Tina Fey’s Rough Start, And Resolution To Apologize Less In 2016


Tina Fey has had a long climb along the road to success, one that she understands is part of show business. Business Insider Australia reports that Fey started out with a gig with The Second City in 1992, one that paid very poorly, but was a start. She wrote in her book, Bossypants, that she desperately wanted to study improve.

“I moved to Chicago in 1992 to study improv and it was everything I wanted it to be. It was like a cult. People ate, slept, and definitely drank improv. They worked at crappy day jobs just to hand over their money for improv classes.”

Tina Fey was part of The Second City’s touring company, which paid very little.

“In the touring company we were paid seventy-five dollars per show and a twenty-five-dollar per diem. Of course, sometimes you’d have a show in Kansas, so you’d have to ride in the van for two days to get to your seventy-five-dollar gig. It wasn’t lucrative, but it was show business!”

However, despite the low pay, Tina Fey says she learned more with her time studying improve with The Second City than she ever has in any other job.

“Studying improvisation literally changed my life. It set me on a career path toward Saturday Night Live. It changed the way I look at the world, and it’s where I met my husband.”

Plus, Tina Fey revealed to NBC News that it was with this job that she learned to fail.

“To be improvising in front of a paid audience, you learn to be fearless. You learn how to fail, because you mostly fail. You mostly flop. You learn to not be afraid to fail.”

Check out one of Tina Fey’s skits at The Second City, alongside Rachel Dratch.

It was while working with The Second City that Tina Fey met her very good friend and “sister,” Amy Poehler. The friendship and professional relationship these two women have shared over the years is incredible. Elite Daily reports that the two have been a big influence for each other when finding their voices and have managed to remain close friends, even when they went their separate ways.

Poehler even once told Pop Sugar that she and Tina Fey are chosen family.

“I think that Tina and I are chosen sisters. I think we are chosen family, so I think it’s been fun to experience that thing I never got to experience in real life. We have a moment in the film where we first see each other and just pick on each other like apes. We find that physicalness can be really sisterly — very specific to that relationship.”

Now 2016 is upon us, and the movie Sisters out.

So, what does Tina Fey have planned for the coming year? The Washington Post reports that Fey has already told Net-A-Porter that she has made a promise – that she will stop apologizing for her art.

“Steer clear of the internet and you’ll live forever. We did an ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’ episode and the internet was in a whirlwind, calling it ‘racist,’ but my new goal is not to explain jokes. I feel like we put so much effort into writing and crafting everything, they need to speak for themselves. There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.”

According to the Observer, Tina Fey is also purchasing an Upper West Side apartment for an easy $9.5 million. It happens to be right above an apartment already owned by Fey and her husband.

Good luck with your new digs and your apology-less year, Tina Fey!

[Photo by Jason Merritt/Getty Images]

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