stringbook

By Randy Kennedy
October 12, 2004 

In a tiny NBC dressing room at Rockefeller Center, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were searching for a good way to describe how it felt to be fake-news pioneers. A week earlier, they had become the first two-woman anchor team in the history of “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live,” a show that its female comedians characterized for years as a kind of comedy frat house.

Trying to be serious about joining Ms. Fey at the anchor desk, Ms. Poehler finally gave up and said, “I feel like - like - a blushing bride.”

“And I,” said Ms. Fey, without missing a beat, “feel like an older, Greek oil magnate who’s taken a young bride. She’s the Jackie O. to my Ari Onassis. Secretly, she’s disgusted by me but she has no choice.”

That is obviously not the case. Ms. Poehler, on a recliner that barely fitted in the room, and Ms. Fey, curled up next to her on a sofa, doubled over in laughter at their joke. The two have been friends and have been performing together since the early 1990’s … Ms. Poehler was chosen [to replace Jimmy Fallon as Ms. Fey’s ‘Weekend Update’ co-anchor] partly because of her energy and her fearlessness … But [she] was also chosen because of her easy rapport with Ms. Fey, a kind of wicked, one-upping camaraderie that was on ample display in Ms. Poehler’s dressing room, where the two were taking a break between rehearsals … The two women clearly love playing off each other and seem to be each other’s best audience.