David Letterman Interviews Tina Fey

David Letterman recently interviewed Tina Fey for The Hollywood Reporter. Here are some of the highlights:

Letterman: "Do you like getting awards?"


Fey:  "This one makes me a little nervous. Have I really done enough to warrant this? Sometimes I tell myself, "Well, what would a guy do? He'd take it." They wanted to give me that Mark Twain Prize [for humor] in 2009, and I said, "I don't think this is appropriate." And Lorne Michaels said to me, "Just take it while your parents are alive," which is very smart."

Letterman: "Do your girls have a better awareness [of feminism and opportunity] than they might have had 20 years ago?"

Fey: "It feels like we were on the precipice of things getting pretty good, and now we're in a bit of a throwback moment. I definitely came out of last month feeling misogyny is much more real than two years ago. But the thing I worry about [more] than actual human interaction is the internet. Because that's just despicable: people just being able to be awful to each other without having to be in the same room. It's metastasizing now, thanks to our glorious president-elect who can't muster the dignity of a seventh-grader. It's so easy for people to abuse each other and to abandon all civility."

Letterman: "But why? I mean, for God's sakes, why?"

Fey: "Because when you're mad, you're just mad about what you see in front of you, and you fire it off and lash out at someone in a way that you would probably not do in the doughnut line at church."

Letterman: "Wait a minute, there's a doughnut line at church?"

Fey: "My church, there was. They cut those doughnuts into four."

Letterman: "Thank you, Jesus."

...Letterman: "I've known Lorne Michaels as long as I've been in New York City, and I've always been afraid of him."

Fey: "Really? He's nothing to be afraid of."

Letterman: "But how about this guy single-handedly forming the culture of comedy in America? Is that too much to say about him, hyperbolic?"

Fey: "He's deeply influencing it."

Letterman: "You're friends? You go to him for advice?"

Fey: "Not necessarily like, "What's the blow for the end of Act 2?" But big-picture things of how should I live my life, how to handle this person, jobs to take or not take, ways of managing people."

Letterman: "Would you want to drive cross-country with him?"


Fey: "Oh, absolutely. Although between the two of us, I don't know that there's a good driver."

Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.