61 pages • 2 hours read
Tina FeyBossypants
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Magazines
Fey mentions magazines several times throughout Bossypants, usually as a symbol of society’s unreasonable demands on women. Magazines in Bossypants are self-proclaimed how-to guides for women, touting arbitrary rules and requirements that women can never meet. In “The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty,” Fey riffs on peppy, overly simplified magazine beauty tips with headlines like “Skin Care, Skin Care, Skin Care!” Magazine photo shoots require her to squeeze into model-sized clothing, and many times, editors at fashion magazines overuse Photoshop, setting unrealistic expectations for what women look like: “It’s as if they are already so disgusted that a human has to be in clothes, they can’t stop erasing human features” (142). “The free magazines” in Fey’s doctor’s office bombard her with the message that “Breast-feeding is best for your baby” (216) while simultaneously advertising formula, making the decision of whether to breastfeed that much more confusing. When she is overwhelmed by the work-life balance of motherhood, she breaks to sob in her office—time that “magazines urge me to use for sit-ups and tricep dips” (235). Occasionally a “mommy” magazine will seek to honor her as “mother of the year”; Fey declines, claiming that they can’t possibly know if she’s a good mother—and that “working moms,” who are similarly bombarded with messages judging their femininity and worth, “want to validate that it’s okay to work, especially if they work at magazines where they can then package that validation and sell it to stay-at-home moms who are craving news from the outside world” (233). Magazines thus create, reinforce, and perpetuate not only the harmful myth that women can, and should, be everything, but also the competition between women who make different choices.
The Intricacies of Comedy
Fey offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the delicate balance necessary for great comedy, the techniques and attention to detail that audiences don’t see. For example, Lorne Michaels forbids directors from cutting to a closed door, for “the moment an audience senses a slip in confidence, they’re nervous for you and they can’t laugh” (116). She writes of Alec Baldwin’s genius, his ability to “play the emotion at the core of a scene […] while reciting long speeches word for word and hitting all the jokes with the right rhythm” (170). She also admires how he “convey[s] a lot with a small movement of his eyes” (170). She describes the difference between the impressionist techniques of Darrell Hammond and Will Ferrell, how Hammond “is a precise technician” while Ferrell’s “technique is loose, bordering on random” (206). She explains how Saturday Night Live employs a writing team made up both of “hyperintelligent Harvard Boys” who “check the logic and construction of every joke” and “Improv People” who, with their background doing “whatever it takes” (115) to win over cold audiences, are “gifted, visceral, [and] fun” (114). She offers examples of the struggle to decide whether a joke is “too rough” (202), how writers must consider the background and potential impact of sensitive jokes. She also discusses the popular but “lame” sketch called a “Sneaker Upper” (207) and the way Seth Meyers manages to write “an admirable Sneaker Upper” (211) involving Sarah Palin. She and Meyers learn “certain tricks [they] could employ” (188) to ensure an impressionist’s speech is realistic and nuanced. Meyers and Amy Poehler deftly manage to write a political sketch that relates a feminist message without being obvious to viewers. These examples demonstrate the thoughtfulness and skill required for writing comedy. Fey writes reverentially of the many professionals who have influenced her over the course of her career, thus further emphasizing the importance of learning from those around us.
Raising Children
Although the anxiety of raising strong, confident children is most apparent in the final chapters, in which Fey discusses the accusations of neglect leveled at mothers who don’t breastfeed and mothers who work outside the home, it is a motif that runs throughout Bossypants. In the third chapter, “All Girls Must Be Everything,” Fey wonders how, in a world in which we’re bombarded with messages that women who aren’t “hot” must “work on it until you are” (23), we can teach our daughters “that they are good enough the way they are” (23-24). In “That’s Don Fey,” she asks, referring to her daughter: “How can I give her what Don Fey gave me?”—meaning, “[t]he gift of anxiety” and “[t]he knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law” (50). By presenting these points as questions, Fey indicates that she herself does not know the answer. She admits as much when she explains that she declines magazines’ offers to award her “mother of the year,” for they have no way of knowing if she’s a good mother; after all, “[h]ow can any of us know until the kid is about thirty-three and all the personality dust has really settled?” (233). Like everything else she does, Fey acknowledges that she is figuring out motherhood as she goes.
In the third paragraph of “Introduction,” Fey writes that parents might have “bought this book to learn how to raise an achievement-oriented, drug-free, adult virgin” (3) and assures them that the book provides the answers. As she does with the satirical beauty tips she presents in “The Secrets of Mommy’s Beauty,” Fey thereby suggests much parenting advice is irrelevant and useless, for there is no perfect child and no perfect parent.
