhere. The only occasional voice of parental frustration on the show comes from Liz’s married-with-five-kids colleague Pete, who fantasizes about stealing his dead neighbor’s identity, “because sometimes it feels like too much and maybe Daddy just needs to get in the car and drive.” (If you desire a realistic, non-”Two and a Half Men” version of what raising kids is like, you really need to be watching “Louie.”)

Perhaps it’s because Fey’s costar Jane Krakowski is pregnant, or her “SNL” and “Baby Mama” costar Amy Poehler welcomed a second child last year, that she felt the need to write with such frankness about her relationship with her 5-year-old daughter, Alice, and the will-she-or-won’t-she? mystery of whether to have a second child. It’s a move she acknowledges would mean “derailing the TV show where two hundred people depend on me for their income, and I take that seriously.” And she understands intimately that that’s a business decision no male prospective parent ever has to make.

Though few of us working mothers have to worry about how our fertility will affect a beloved television network franchise, Fey’s internal anguish and external pressures to “have another one” are familiar to many of us. She opens her essay with her daughter bringing home a copy of the storybook “My Working Mother,” a whimsical tale of a witch’s child who admits, “It isn’t easy having a working mom. Especially when she enjoys her work.” Yes, kids, it’s true: The only thing harder than a mom who has to work is one who actually likes to work. A few years ago, when I wrote what would be the last story I’d write for a parenting magazine, an editor changed a source’s quote from “I love my job and I love my kids” to “I like my job, but I love my kids.” God forbid you have more than one passion in life. How do you, as Fey writes, answer the skeptics who accusingly ask how you “juggle it all”? (Hint: They don’t believe you can. They’ll urge you to keep reproducing and judge you for still having a vocation.)

As it happens, I know “My Working Mother” well; my own young daughter pointedly selected it the last time we went to Books of Wonder. I know what it’s like to have a kid who says, as witch’s sprog does, “I don’t always like having a working mom.” It sucks, even though, as Fey says, “I’m sure the two men who wrote this book had the absolute best intentions.”

Like that broomstick-flying heroine of the children’s story, Fey also likes her work. And she’s blazing at it, which is where the rub comes in, because she says she always assumed her show would have been canceled by now. Instead, she now finds herself in what she self-deprecatingly refers to as her “last five minutes.” As in last five minutes of fame. Last five minutes of fertility. The cruelest joke of all is the one made by biology. And for many women, the apex of their careers coincides neatly with the waning of their fecundity. What’s a mother to do, when no matter how equitable and awesome the family may be, no one will ever write a book about how difficult it is to have a dad who holds down a job?

So it’s terrific to read another mother admitting her anguish over “this second baby nonsense.” “Am I just chasing it because it’s the hardest thing for me to get and I want to prove that I can do it?” she writes. “Do I want another baby? Or do I just want to turn back time and have my daughter be a baby again?” And she’s open about the very real career danger of a woman in show business suddenly going AWOL and finding herself the subject instead of the source of the punch line. As she brutally puts it, “The definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her any more.”

Yet as the sands of time slip through the hourglass and those incredibly nosy helpy helpertons advise, as they do Fey, “You should have another one,” somehow the world turns on, often quite well anyway. We can be paralyzed by choice, but life will make choices for us regardless. In the end, Fey admits that “Either way, everything will be fine,” which is possibly the most hopeful and encouraging thing any working mother could say to another. And there’s something pretty wonderful about having America’s best girlfriend admit she’s got her eggs in the same basket as the rest of us.

But there also was something about the evening — its mix of gentle Fey roasting and lavish praise, its abundance of Palin jokes combined with a delicately apolitical tone — that took a considerable amount of that gloriously sharp, Samuel Clemens-ish philosophy of “the assault of laughter” out of the whole works.

Despite its impressive, 19th-century-evoking name, the Twain Prize doesn’t have much of a history. It’s only been around since 1998, when the Kennedy Center established it to “recognize those who create humor from their uniquely American experiences” and chose as its first honoree Richard Pryor. It’s only been given posthumously once, to George Carlin, who died mere days after his award was announced in 2008. It’s only been given to two other women: Whoopi Goldberg in 2001 and Lily Tomlin in 2003. And considering that last year’s recipient was Bill Cosby, it’s hard not to consider that Fey’s acceptance speech words “Only in comedy is an obedient white girl from the suburbs a diversity candidate” were not entirely in jest.

If this prize is, after all, modeled on the American who best emulates Twain as a “fearless observer of society,” wouldn’t this have been the year of all years to give a nod to Jon Stewart whose fearlessness level has been off the charts?  But maybe there’s such a thing as too fearless, too political, too of the moment. And it has been seven years since anybody gave one of these things to a woman. So Fey, this year, it is.

It’s undeniable that Fey has, in the short dozen years since she joined the writing staff of “Saturday Night Live,” blossomed into an indispensable force in the American comedic landscape and the world’s greatest retort to the charge that women can’t be funny. Sunday night, she was funny indeed, thanking Sarah Palin for so much inspiration and lamenting that the Kennedy Center will soon be known as “the Tea Party Bowling Alley and Rifle Range.”

But it’s worth noting that her deadpan praise for conservative women in politics — they’re great “unless you don’t want to pay for your own rape kit … unless you’re a lesbian who wants to get married to your partner of 20 years … [or] unless you believe in evolution” — did not make it to the broadcast. Nor, in fact, was there much evidence in all of the clips shown Sunday night of the wicked, often scathing social commentary that burns through Fey’s work. This is not just the woman who wrote the “Mom Jeans” fake ad; she’s the one who penned an entire episode of “30 Rock” revolving around an insulting word for the female genitalia, one who declared in 2008 that if McCain and Palin won the election “I’m leaving Earth.”

For all her disarmingly bespectacled, girl-next-door appeal, the lady is an eviscerating wit whose humor touches on race, death, gender and all kinds of difficult, often terrible-to-talk-about stuff. She even slipped a highly contentious rape joke into “30 Rock’s” season premiere this year.

Fey doesn’t write that way because she is, according to her own self-description, a “stone cold bitch.” She does it because she intuitively understands Twain’s directive that “the hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence.” But if she is presented simply as that kooky neurotic gal from that sitcom, the accolades hardly seem worth giving. And sitting regally at the Kennedy Center, looking, as Amy Poehler observed, like Evita, Tina Fey seemed a little lost, like security had taken all the hard and cruel and sordid out of her purse, and left her with too little to bounce her genius against.