SALON

Monday, Nov 15, 2010 9:01 PM UTC

What was Tina Fey’s humor prize really about?

Last night on PBS, America's best comedians celebrated her -- but her edgiest, best work was nowhere to be seen

By

Topics: Tina Fey, Television,

What was Tina Fey's humor prize really about?Tina Fey waves to fans as she arrives at the Kennedy Center where she was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for humor in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2010. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) (Credit: AP)

Of course Tina Fey is brilliant. Of course she’s one of the most insightful and hilarious figures in American comedy today. Of course she deserves every Emmy (seven, if you’re counting), Golden Globe, Writers Guild of America and Teen Choice Award  on her overstuffed shelf. She was the head writer for “Saturday Night Live.” She gave us “Mean Girls” and “30 Rock.” She’s an icon to legions of urban career women — a Carrie Bradshaw with more wit and fewer plantar warts. She’s even in the No. 1 movie in the country, as reporter Roxanne Ritchie in “Megamind.” And so when she was feted last week with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, in a comedy legend-packed evening at the Kennedy Center that aired Sunday on PBS (right opposite her Fey look-alike Sarah Palin’s reality debut), it was in many ways cause for cheering.

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. 

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 29 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Journalists file suit against Manning's trial secrecy: Plaintiffs including Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange demand press, public access to trial and documents
140 points141 points | comment
vote
Report: Nearly a quarter of Americans struggle to afford food
125 points126 points | 12 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
111 points112 points | 84 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
101 points102 points | 28 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
77 points78 points | 19 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations