Tina Fey

We need to stop talking about whether women are funny. And we need to acknowledge that black people are funnier than white people. Let’s discuss that.

Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don’t know who that’s attributed to. I think it’s Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.

I can’t believe you recently had a baby. How do you do it? [pause] The baby starts to come down…and once that happens you can’t-it comes out. Whether you let it or not, the baby comes out. So that’s how I did it.

I would not trade any of these features for anybody else’s. I wouldn’t trade the small thin-lipped mouth that makes me resemble my nephew. I wouldn’t even trade the acne scar on my right cheek, because that recurring zit spent more time with me in college than any boy ever did.

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that’s where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.

I like to crack the jokes now and again, but it’s only because I struggle with math.

I’m the worst at picking what movies are going to do well. I have no idea. I’m really surprised if a movie I like does well.

I can do anything I want to do really, I might as well.

Even in 2008 – which was probably the most exciting political cycle I experienced while at SNL – there was a sense of a hangover afterwards. But this time, it has been relentless, and we’re only relentless in what we’re doing because [the Trump administration is] so relentless in what they’re doing. So this is all a reactive relentlessness.

How do you expect me to see your nasty-looking eye ball if you don’t look straight ahead?

The second I met Zac, I thought he was a really cool guy. It’s hard not to have chemistry with someone who is so attractive.

I did Jonathon Ross last year and he said ‘do people do impressions of David Brent?’ and I went ‘well, they can’t really because he’s such a normal bloke’. Then, after the show, me and Ross are walking through the car park and this bloke jumps out and goes ‘der-ner-ner-ner-ner’, does the David Brent dance and runs away. Jonathon Ross was in hysterics: ‘all that shit you came out with and then some bloke jumps out and runs away’. But on the whole it doesn’t really happen.

Maybe my fairytale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK.

[On struggling to be taken seriously in the industry] Even now, people want to marginalize me. They want to attribute all my success to teenagers seeing my movies. I really resent it when people say, “It’s just a genre film; it’s a teen comedy.” It takes a lot of work to make these things have heart and resonance so they’re not just empty, disposable confections. But I don’t give a damn about other people’s perceptions, because I’ll show them. For women in this business, ascendancy is always a battle. It’s scrape and claw. I just try to stick to my guns and respect myself. I want to take the ingenues aside and say, “Value yourself! It’s O.K. if you have opinions!

It was reported that Guy Ritchie has cast his wife Madonna in a small walk-on role in his new movie, Revolver. Madonna will play the part of the woman who ruins the film.

Fame for fame’s sake is a completely empty experience. Fame should be a by-product (and not necessarily a good one) of achieving something extraordinary.

I don’t know how many millions of photographs have been taken of me.

I did (training in) tennis, ballet, swing dancing, piano, art class and etiquette. I also did French dialect, but then it was mixing me up with my Southern dialect, so we stuck to Southern!

If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?

[On husband Ryan Phillippe] I don’t think I can imagine a better guy than the one I’ve ended up with.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will live as one.