What I'm Reading #22: Bossypants (Tina Fey)

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I did the math: between last Monday, May 16 and this Friday, May 27, I will have driven about 35 hours. From Durham to Charlotte, Charlotte to Charleston, Charleston to Durham, Durham to Savannah, Savannah to Charlotte, Charlotte to Durham, and Durham to Indianapolis. Audiobooks have been and will be my saving grace.

Bossypants (Reagan Arthur Books 2011) was a super fun audiobook because it was entertaining in its own right, and hearing Tina Fey read it herself just multiplied the hilarity. I love Tina Fey; I think she's brilliant and funny, and this book was not only entertaining, it had some pretty interesting things to say.

First, she told about an experience of asking a group of women when they first knew that they were a woman (i.e. not just a girl, but a grown woman). She found that almost all of the responses involved men doing something nasty to them, usually yelling things from cars. How sad is it that? Women of the world: your womanhood is about WAY more than whether men will catcall when you walk by.

Fey also told of her experience as a teenager working at a local theater for two summers. In the first summer, she became good friends with a number of gay men, and by the end of that summer was willing to defend homosexuality to anyone who condemned it. But by part of the way through the second summer, she realized that she was unwittingly using those friends for how fun they were and for how she could tell them all her problems without dealing with theirs because they were still half-closeted. This is the quote that hit home and made me examine myself: "Gay people were made that way by God, but not solely for (my) entertainment. We can't expect our gay friends to always be single, celibate, and arriving early with the nacho fixin's. And we really need to let these people get married already."

There was also a point in the book where I thought of Sam Wells, the Dean of Duke Chapel. Bear with me. Fey's background is in improv, and in Bossypants she takes time to discuss the rules of improv as the rules of life. First off, improv is not a solo thing but requires at least one other person. Anyway, here are the basic rules:

1. Start with "Yes"; always agree with your partner.
   
2. Then say "Yes, and..."; add something to what your partner has done.
3. Make statements; asking questions just puts it back on your partner to move the action.
4. There are no mistakes, only opportunities.

Hint: Dean Wells wrote a whole book called Improvisation that uses the rules of improv (not these exactly, but similar) to talk about Christian ethics. Rule #2 is what Wells calls "overaccepting." I admit with great embarrassment that I have not yet read his book, but I intend to do so this summer, and then I'll probably have more to say about it, but still, it's cool.

I have a lot more to say, but then this post would get way too long (it probably already is) and you wouldn't need to read the book. I'll close by saying a little more about gender issues that Fey addresses. She talks about how while some thought women like J-Lo and Beyonce liberated women from some normative body image, they actually just added on to the impossible laundry list of desirable features, or things for a woman to hate about her body. She talks about how she gets asked, "Is it weird for you to be the boss of all these people?", something no one would ever think to ask a man in her position. She also talks about the hazard of being a woman who speaks her mind, and I thought of my ethics professor Amy Laura Hall when Fey said this (I feel like a chicken for editing out the expletive, because honestly, I don't care, but if Stanley Hauerwas has stopped using the f-word, maybe I should avoid it too): "Women, at least in comedy, are labeled 'crazy' after a certain age...I have a suspicion that the definition of 'crazy' in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to [have sex with] her anymore."

Of course, Fey had to talk about her gig as Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. It was interesting to hear about the process of her coming to do that when she was no longer on SNL at the time, even more interesting to hear about reactions to her character and how she handled those. She talked about how she did get a lot of criticism for her portrayal of Palin (which, by the way, I think was brilliant), usually for being too harsh on the vice presidential candidate at the time. Fey points out that plenty of her male colleagues have made much nastier jokes about male politicians, and if they are criticized, it's not in the same way. Here's what she concluded: people saw her (Fey) as a bitch, and they saw Palin as fragile. Both of these caricatures are profoundly genderized in problematic ways on both ends. Why can a man and a woman make the same kind of joke, and the man's funny but the woman's a bitch? Why would a male politician being mocked probably be ignored or told to (*cough*) "man up," while a woman who is satirized draws protective concern from supporters? These observations and more are why Fey's book was both highly amusing and very thought provoking. And now I will leave you with a hilarious video clip of Fey as Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton, because it is still funny.