Feminism is the new funny

It is different, and "Baby Mama" and its creators know it, presenting poetic revenge for the old Katherine Parkers of the world -- not only in Kate's ability to be a single career woman and have a family anyway, but in the casting of Weaver herself, who plays wealthy, ambitious, chilly, obviously post-menopausal Chaffee Bicknell, the head of the surrogacy agency who miraculously continues to spit out her own children, as she says, "the old-fashioned way." ("What, with a time machine?" responds the incredulous Fey.) Twenty years after "Working Girl," Katherine Parker could get dumped by Harrison Ford and still pump out precious little angels into her dotage. Fey's character can be the movie's heroine -- not its villain -- a woman who, like so many of us, chose to live independently, and happily, during her youth, and finds herself in need of creative ways to reproduce in her late 30s.

"This is a film we could not have made before, obviously," said Poehler, who is married to fellow comedian Will Arnett and does not have children, "because the biggest difference that our generation has from our mothers' is that we just don't have babies yet. Our mothers by this time in life had one, two, three children, or they were never going to have children. Our mothers look at us now -- I'm 36 -- and the choices and experiences we have are way different than what they had from 25 to 35." Poehler paused. "Yeah. And then we do like really funny fart jokes."

But the ability to do the really funny fart jokes is its own kind of social evolution, though one that Poehler insisted she hasn't had to work too hard for. "In a personal way, the struggle as a female comedian was done for me by the women who came before me," she said. "The women that were on 'SNL' from the beginning, or the women who were on SCTV, or the women in the films in the '80s when I was growing up. I am lucky to be in this position." The story that "Saturday Night Live" is a boys club, said Poehler, "is a really old story." The show had Fey -- its first female head writer -- at the helm for years, and, she said, "in the past 10 years the women have been really strong on the show. Even before I got there, Molly [Shannon] and Ana [Gasteyer] and Cheri [Oteri] were kind of rippin' it up."

It doesn't hurt the comedy, she added, that ladies have made strides in other areas as well. For instance, Poehler's Hillary Clinton impersonation -- one that has actually come up in the real debates -- has been made possible by the existence of Hillary Clinton on the political stage. "There are so many women to play," she said. "So many strong women in politics and entertainment and in positions of power that you get to impersonate, it's really cool."

Starting from this plateau of increased opportunity, Poehler said, she and Fey and their peers can exercise their own feminism -- flicking at social and political issues, calling out dumb girls and a chauvinist media --but only if they don't try too hard.

Poehler said, "It's like when you sit down to write a sketch at 'SNL' and you're like, 'I'm going to write something really important.' Or you say, 'I'm going to write something really political this week.'" Here she mimics the blank stare of writer's block. "Suddenly, you're like, 'Oh, fuck.' And as soon as you say, 'You know what I want to do? I want to change the minds of viewers!' it's like, 'Oh, brother.'"

At some point, said Poehler, "feminism certainly informs my day to day, but then you've got to let it go. And also not worry. It's the same with worrying about sensitivity regarding issues of infertility and surrogacy. You have to not worry too much about who you're offending and who you're poking fun of."

"The way to do it," said Poehler, "is to do what men do, which is you just assume power. You're not grateful for it."

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