Tina Fey names her favourite ‘SNL’ sketch
Regardless of how you feel about the show, it is undeniable that Saturday Night Live has served as a training ground for some of the most famous actors and comedians of the past five decades.
Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Will Ferrell, Bob Odenkirk, and Bill Hader all honed their skills there, so we have a lot to be grateful for. The fact that it was also responsible for Adam Sandler and Jason Sudeikis can be forgiven. One of the brightest stars to emerge from the show in the past couple of decades, however, is Tina Fey.
Unlike superstars like Murphy and Murray, Fey wasn’t hired as a performer. After sending some scripts she’d written to Lorne Michaels, she was hired as a writer in 1997 and rose through the ranks to attain the coveted position of head writer.
According to Fey, she was only invited to go on camera after she lost weight. “I was a completely normal weight,” she told The New York Times in 2001, “But I was here in New York City, I had money, and I couldn’t buy any clothes. After I lost weight, there was interest in putting me on camera.”
Fey Steps in front of the camera
It doesn’t speak highly of the decision-makers of the show, but it did get her in front of audiences, which proved to be a turning point. After years of co-hosting the Weekend Update segment with Jimmy Fallon and Amy Poehler, she left the show to create a parody of it, 30 Rock. Later, she returned to play Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, thanks to their uncanny resemblance.
In total, Fey spent over a decade at SNL, which makes it hard to narrow down a single sketch that stands out above the rest. There was the Weekend Update segment in which she interviewed Harry Potter (played by the comedic genius Rachel Dratch); there are also all the fake television adverts that flip the clichés on their head. And there are, of course, all those brilliant Palin sketches. However, when asked to name her favourite, Fey opted for none of these.
“Rachel Dratch and I wrote one that we really liked,” she said. “It was a show like Barney. She played a little girl who had gone through puberty, and her breasts were really big”.
The sketch in question takes place on the set of a kid’s TV show that features, like Barney & Friends, a giant purple dinosaur that leads a cast of children in song and dance. Fallon plays the director of the show, who has to tactfully ask Dratch to move to the back of the group when they start to do “the jumpy dance”.
As the music starts, the kids hop, shimmy, push their chests out, and bend over. For the rest of the ten and 11-year-olds, this doesn’t look particularly suggestive. But for Dratch’s unsuspecting character, it’s a recipe for disaster. Fey and Poehler’s collaborations during and after their time on SNL are revered for a reason, but Fey and Dratch made magic together as well, as this skit demonstrates in all its cringeworthy glory.
