Tina Fey admits she took “the wrong side” with some of her past “Saturday Night Live” jokes, but insists that her uncanny impersonation of former Republican presidential running mate Sarah Palin was a “fair hit.”
Fey looked back on her tenure in Studio 8H during the History Talks celebration in Philadelphia on Saturday. While discussing the show’s political side, the Emmy-winner said that experiencing the first episode after September 11, an anthrax scare and the time President George W. Bush met his “SNL” imitator, Will Ferrell, made her realize it was impossible to completely separate their comedy from the real world it parodied.
“The show’s relationship to current events became a thinner and thinner veil,” said Fey, per Variety. “They said something, we said something back. They’d come over and go, ‘We want to be on [the show] too.’ It’s thrilling, and almost a scary thing, that something you say will be heard by the person in charge.”
But Fey conceded that not all her bits had aged well.
“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.’” she said, per Deadline.
Fey, who was a writer and a cast member from 1997 to 2006, also talked about striking the right balance between absurd and astute while playing Palin, who was a veritable gaffe magnet during Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“We always worked really hard to make sure that we felt like they were what we would call ‘a fair hit,’” Fey said about crafting the GOP caricature with writing partners Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. “It only felt like it would work if it was based in something that was true.”
Fey also explained that she thinks “Saturday Night Live” has next to no actual impact on politics.
“Sometimes, people will ask me or ask others, ‘Does ‘SNL’ try to control the narrative and politics?’ And they really do not. And also, you really can’t. If it’s not true, it will not be funny,” she said.
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