Tina Fey on Las Culturistas: Great Americans, Mozzarella Stick Math, and the Danger of Having Opinions

There is a specific kind of podcast episode where the guest is so cosmically correct for the show that the hosts spend the first ten minutes just processing the fact that it is happening. Matt Rogers transcribed Mean Girls by hand as a fourteen-year-old, typed every slug line into some guy’s script database website because the demand was never higher, and now Tina Fey is sitting in Bowen Yang’s dressing room, which, it will later be revealed, contains zero deodorant. The culture decided to be good.

The episode earns its title almost by accident. Rogers and Yang keep nominating people for the informal pantheon of Great Americans: Sam the Disney tour guide, Kenan Thompson staying up until 4 a.m. to keep morale alive on an overnight shoot, Chloe Sevigny for being a real New Yorker. Fey rolls with it, building her own list of formative texts like someone reading from a time capsule. Benny Hill on PBS as a family. VC Andrews paperbacks at the Jersey Shore. Getting up early with her brother to watch the very first minutes of MTV. Real World New York season one. Live Aid, where she somehow thought the Philadelphia leg was a separate event from Wembley and did not understand that Phil Collins got on a Concorde.

I am from watching Benny Hill as a family.

The ‘90s-were-rough conversation is where this episode really opens up. Fey does not romanticize her early years at SNL. She says she was shaking every single day just to be there, that kindness was not in fashion, that everyone ended up with some version of temporary OCD and PTSD. She and Rogers watch old Letterman clips and arrive at the same conclusion: a fifty-five-year-old man just hanging a teenager out to dry, and everyone laughing along. The Paris Hilton interview. The Courtney Thorne-Smith and Norm clip where she is just trying to tell a funny story and two maniacs are on either side of her doing a bit. Fey’s read is generous but clear: we were hard people. The fact that she co-wrote a segment on 30 Rock modeled directly on the Paris Hilton Letterman interview, specifically to make that discomfort the subject, lands differently once she names it.

Kindness was not in fashion. And it would get worse from there. Mental Health was like, what? What is that, what are you talking about.

Fast and Loud

The Mean Girls material is genuinely illuminating, which is not something you expect from a movie that has been discussed to near-death. Fey remembers being anxious on set because she had only ever done Update and did not know whether she was on camera, so she was trying real hard every single take. She watched Rachel McAdams and was worried. The performance was so small she went to director Mark Waters and said she did not know. Then the dailies came back and it was perfection. She describes what sketch training does and does not give you, the difference between someone who understands what the camera wants and someone whose performance lives entirely in the edit room. The note she gives every host on Wednesdays is two words: fast and loud.

Fast and loud. That usually dials it in.

The ‘I Don’t Think So Honey’ segment arrives like a small reckoning. Fey’s rant, aimed at Bowen Yang’s habit of giving his real opinions about movies on this podcast, is delivered with the particular warmth of someone who has already made every available mistake. She tells him he is too famous now. She asks what he is going to do when Emerald Fennell calls about the next project where he plays Carey Mulligan’s coworker in the bridal section of Harrods. She tells Matt he has about one year left before the same problem catches up with him. Bowen’s counter-rant, about Matt failing to mention him in a Paramount Plus ad for a movie Bowen is actually in, where he plays Sydney the rat, is the funniest thing in the episode and also completely justified. The two rants form an accidental thesis: authenticity is dangerous and expensive, but so is being a person who only ever says everything everyone does is amazing.

Podcasts are forever. Seconds of authenticity is dangerous and expensive.

By the end, Fey has told the story of calling Amy Poehler from an Amtrak back from Washington DC and asking her to be her comedy partner, has explained that she wrote most of Mean Girls over two summers on Fire Island while her husband got a rash from a trash-picked desk, and has confirmed that she once volunteered herself and Amy to play Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in the Hall of Presidents and was told, politely, that they were good. She leaves them with the advice she gives hosts on Wednesdays. She recommends they take the Enneagram test. She accepts the invitation to the Beacon. It all feels correct.