Tina Fey stands behind her old Weekend Update partner Jimmy Fallon, who came under fire last month for nervously giggling his way through an interview with Republican candidate Donald Trump, even though “nervously giggling” is pretty much Fallon’s default setting for his entire life. “I really felt for Jimmy when people were so angry,” Fey said, while speaking at today’s Produced By New York conference. “It’s not Jimmy who peed in the punchbowl. It’s not Jimmy who created this horrible world we’re living in.”
Besides all the punchbowl piss talk, Fey also commented on the political atmosphere during her stint as head writer of Saturday Night Live, saying, “We spent so much time and care on making sure everything was a fair hit. We never, ever went into it thinking, ‘We gotta protect Obama’ or ‘We gotta make (the Republicans) look bad.’ Audiences can smell when a sketch is tipped.” That apparently earned her the ire of fellow-former-head-writer-turned-senator Al Franken, who once blasted Fey’s SNL on Larry King over a sketch about John McCain.
Fey: “I thought, ‘You’re not wrong, but you do know my phone number, right? You wanna tell me or Larry King? You knew the phone number when you submitted a sketch.’” Fey also noted that she’s developed some Franken-y habits of her own, periodically poking her head into the SNL writer’s room: “I’ve become their worst nightmare–calling up on Friday nights and saying, ‘So, what do you got?’”