Like her bestie Amy Poehler , Tina Fey is one of the most iconic female comedians around.
She’s known for her incredible work on 30 Rock , Mean Girls , and SNL .
RELATED STORIES
But there’s also a lot you probably don’t know about the star, like how she was the first female head writer on SNL or how she’s done voiceover work for a video game.
For more, here are 10+ interesting things.
1. Her real name is Elizabeth:
Stamatina is her middle name. As it turns out, her 30 Rock character, Liz Lemon, is actually a nod to her given name, Elizabeth.
There are even easter eggs to this in the show’s fifth season.
2. Fey liked being the funny kid in school:
“I really wanted to be funny,” she said in an interview with The New York Times .
“I remember in eighth grade saying something like, ”Well, you know, people who are funny like me — boys don’t always like us.”
“And I remember this kid was like: You’re funny? Why do you think you’re funny? But I wanted to identify myself that way from pretty early on.”
She also considered herself to be quite the gossip, as she knew everything about everyone.
Maybe that’s why her hair is so big? It’s full of secrets.
3. She did a book report on comedy as a kid:
While most of us chose Catcher in the Rye for our book report in school, Tina chose Joe Franklin’s Encyclopedia of Comedians .
She recalled the experience to the A.V. Club .
“I remember me and one other girl in my 8th grade class got to do an independent study because we finished the regular material early,” she said.
“And she chose to do hers on communism, and I chose to do mine on comedy. We kept bumping into each other at the card catalog.”
4. She was attacked by a stranger as a kid:
When she was five and living in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a stranger came up and attacked her out of nowhere.
“It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it,” the comedian told Vanity Fair in 2018.
“It was in, like, the front yard of her house,” explained her husband, Jeff Richmond.
“And somebody who just came up, and she just thought somebody marked her with a pen.”
She still has the scar to this day.
5. She was the first woman to be named head writer at *SNL*:
In 1997, she was hired as a writer for SNL , but she soon earned a promotion to head writer.
She did this for six seasons before she left to write and executive produce 30 Rock .
6. She met her BFF, Amy Poehler, in improv class:
Amy recalled their chance meeting in her memoir, Yes Please .
“She said there was another new improviser in another one of her classes whom she thought I would really like. Her name was Tina and she was like me but with brown hair.”
7. She’s the youngest Mark Twain prize winner:
It’s one of the highest honors for those in comedy. Fey won it when she was just 40 years old.
This happened in 2010, right after she earned worldwide acclaim for her hilarious portrayal of politician Sarah Palin.
8. She did voiceover work for a pinball machine called Medieval Madness:
She voiced both the British and German princesses for the game.
“And that was the only time Jeff [Richmond, her husband] has kind of hinted that maybe I should talk like that all the time,” Fey once said .
9. She decided to play a math teacher in *Mean Girls* for a very important reason:
She wanted to fight prejudice.
“It was an attempt on my part to counteract the stereotype that girls can’t do math. Even though I did not understand a word I was saying,” she said .
10. She’s a *New York Times* bestselling author:
In 2011, she released her memoir, Bossypants .
She shared stories from her childhood in it, as well as the early days of starting her career.
The book was a huge success, going on to sell over 2.5 million copies.
11. She succumbed to Hollywood body image pressure while working on *SNL*:
This is sadly common in Hollywood.
For Fey, she dealt with a Hollywood agent saying that she didn’t have the looks to be on camera for SNL’s Weekend Report.
“I was a size 12 when I came to the show, and then I was really dealing with my stress with Krispy Kremes,” she told *People* in 2004.
In the end, she went on to lose about 30 pounds before taking over the Weekend Update.
12. She wrote the screenplay for *Mean Girls*:
After she bought the rights for Queen Bees and Wannabees (the book that Mean Girls is based on), she realized that she didn’t have any idea what to write.
Which is fair, writing is hard.
“It was kind of a bonehead thing to do on my part for my first screenplay,” she told *The New York* times.
“To try to adapt a nonfiction, nonnarrative book. I had to make up the whole story. I mean, it’s not ”Chinatown.” But just to keep a story moving forward was all new to me.
13. She created a scholarship for veterans in her father’s name:
The memorial scholarship was set up in 2015 for any veterans who want to study journalism at Temple University.
That’s because her father, Donald, was a Korean War veteran who also studied journalism at Temple University.
“He was really inspiring,” Fey said.
“A lot of kids grow up with dreams of doing those things and their parents are fearful and want them to get a law degree and have things to fall back on, but he and our mom always encouraged us to pursue whatever truly interested us.”
