Kristen Wiig and Tina Fey Compete to Have Had the Worst Adolescence

The photograph is damning. Tina Fey, bowl cut folded symmetrically from a haircutting school whose marquee promised ‘London, Paris, Upper Darby,’ stares back at the studio audience as proof that genius and social catastrophe are not mutually exclusive. Graham Norton has photographic evidence of almost everyone on the couch tonight, and the effect is less ‘celebrity chat show’ and more ‘intervention.’ Kristen Wiig is there with a perm and a Sun-In disaster. Jamie Foxx is 18 years old and looks, as Norton helpfully notes, 47. Kurt Russell apparently auditioned for both Han Solo and Princess Leia. Everyone is implicated. Nobody is safe.

Guitar Case, No Guitar

Wiig’s contribution to the awkward-childhood Olympics is genuinely great television. She explains, with a perfectly straight face, that as a kid she would take her dad’s guitar out of its case and walk around the neighborhood carrying just the case, to make people think she played. The bit lands. Then comes the kicker.

I remember putting thinking to myself I should probably put vitamins in there because I got tired. So I just had like Flintstone vitamins in the guitar case.

Nobody is workshopping that. That is a real memory from a real child who was, by her own account, already managing optics and logistics simultaneously, just very badly. Fey, for her part, goes darker. She had the bowl cut, yes, and the late physical development, and the deeply public bra fitting conducted by her mother in the middle of a JCPenney floor. The audience is delighted. Fey seems like she has made peace with all of it mainly by turning it into material, which is the only reasonable exit strategy.

Stallone Gets the Note

The best professional story of the night belongs to Fey, who describes her first week as a writer at SNL. The host was Sylvester Stallone. The veterans decided to haze the 27-year-old by sending her to his dressing room with a note.

They were like, ‘You need to go into his dressing room and tell him we can’t understand anything that he’s saying.’ And he was so sweet about it, and it was also so sweet cuz he was like clearly like not the first time he’d gotten that note.

That detail, Stallone accepting the note graciously because of course he had, lands as both a good joke and a genuinely sweet portrait of a movie star who just wants to do the work right. Fey has a gift for stories where the punchline is actually warmth dressed up as mockery. It is probably why she survived as head writer.

The Fly Situation

A large fly enters the studio. This is not a bit. Graham Norton attempts to explain, with genuine enthusiasm, that if you position your hands on either side of a fly and clap inward, the air pressure tricks it and you catch it every time. It is the kind of claim that gets nodded along with in polite company and tested once in private. Norton tests it live, on camera, in front of Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig. Then, incredibly, he accidentally drinks it.

I’ve chewed it. I took a drink. I was like, I didn’t realize I had any ice in there.

The fly is eventually produced, dead, from Norton’s mouth. The crowd loses it completely. Wiig and Fey sit there looking like two people who have written enough absurdist comedy to recognize a perfect scene when it happens in front of them. The childhood pictures, the Stallone story, the Sarah Palin impression, the Bridesmaids bowel-movement origins conversation, all of it is good television. The fly is great television. Norton, to his credit, knows it.

Everyone said, ‘It’s too ambitious. Don’t try it.’ Listen, we won.