I'm a big fan of Saturday Night Live. I used to watch it religiously, and even though I don't see it real-time as much as I'd like due to increasing inability to stay up past 11:30 on the weekends, I do try to keep up with who's on and what new skits they're brewing. The women on the show have always been my favorites. Hell, this blog and its tagline bloomed from one single quote by Gilda Radner. She personified everything I like in a person - down-to-earth, funny as hell, and the able to not take life so seriously. Delicious ambiguity is what it's all about, after all. Gilda was platinum.
Fast forward to the era of women ruling the roost at SNL. Tina Fey is one of my self-proclaimed personal heroes, and the fact that she is the first female head writer of the show is just plain cool. It's about time, really, and since she's been there, I think they've had some of the best writing they've had in decades. All the women on that show have been funny over the years, but she and Amy Poehler and the new cast of increasingly funny chicks has raised the bar, in my opinion.
Poehler's first was being promoted from featured cast member to full-fledged cast member in her inagural year - a distinction held only by two other cast members. Both men. So, when I found out that Amy Poehler was leaving SNL, it made me a little sad. My Dad likes to say that I look and act like Tina Fey (he contends that she'll play me in the cinematic biopic of my life, but the jury is still out on that), and while I'll take that as a compliment (nothing wrong with being compared to a smart, funny chick), I'd like to think that Amy and I have a few things in common as well. For starters, she was born exactly 20 days after me in 1971, and we're both Virgos...which really just means that we're both earthy, organized perfectionists who have a professional exterior but wild interior. Or something like that. She's married to a guy named Will. I, too, have a husband with a four-letter name.
We're practically twins, people.
I'll miss watching those two girls do their thing on the Weekend Update, but I'm sure she'll show up someplace else real soon. In the meantime, here are some of the SNL women acting like half the 19-year olds I teach at the university.
Long live the funny girl.
