After graduating from the University of Virginia, there was no meteoric rise to the top that would make a good montage in a biopic. Tina headed to Chicago where she hoped to join Second City, an improv troupe known as a minor-league system for Saturday Night Live. (Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner all started there.) She worked at a YMCA for two years while waiting for the invitation to join.
And then things finally started happening. Tina quickly gained a reputation as a great sketch comedian. Adam McKay, a Second City alum who was the head writer at SNL, urged her to send scripts to executive producer Lorne Michaels. Two months later, Tina landed her dream job. Two years after that, she became SNL’s first female head writer. A year later, she was tapped to co-anchor Weekend Update.
“Some people feel Tina can do no wrong in my eyes,” Lorne Michaels told the New Yorker. “That’s just because she’s wrong less often than other people.”
On a show that is notoriously a boy’s club, Tina made comedy about women. She is the feminist most of us want to be—not bra burning or man hating, but the type who supports other women full-heartedly. While head writer, Tina nurtured Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, and Maya Rudolph. And her writing zeroed in on our culture’s bizarre notions of gender. In one Weekend Update, Tina pointed out, “In honor of Women’s History Month, the Women’s Museum of Dallas has developed a list of ten influential women in U.S. history, and put their images on trading cards. Hey, kids! It’s the great women of U.S. history! Collect all … ten!”
In many ways, Mean Girls was a continuation of Tina’s feminist mission. A Lindsay Lohan vehicle, sure, but the movie cut deeper—exploring the horrible ways teenage girls treat each other. Tina achieved the impossible—sending a message without being preachy. Only she could pull off the pivotal scene in which Ms. Norbit gathers the tenth grade girls in a gym to talk out their issues and do trust falls. Anyone else would have had the entire audience rolling their eyes.
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