Splitsider

It's a good thing I enjoy humor because, if I had to estimate, I'd put the number of humor pieces I've read this year somewhere in the low thousands. As a fan — and as someone who's numb to the embarrassment that comes with laughing aloud while riding public transportation — I imagine I'd have read some fraction of these just for fun. But as someone who’s had the privilege of editing Splitsider's Humor Section for the past nine months and compiling the list below (who am I kidding? tl;dr), I’ve been overwhelmed in the best way possible by the volume and quality of the humorists populating the [...]

In the latest Totally Tina news, reading the L.A. Times story about Tina Fey and Steve Martin riffing during Fey's Bossypants book tour is going to make you wish you had a private jet even more than you do already (unless you live in L.A., in which case you have no excuse). "Not many people know this, but my parents were brutally murdered by Earl Scruggs," Tina deadpanned when Grammy-winner Martin inquired as to her lack of banjo skills. The pair discussed Fey's hysterical pregnancy ("Do the breasts go down?" Steve inquired. "I hope not," Tina replied), working with liberal mascot Alec Baldwin and Fey's experience with [...]

You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody at the moment as well positioned at the nexus of comedy, entertainment, and the cultural zeitgeist as Tina Fey. She cut her teeth at improv on the stages of the Second City Theater in Chicago, incubator of such geniuses as Belushi, Aykroyd, and Colbert. She rose through the ranks of Saturday Night Live to become head writer and the anchor for its Weekend Update. She’s the creator of NBC’s 30 Rock, which broke records for garnering the most Emmy nominations for comedy in a single year. Oh yeah — and she also delivered late night impressions of a certain former governor so dead-on [...]

Straight from the Frankfurt Book Fair is this, the apparent cover of Tina Fey's upcoming book Bossypants. How delightfully unsettling.

This video of Today guests Bill Clinton and Mindy Kaling recommending their favorite holiday books is pretty fun. Although how rude was it of Clinton to interrupt when Ann Curry was asking Mindy Kaling about her feelings on the situation in North Korea!? Anyway, there should be a follow-up video where they're each forced to read the books on the other one's list, just so we can see Bill Clinton chuckling at Bossypants and Mindy Kaling taking a nap on top of The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes.

Last night on Conan, Tina Fey talked about how, in the middle of signing a couple thousand copies of Bossypants, 30 Rock Exec Producer Robert Carlock convinced her to sign a couple of them "Help, I'm stuck in a Korean Tina Fey autograph factory." Apparently she was not lying! Check out the full interview below.

It looks like Tina Fey is heading back to SNL to promote her new book Bossypants; she'll be hosting the show on May 7th, the next new show after this weekend's Mirren-helmed episode. Fortunately for her, Sarah Palin hasn't done anything too outrageous lately, so she probably won't have to don those glasses again. Knock on wood!

Update: Make that May 7th. In any case, it's the next new one.

While Tina Fey's interview at Google is an hour-long delight, the real character on stage is Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt. This guy! "There's a lot in the book about women things, which I'm not going to quote from," he reassures her. Later he asks, "You like Alec Baldwin" as a question. Classic Schmidt. In talking about her new book Bossypants, Fey touches on the basic tenets of improv, recounts some embarrassing Joan Rivers lore passed around Second City, and does an villainous impression of the Harvard faction of 30 Rock's writing staff: "These humans think they've found something in the moment. We'll let them do it." When [...]

I suggested that we rename the site TotallyTina.com; Adam promised he'd look into it. Until then, NPR's interview with Tina Fey about Bossypants will have to suffice. "It's just such a tangled-up issue, the way women present themselves — whether or not they choose to put their thumbs in their panties on the cover of Maxim and judge each other back and forth on it," Fey says. "It's a complicated issue, and we didn't go much further on saying anything other than to say, 'Yeah, it's a complicated issue and we're all kind of figuring it out as we go.'" Putting your thumbs in your panties/manties while reading TotallyTina, [...]

Tina Fey's Bossypants reviews are in, and critics are finding it hilarious, well-written, and compelling…though not, technically speaking, much of an autobiography. "Bossypants isn’t a memoir. It’s a spiky blend of humor, introspection, critical thinking and Nora Ephron-isms for a new generation," says the New York Times' Janet Maslin. "Bossypants is uneven and jagged in a way you might expect from one practiced in sketch comedy and sitcoms, but it's also loaded with personality, insights into power and the kind of humor that can cause beverages to travel through the reader's nasal passages unplanned," Time's Mary Pols explains. Angle your head away from your computer accordingly.