Tina Fey acknowledged that she was “on the wrong side” of some jokes during her time on Saturday Night Live but maintained that other sketches, including a widely discussed impersonation of Sarah Palin, were a “fair hit”.
Fey was speaking on Saturday at the History Talks event at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, organised to mark the 250th independence anniversary of the US, where she reflected on her nine-year tenure on the live sketch comedy variety show.
“I started there in 1997 and I was there when we had to come back for the first show after September 11 and try to figure out what that show could be,” the 30 Rock star said, according to Deadline.
“The longer I was there, I realised that the show’s relationship to current events, it became a thinner and thinner veil,” Fey added, recalling that she was in the NBC building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza when “president Bush came by to meet Will Ferrell” and the anthrax incident occurred.
The anthrax incident took place in 2001, when letters containing the lethal bacteria were sent to US media organisations including NBC, killing five people and infecting 17.
It was around this time that Will Ferrell was regularly impersonating then George W Bush on Saturday Night Live, a role he started during the 2000 presidential campaign and continued into then president’s early years in office.
“They say something, we say something back, they come over, they go, ‘Oh, we want to be on it too.’ It’s a thrilling and almost scary thing to have this idea that something you say will be heard by the person in charge,” Fey continued. “I mean, I’ve made jokes, but also, I was pretty dumb and not much better now, but there’s jokes that I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I was on the wrong side of that.’”
The Four Seasons star also addressed the six-week period during the 2008 US presidential election when she worked with Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers to write sketches and portray Sarah Palin, the vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket with John McCain.
“We always worked really hard to make sure that we felt like they were what we would call ‘a fair hit’. And I think part of that is, one, we knew we would get in trouble if it was wrong or random, but also because it sort of only felt like it would work if it was kind of based in something that was true,” the actor said.
The sketches became one of Saturday Night Live’s most widely viewed political moments, and even won Fey the Emmy for outstanding guest actress in a comedy series in 2009.
Palin later appeared on Saturday Night Live herself in October 2008, alongside Fey, during the height of the election campaign.
Despite the proximity to political figures, Fey rejected the idea that the show attempted to shape political outcomes.
“Sometimes people will ask me, ‘Does SNL try to control the narrative of politics?’ And they really do not. You really can’t because if it’s not true, it will not be funny,” she said.
Fey, who became SNL’s first female head writer in 1999, opened the debut episode of the UK version last month.
The premiere, which received a mixed reception, saw cameos from actor Michael Cera, British chat show royalty Graham Norton, and Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan.
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