Sunday Short: Lessons from Late Night by Tina Fey

You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I’m from a generation in which a lot of people died on waterslides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live television.

I have a love-hate relationship with this article by Tina Fey. On the one hand, I think she's awesome, a brilliant writer and creative, and, on the other hand, I think she's prone to being dismissive of women and women's issues that aren't directly affecting her. I love most of this article, but she makes a strange comment halfway through about there not being "institutionalised sexism" at SNL. It's great she got her way and all, but the way she says it rubs me the wrong way and, I think, can be damaging. There's so much sexism in comedy and screenwriting that to paint one place in such a broad stroke (a place that, up until recently, had no African American women on staff) is potentially damaging and ignorant. That said, this is still a great insight into the way SNL operates and the nature of being a comedy writer on television and Fey is, as usual, pretty darn funny.

You can read 'Lessons from Late Night' over on The New Yorker website here.