Tina Fey is the queen of comedy. We know because they’ve said so over at Vanity Fair, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Daily Mail and even in this paper.
Think hard about how she earned the title of comedy’s No. 1 lady. One good celebrity impression in one pretty good sketch. A TV show nobody watched. Two gigs hosting the Golden Globes — one of which was lame.
Queen of comedy? Fey isn’t even the lieutenant governor of comedy. Maybe she brings the queen some memos to sign once in a while.
But the throne is already taken — by the high priestess of humor, the empress of laffland, one true comic to rule them all: Melissa McCarthy.
I’m not here to defend “Tammy” (a dismal, slow-moving and plotless road movie). But it has Melissa McCarthy, and Melissa walking across a parking lot with a paper bag on her head beats Tina Fey at her best. The movie earned $33 million in five days. That’s about double what Fey’s “Admission” earned in its entire theatrical run.
Both actresses were nominated for Emmys Thursday (for “SNL” appearances), but people actually show up at McCarthy’s movies. Because they have to see what McCarthy is going to do next.
I don’t know what’s in the scripts McCarthy gets, but I suspect they’re very different from the movies she’s in, because they’re all so purely Melissa.
One of the funniest parts of “Identity Thief” is when, out of nowhere, she starts singing along annoyingly to “Milkshake” and every other song Jason Bateman can find on the radio. The scene wouldn’t look like anything on paper. It’s just McCarthy hijacking the movie and flying it to Funnyland.
The best comedy is difficult to intellectualize.
As Fey put it in “Bossypants,” “Saturday Night Live” is a harmony of two contrasting voices. There are Harvard Lampoon nerds who sweat it out in writers’ rooms and Chicago improv comics who work the audience.
If the former ran “SNL,” Fey wrote, it would be nothing but “commercial parodies about people wearing barrels after the 1929 stock market crash.” If the improv types ran it, “the whole show would be loud drag characters named Vicki and Staci screaming their catchphrase over and over, ‘YOU KISS YOUR MUTHA WITH THAT FACE?’ ”
Guess which one Melissa is.
Fey may be witty and cute and sophisticated (and improv-trained), but it’s McCarthy who makes you laugh: Note the element of force involved. When Melissa’s up to bat, you’re the baseball.
How did Fey get to be so overrated? Easy. The culture arbiters think she brought down Sarah Palin. Then she seized the opportunity to secure a political perch for herself as America’s Lite Comic Feminist.
Alas, this meant comedy that sounded like the jokes page of Ms. magazine. “And now, like a supermodel’s vagina, let’s all give a warm welcome to Leonardo DiCaprio,” Fey said at the Golden Globes. (Ha ha. Vagina!) That creep Leo, he should make a statement about women’s appearance issues and date women who look like Amy Poehler.
“The definition of ‘crazy’ in Hollywood,” Fey declared in “Bossypants,” “is a woman who keeps talking after no one wants to f - - k her anymore.” Bemoaning the objectification of women is a strange stance for someone who inexplicably took her shirt off in a classroom in “Mean Girls.” (But I’m sure that scene was all the screenwriter’s fault.)
Fey is worth some $45 million, and she wants us to feel angry-sorry about how oppressive being a woman is.
That sour ingratitude is absent from McCarthy’s films and their loopy self-confidence. Contrast Fey’s whining with McCarthy’s hilarious “Bridesmaids” airplane come-on scene (“You feel that steam heat coming? That’s from my undercarriage.”).
She is who she is. She owns it. In “The Heat,” whether she’s downing shots of Jager or slamming a perp’s face with a phone book, she rules every space she’s in.
Melissa McCarthy is a walking rebuttal to Fey’s tired shtick about women being judged by their appearance. She’s happy with who she is: a cyclone blast of sheer awesomeness.
What’s more feminist than a ballsy, brassy broad?