Bossypants (18 page)

THOMAS JEFFERSON

I don’t care. This is about Tracy. I rode a horse all the way from Heaven to tell him something.

There was Matt Hubbard, a baby-faced Harvard boy who always wanted to order McDonald’s for staff lunch, which I liked a lot. Matt and his wife sublet a place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that turned out to have bedbugs. This kind of deep human suffering, in combination with his highly processed diet, transformed him into a joke-writing superhero. MVP episode: 115, “Hardball.” MVP

joke: Tracy Jordan on food.

KENNETH

Hello there, Mr. Jordan! Mr. Slattery, Mr. Oppenheim. I’ve picked up your lunch from Sylvia’s.

Extra cornbread, because I know you like it.

TRACY

Like it? I love it! I love that cornbread so much I want to take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant!

There was Daisy Gardner, a delicate soul with a nervous stomach who pitched some of the filthiest jokes you could imagine, in the gentlest voice you could imagine. MVP episode: 116, “The Source Awards,” in which Jack Donaghy tries to recover from the failure of his foul-tasting wine, Donaghy Estates, by trying to market it to the hip-hop community as a replacement for Cristal. MVP

joke: rapper Ghostface Killah trying to swig Donaghy Estates during a music video.

GHOSTFACE KILLAH (CONT’D)

’CAUSE I GET RAW AND TAKE NAMES/JUST LIKE LEBRON JAMES/AND DONAGHY KINDA RHYMES

WITH PARTY/WHICH IS COOL –

He takes another sip, reacts, disgusted.

GHOSTFACE KILLAH (CONT’D)

I gotta take a break. I can’t drink any more of this. My tummy hurts!

The Lord sent me John Riggi, who upon first meeting looked like an angry longshoreman in a denim jacket and a skullcap, but turned out to be a sensitive Italian boy from Cincinnati and an excellent cook. MVP episode: 104, “Blind Date.” MVP joke:

LIZ

You mean Gretchen Thomas? The brilliant plastics engineer-slash-lesbian?

(off his puzzled look)

What made you think I was gay?

JACK

Your shoes.

Liz looks down at her shoes. They are pretty borderline.

LIZ

Well, I’m straight.

JACK

Those shoes are bi-curious.

Our youngest writer was Donald Glover. He had just graduated from NYU’s writing program and was still living in a dorm and working as an RA. Donald was our only African American writer at the time, but his real diversity was that he was our only “cool young person” who could tell us what the “kids were listening to these days.” Also, because he came from a large family in Georgia, he was very helpful in writing for the character Kenneth the Page. MVP joke: a scene where Jenna (Jane Krakowski) is trying to teach Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) how to brag about himself in a passive-aggressive way.

JENNA

Not even a “back door” brag?

KENNETH

What’s a “back door” brag?

JENNA

It’s sneaking something wonderful about yourself into everyday conversation. Like when I tell people, “It’s hard for me to watch ‘American Idol,’ because I have perfect pitch.”

KENNETH

Oh… ew.

JENNA

Now you try.

KENNETH

It’s hard for me to watch “American Idol” ’cause there’s a water bug on my channel changer.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint what I like most about that joke. Is it that Kenneth is truly incapable of bragging? The revelation that Kenneth’s apartment is crawling with water bugs? No, I think it’s the use of the grandmotherly expression “channel changer.”

As for Robert Carlock, his strengths are erudite references, absurd joke constructions, and White Male Malaise in a multicultural world. MVP episodes: 105, “Jacktor”; 215, “Sandwich Day”; 310,

“Generalissimo”; 416, “Apollo, Apollo.” MVP joke: too many to name, but the character that flows from him the most freely is Dr. Leo Spaceman (Chris Parnell). At the end of season 1, Jack suffers a heart attack. His unscrupulous showbiz doctor comes out to the waiting room to give Liz, Jack’s mother (Elaine Stritch), and Jack’s fiancée (Emily Mortimer) a prognosis.

Dr. Spaceman enters from I.C.U. His lab coat is covered in blood. The women all gasp.

DR. SPACEMAN

What, this? No, no, I was at a costume party earlier this evening… and the hostess’s dog attacked me so I had to stab it.

Perhaps the Carlockian worldview is best summed up by this exchange from a recent episode, when Tracy arrives at the hospital just after the birth of his daughter.

TRACY (O.C.) (CONT’D)

Why is the baby covered in goop?!

DR. SPACEMAN (O.C.)

Because everything about this is disgusting!

Taking the World by Storm! (Storm Downgraded to Light Rain by

Weather Experts)

We premiered on Wednesday, October 11, 2006, at 8:00 P.M. and we were an instant hit—like figs for dessert or bringing your guitar out at a party. We were New Coke!

We were not a hit.

But we barreled ahead knowing that we’d at least come out of this with DVDs to show our friends. The story ideas came fast and furious in the beginning. “What if Tracy went off his medication and started hallucinating a little blue dude everywhere?” Sure. “What if Jenna was in a movie called
The
Rural Juror
and no one could understand her when she said the title?” Fine. “What if we do a story about Liz being called a cunt?” Why wouldn’t we? That had happened to me plenty!*

You know that saying “Dance as if no one is watching”? Well, that’s what we were doing. We were dancing with abandon, and no one was watching. Actually, about five and a half million people were watching, but that counts as nothing. In my Chicago theater days, the rule was there had to be more people in the audience than on the stage or we cancelled the show. Although once I did a two-woman play called
Ironmistress
for an audience of two. So five million people seemed pretty good to me. But back when
Friends
was in its prime, they had about twenty-five million viewers. We were in jeopardy.

I don’t think Robert Carlock unpacked his suitcase that whole first year. He probably didn’t even buy full gallons of milk, assuming we’d be cancelled any minute and he’d have to chug the whole thing and get back on the plane to Los Angeles.

I proceeded with the blithe confidence of a moron. I was the baby in the movie
Baby’s Day Out,
toddling down the street, completely unaware that an anvil had just fallen behind me.* Conversely, every time the office phone rang, Robert put his coat on. That was the burden of his higher intelligence.

We worked incredibly hard that first year, and every year since. Carlock and I can’t believe we used to complain about the hours at
SNL,
which now seem like a cakewalk. Especially for me, because that’s all I did my first two years at
SNL:
walk around and look for cake. For context, I’ve attached a chart that shows the relative stress levels of various jobs.

Jeff Zucker and NBC president of Primetime Development Kevin Reilly proved to be real champions of the show. We started making jokes about NBC and its then parent company, GE, almost immediately. We didn’t have anything against GE or even really know anything about GE, but we had painted ourselves into a corner by making it Jack Donaghy’s workplace in the show. When Carlock got a call one day from a woman in the GE Legal Department disputing the accuracy of a GE mention in one of our scripts, we were confused and nervous. Why does the parent company have our scripts? Is this going to happen every week? Don’t they know I’m the baby from
Baby’s Day Out
? Apparently it was Mr.

Zucker who personally intervened and explained to his more corporate peers that these were just jokes and we were to be left alone. Maybe he assumed we’d be dead soon. Whatever the reason, I appreciate NBC for letting us make jokes about them all the time. I don’t think ABC or CBS would stand for that abuse, and I’ll probably never find out.

Doing, Learning, Dying

We shoot
30 Rock
on film, like a little movie each week. This means that we film every line of dialogue about five times from about five different angles. Every time we switch angles it takes about twenty minutes to move the cameras around. Every five minutes the cameras run out of film and we have to reload. If someone’s getting on our fake elevator in a scene, it usually takes an extra five tries to have the elevator door close at the right time. You don’t even want to know what happens if there’s a dog, cat, parrot, baby, or peacock in the shot. And worst of all, our cast and crew like one another and enjoy lively conversations. All this jocularity adds up to about fourteen hours a day.

(If we shot on this newfangled hi-def video it would go faster, but we would look like the zombie backup dancers in
Thriller
.)

We only shoot in this “single camera” style because it is currently the fashion. Classic shows like
Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond,
and
Seinfeld
were shot “multi-camera” in front of an audience. I’m pretty sure it took about three hours a week. I don’t know why the network’s taste changed to single-camera shows, but there’s no bucking fashion trends. If that were possible, I’d still be wearing this amazing pair of light blue jeans I owned in college that had four built-in belts across the front.

That first season when we shot on location in Manhattan, people would stop to watch before realizing we were not
Sex and the City,
when they would leave immediately. I learned a lot about acting that year. What I learned about Film Acting is that it’s mostly about not standing in other people’s light, and remembering what hand you had your papers in. When you do your “off-camera” lines for someone, you try to put your head real close to the camera. That’s about it. You’re a trained film actor now.

Anything I learned about Real Acting I learned from watching Alec Baldwin. By Real Acting I mean “an imitation of human behavior that is both emotionally natural and mechanically precise enough as to elicit tears or laughter from humans.” Alec is a master of both Film Acting and Real Acting.

He can play the emotion at the core of a scene—he is falling in love, his mother is torturing him, his mentor has been reincarnated as a peacock—while reciting long speeches word for word and hitting all the jokes with the right rhythm. You would be surprised how many major Oscar-winning movie stars cannot do this. There are only about nine people in the world who can do this; maybe three more that we don’t know about in North Korea.

Alec knows how to let the camera come to him. He can convey a lot with a small movement of his eyes. He speaks so quietly sometimes that I can barely hear him when I’m standing next to him, but when you watch the film back, it’s all there.

It may not have made me a better actor, but at least now I know why what I’m doing is terrible.

After each fourteen-hour acting class was over, I would meet up with five or six writers at my apartment to catch up on what they had written during the day. During those early days we’d order food and work until one or two in the morning. My husband, Jeff, sat in what was meant to be a pantry and wrote music to score the show. We kept a video baby monitor next to the computer screen, and I could watch my daughter sleeping while we worked. I would excuse myself occasionally to change a diaper in the night. Usually for the baby. These will definitely be my happiest memories of this time, because everything I cared about was within ten feet of me. One night I put my daughter to bed, worked with the writers all night, and in the morning when she toddled out, the writers were still there. It was the best worst thing ever.

Another night to remember: Around three A.M., Carlock and I were leading a rewrite in my living room and realized that we had both fallen asleep while talking. When we woke up a few moments (or hours?) later, the other writers were just sitting politely, awaiting further instruction. That is a dedicated staff.

The only downside was that the next day’s work began at six A.M. In spite of the exhaustion, I am proud to say I lost my cool only once, in my kitchen. “It’s too much. It’s just too much work,” I sobbed to my husband. Please refer to the Coal Mining and Military Service sections of Chart A for perspective.

I turned to domestic violence only once. We were going to bed at three A.M., knowing we’d have to get back up at five thirty A.M., and my husband kept talking and talking as a joke when I was trying to fall asleep. His exhaustion had given him the giggles, and he kept poking me and waking me up saying things like “Hey, I gotta ask you one more thing. Do you like pretzels?” I flew off my pillow and shoved him so hard across the bed that I saw genuine fear flash across his face. It was one of the very few “deleted scenes from
Star 80
” in my life.

There is one other embarrassing secret I must reveal, something I’ve never admitted to anyone.

Though we are grateful for the affection
30 Rock
has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren’t trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make
Home Improvement
and we did it wrong. You know those scientists who were developing a blood-pressure medicine and they accidentally invented Viagra? We were trying to make Viagra and we ended up with blood-pressure medicine.