CHAPTER 4
AMY POEHLER
Subversive
THERE ARE A HANDFUL OF contemporary comediennes I always mix up—but never Amy Poehler. Perhaps because she looks like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and a cute cartoon frog contemplating a felony. There’s that arched eyebrow, that deadpan stare, that curled corner of the lip. She’s very sweet looking—but beware. Amy is one of those difficult women who fly under cover of adorable amiability, but when pressed, can throw some world-class shade faster than you can say “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”
In Yes Please, her sort of a memoir, she tells a story about the time she was flying to Toronto with Tina Fey and Ana Gasteyer to shoot Mean Girls. They were in first class, and during the hour-long flight were chatting in a lively (loud) fashion as girlfriends often do. A White Businessman of a Certain Age in a fancy suit was seated nearby and mistook first class for a library. Fancy Suit was peeved at what he clearly viewed as disruptive visiting among the women. After they deplaned, he pushed past Amy and she did that thing where you say “Excuse me!” but what you really mean is You’re the One Who Should Be Saying Excuse Me, Pal.
Fancy Suit said, “Excuse ME? Excuse you!” He then told Amy that because she and her friends had been yammering during the entire flight, they shouldn’t have been allowed in first class.
Amy was enraged. She spun around and dropped a few F-bombs.
He turned on his heel, to get away from this madwoman, but she ran after him, shouting and cursing that he wasn’t better than her, and that he could keep his entitled opinions to himself.
Brief digression for a sexism check: This nonsense wouldn’t have happened to a man, so why is it happening to a woman? Is there any doubt that if Amy, Tina, and Ana had been three showbizzy guys talking sports, Fancy Suit would have wanted to join in on the Monday morning quarterbacking, stat swapping, and Super Bowl ad recounting? (I just decided our hypothetical guy makes commercials.)
This altercation took place in the early 2000s, before the iPhone-equipped masses became citizen journalists eager to record a celebrity losing her mind in an airport (the better to create memes, GIFs, and hashtags like #SNLStarChasesManInAirport). Still, Amy Poehler was a public figure: a young woman who appeared every weekend on Saturday Night Live. Tabloids were around, and surely someone could have snapped a picture of her looking unhinged.
Like many women (me), she could easily have complained under her breath but otherwise kept her objections to being patronized to herself.
Because so often, that’s what we do. We stay silent, rather than cuss out someone and chase him down the moving walkway. Even difficult women who are stubborn, brave, outspoken, and won’t take no for an answer tend to let this kind of thing go. Men, however, do not let this sort of thing go. That’s why there are bar fights and the situation in the Middle East.
There are complex biological and sociological reasons why we ladies prefer to go along to get along (I’m guessing). But the one reliable woman-taming weapon that never loses its effectiveness is slinging the b-word. For some reason we think we will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West if someone calls us a bitch. The only time it’s okay to be called a bitch is if you’re about to get busy with a hot guy who growls “you’re one sexy bitch.”
Ugh. Even then. I totally take that back.
In 2008, Tina Fey hosted SNL and did a guest spot behind the “Weekend Update” desk, doing her best to take the sting out of the word and make it a rallying cry. It will come as no surprise that the bit was attached to Hillary Clinton.
“Some people say that Hillary is a bitch. I’m a bitch, so is this one [nodding at Amy]. Bitches get stuff done. Bitch is the new black.”
Not that this did any good at all. The morning I wrote this, I was in line at Starbucks behind two girls who were maybe 19. One was tormented about whether she should tell her lousy boyfriend that it was uncool when he flirted with someone else while she was standing right there: “I don’t want him to think I’m a bitch,” she sighed. Amy would totally have told that girl to cuss him out and chase him down the street.
BORN IN NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1971, Amy Poehler was always a funny girl. After graduating from Boston College, she earned her comedy chops in Upright Citizens Brigade, the improv group she co-founded in Chicago in the 1990s. Improv is all about reading a situation, staying in the moment, and doing what feels right. “She was like a surreal anarchist punk comic…a total maverick,” said Natasha Lyonne, a friend and fellow actor.
Amy appeared on Saturday Night Live a week after 9/11—not the best time for sketch comedy—and still managed to find a way to make people shoot beer out of their noses. She was rapidly promoted from featured player to full-time cast member, and was tapped for co-anchor of “Weekend Update”—first with SNL head writer and “comedy wife” Tina Fey, then with Seth Meyers. After the birth of her first son in 2008, she left SNL to star in Parks and Recreation as Leslie Knope, the nation’s most upbeat, yet uncompromising, mid-level city bureaucrat. (Every feminist could take a lesson from Leslie: “You know my code. Hoes before bros. Uteruses before duderuses. Ovaries before brovaries!”) No one was much surprised when Amy won a Golden Globe for her portrayal—the same year she co-hosted the awards with Tina Fey.
The woman is everywhere these days: producing, directing, writing, and starring in shows on all the TVs (network, cable, digital) as well as feature films. In 2008 she co-founded, with producer Meredith Walker, the online community Smart Girls at the Party, where the focus is on intelligence and imagination, rather than slavishly trying to fit in with a bunch of girls who, let’s face it, are never worth it. Tagline: Change the World by Being Yourself. Pretty much the difficult woman credo.
That same year, Amy did something that should probably be in Guinness World Records: Most Epic Rap Song Performed by a Woman Hours Away from Giving Birth. It occurred on SNL in October 2008, when she was so pregnant that it’s a true reproductive miracle that her water didn’t break on air. Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin guest starred, taking a seat at the “Weekend Update” desk with co-anchors Amy and Seth Meyers. There was some back-and-forth between Palin (in full hot teacher mode with glossy updo and shiny teeth) and Meyers about a bit Palin chose not to participate in, as it wouldn’t be good for the campaign. Amy graciously agreed to step in and dove into an epic rap. A pair of Eskimos appeared as her backup chorus.
Amy was so pregnant that her belly was no longer round, but more oblong and bargelike—something that happens at the very end when the baby, rather than floating sweetly in its amniotic bath, is wedged in there like a sumo wrestler stuck in economy. She looked pretty exhausted, but completely owned it—as if this wasn’t simply one of a hundred bits she’d done over the years, but as if this performance would be the ticket out of her small town.
If there exists more convincing evidence that pregnant ladies aren’t the delicate flowers our culture would have them be, I’d like to see it. All those comely pregnant celebrities on the cover of the glossy mags—boldly displaying their very round bellies and outie belly buttons, a Mona Lisa smile on their moistened lips—think they’re showing the world what it’s like to be a mom-to-be? Wrong. It’s Amy Poehler, rapping My name is Sarah Palin /you all know me / vice prezzy nominee / of the GOP.
When asked by People whether it was bizarre to be sending up Palin, who was sitting right there, Amy said she felt no shame or embarrassment. “I was just trying not to give birth—that was my goal.”
Amy’s style of difficulty is inspiring because however winning or funny she may be, she takes herself and her life very seriously. Once, when she was in Cannes to promote a film, a reporter asked whether she ever dreamed she would one day be there. Clearly, this was her cue to confess that yes, she was thrilled and shocked and full of Hollywood guru-inspired gratitude with a twist of lemon. Instead, she gave him a look—I’m betting with an arched eyebrow—and said, “Sure I did.”
It doesn’t get any more difficult than that.