...And funny with it

Tina Fey soared to prominence on Saturday Night Live. Now with an Emmy-winning sitcom and two hit movies, she is being hailed as the most powerful woman in US comedy, says Christopher Goodwin...

Women aren't funny. Christopher Hitchens made the claim last year, but fortunately Tina Fey didn't get the fax. Fey is the producer and star of America's latest hit movie comedy Baby Mama, which has gone straight to the top of the American box office. The success establishes her as the most powerful woman in American comedy and may finally convince Hollywood executives that women really can be brainy, hilarious, and commercially popular. The film, a female buddy comedy in which Fey's character finds a hilariously inappropriate surrogate mother for her baby, took $18.3 million in its first weekend. (Baby Mama is Fey's second number-one hit. The first was the deliciously bitchy 2004 high-school comedy Mean Girls, starring Lindsay Lohan, which Fey wrote, produced and also starred in.) What's even more significant is that Baby Mama easily beat comedies aimed at Hollywood's preferred and pampered audience - horny teenage boys. Women made up 68 per cent of the audience, and 55 per cent of them were older than 25.

Baby Mama features Fey as Kate Holbrook, a 37-year-old, unmarried, politically correct, over-achieving executive for an organic-foods company. She hires Angie, played by her Saturday Night Live co-star Amy Poehler, to have her baby. Much of the comedy comes when Kate and Angie, a gum-chewing, working-class party girl, become 'womb mates', moving in together. Imagine a 21st-century version of The Odd Couple. Their dysfunctional but often very funny relationship makes Baby Mama 'such a welcome alternative to the desperation and self-loathing of the Judd Apatow canon, or the compulsive verbosity of Juno', says Ann Hornaday, film critic of the Washington Post

Fey, who came to prominence on Saturday Night Live, the long-running TV sketch show, is already one of the most important figures in US television. She's the producer and star of the sitcom 30 Rock, which won an Emmy last year, beating The Office and Ugly Betty. Set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-like TV show on which she plays the unattached head writer Liz Lemon, it's been hailed as the 'best sitcom since Seinfeld'. The combination of genius casting, including Alec Baldwin as a controlling TV executive, with dense scripts which combine high and lowbrow humour means it has the kind of devoted following long overdue for an American network comedy series (critics rave about it, saying they watch it twice in order to catch all the jokes). Although Fey is thrilled at the success of Baby Mama, what really makes her happy is that Lemon has been called 'the most realistic single woman on television'.

'We strive to make her realistic to the point of embarrassment,' says Fey, who acknowledges that Lemon is an unmarried version of herself. (Fey, 38, has been married for seven years to Jeff Richmond, a music supervisor who works with her. They have a two-year-old daughter.) 'We're just trying to show the underbelly of being a real woman. But it's TV, so I'm sure there are things that are heightened. I mean, she did steal a baby once.'

Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, believes that what's most remarkable about Tina Fey's success is that she 'has carved out a really new female comedy character, this pretty yet insecure intellectual. Fey is short, she's got glasses and she's insecure. It is really refreshing and not at all typical.'

Donna Langley, president of production at Universal Studios, which produced Baby Mama, believes that Fey has a unique generational appeal. 'Tina is so connected to the zeitgeist,' says Langley, referring not just to the success of Baby Mama and 30 Rock, but to a Fey sketch on Saturday Night Live in March which had a remarkable and pivotal impact on the Democratic presidential campaign. (Fey left Saturday Night Live in 2006, but returns to the show occasionally.) The sketch she wrote and delivered has been credited for single-handedly reviving the fortunes of Hillary Clinton, then all but counted out after a series of devastating primary defeats. It showed the press being ridiculously deferential to Barack Obama.

'If anybody saw Saturday Night Live,' Hillary said in a debate soon after, 'maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow.' It was the last line of the sketch, which the New York Times described as 'a brilliant girl-power endorsement from Tina Fey', which gave Hillary and her floundering campaign heart, by making a political virtue out of what has been seen as her greatest failing. 'Bitches get stuff done,' snapped Fey. 'Bitch is the new black.'

Shortly after that, Fey's status as the most important woman in comedy was confirmed by her appearance on the front cover of American Marie Claire magazine which normally features young Hollywood starlets, not 38-year-old spectacle-wearing, self-confessed geeks.

Fey seems to have fashioned her comic persona around her glasses. She first started using them when she joined Saturday Night Live in 1995, discovering before her first show that she needed them to read cue cards. She quickly realised that they give her the apparent moral authority to smile sweetly as she sticks a knife into the backs of the mighty, the pompous and the idiotic.

Recently, for instance, she called Paris Hilton 'a piece of shit' who has 'hands like a tranny', and is 'a terrible role model and a terrible young woman. You can buy videotapes in which you can see her bejanis.' (As a comedy sideline, Fey has devised many TV-acceptable euphemisms for female genitalia, her favourite, and ours', being 'cooter'. One of her sketches for Saturday Night Live was called 'Talkin 'Bout 'Ginas', a parody of The Vagina Monologues

But as the most famous - and most fetishised - spectacle-wearer in America, Fey plays down her status as the thinking man's sex symbol. 'Glasses make anyone look smarter,' says Fey, who can seem reserved in person. 'You put glasses on Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal and he's an architect. You put a pair of glasses on Denise Richards and she's a palaeontologist.'

The day Baby Mama opens, I ask Lorne Michaels, creator and producer of Saturday Night Live and co-producer of Baby Mama, what he feels is most distinctive about Fey and her humour. 'She has a very clear take on things,' he says. 'It always comes from a place of intelligence and there is just an edge to it. It's not fearful. It's strong and confident and you recognise the voice and most of the time you agree with it.'

That's interesting, I say, because people who know her well say she's quite shy. 'As a person, yes, I think that is so,' he says, 'but she projects a confidence. I have never seen her face a challenge that she didn't pull off. She won't give up until it's good. She has impossibly high standards.'

If Tina Fey's self-effacing appearance is unusual for a female comedian, her background and temperament seem particularly ill-suited to her chosen profession. Coming from a solidly upper-middle-class, stable Greek-American family in Pennsylvania, Fey was an unapologetic geek and straight-A student, editor of the school newspaper, in the drama club and member of the choir. She had trouble fitting in.

'I had a pretty rough puberty,' she says. 'Growing up as a girl is always traumatising, especially when you have the deadly combination of greasy skin and getting your boobs at 10. But somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. I was trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity.'

She now acknowledges that much of the fabulous bitchiness of Mean Girls, which she wrote, came from her own high-school experience. Lindsay Lohan plays a naive teenager who has been home-schooled and is then plunged into the cliquey gender rituals of American high school.

'I ate weaker girls for breakfast,' Fey admits. 'I really was a snarky girl. My whole thing was, if I really liked a guy and he had the audacity to like someone else instead of me, I would hate that girl and devote hours and hours of time to picking her apart and talking about her behind her back and canvassing my friends to dislike her.'

At the University of Virginia, where she studied drama, Fey was again not part of the cool crowd. She disapproved of the heavy drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity in which many of her fellow students indulged. Today she's proud that she's never taken drugs, except in childbirth. 'I want to be on record saying this, so my daughter can see it one day in the future. I have never done any drugs! I am extremely square and obedient in nature!'

After university, Fey went to Chicago, joining the Second City troupe, renowned for improvisational comedy. She went because she knew a number of alumni had graduated to Saturday Night Live, including John Belushi and Bill Murray. Fey honed her particular brand of humour there, specialising in especially lewd and caustic routines. In one sketch, she imagined Catherine the Great complaining about the unfairness of life: 'You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly. But fuck one horse and you're a horse-fucker for all eternity.'

Fey was so happy at Second City that she had doubts about moving to New York when Lorne Michaels invited her to join Saturday Night Live. The show, which started in 1975, has a reputation as a fearsome testing ground, especially for women, who had always been outnumbered by the men. The brutal and relentless weekly process by which sketches and jokes get winnowed down before the show can be devastating.

One thing Fey learnt from her fellow comics on the show was that, 'If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.'

The first sketch Fey wrote, about Bill Clinton, died in read-throughs. 'This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out,' she recalls. 'But I realised, "OK, that happened, and I didn't die". You've got to experience failure to understand you can survive it.'

Survive she did, and in 1999 Michaels made her head writer, the first woman to hold the post. The following year he made her co-host of the centrepiece 'Weekend Update' segment. Weekend Update features two faux newsreaders dissecting the previous week's news and disembowelling those unlucky enough to have been part of it.

'Prostitutes in Lyon, France, sent a fax to the government to complain that they are losing business to Eastern European women who are protected by the Albanian mafia,' said Fey in one typical segment. 'First of all, how rough-looking are these French prostitutes that all their customers are running to the Albanians? Secondly, why did they send a fax, and from whence? Do they have a fax machine in the whorehouse, or did they all trundle down to Kinko's - "You fax these, I'll let you shave me". Thirdly, how come French whores know how to work a fax machine, but every time I try to use it, I hit Powersave, or I forget to dial 9? This just proves what my boyfriend always says - that I'm dumber than a French whore.'

Other examples of Fey's Weekend Update repertoire: 'A Harvard Medical School study has determined that rectal thermometers are the best way to tell a baby's temperature. Plus, it teaches the baby who's boss.'

'Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman say their split is amicable, and they want everyone to know that after their divorce their two adopted children will be returned to the prop department at Universal Studios.'

'In order to feel safer on his private jet, John Travolta has purchased a bomb-sniffing dog. Unfortunately, the dog came six movies too late.'

'U2 lead singer Bono met with President Bush on Wednesday and urged the president to help the world's poor, while the president urged Bono to get back with Cher.'

Under Fey's tutelage as head writer, the number of women on the show increased significantly. But Fey doesn't believe Saturday Night Live was ever overtly hostile to women, as long as they are funny. 'If it gets laughs it goes forward,' she says. 'There have been so many women who were stars on SNL. It's when they leave and try and be in the movies that things get hard.'

Which is why Fey is so thrilled that Baby Mama has been successful. 'Amy and I were excited to be doing a story about two women who are not somebody else's girlfriend,' says Fey. 'I liked the topicality of the fertility issues. There's so much weirdness and emotion about it. And Amy liked that it had nothing to do with a goddam wedding.'

Fey's hard-won success has also clearly squelched ludicrous charges, made recently by Hitchens and others, that women aren't funny. Responding to the late Michael O'Donoghue, the first head writer for Saturday Night Live, who once said that it helped to have 'a big hunk of meat between the legs' when writing humour, Fey says: 'I do have one, but it's been flayed open to a vagina.' So you don't agree? 'Well, the thing is, he said it and then he died. So, I don't know. '

But it's also clear that Fey's success is the exception in US comedy rather than the rule. Media historian Robert Thompson believes there are clear social reasons for that. 'Until relatively recently, the kind of things that would lead you to a life of comedy, just like the kind of things that would lead you to a life of crime, tended to be those things that were rewarded in boys, but not in girls. You could act up in school and you could be priming the act that you would eventually be doing professionally. It was kind of expected, boys will be boys. But for girls it was considered unfeminine, unseemly, even downright promiscuous.'

Intriguingly, unlike most other comedians, Fey's comic strength doesn't come from having been class clown. Instead it comes from skewering adult class clowns, our politicians and celebrities. 'She's pretty monastic at times,' says Poehler. 'She's not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else's belly-flops and then writes about it.'

As Lorne Michaels, who has worked with comedians for more than three decades, looks at Fey's career in the light of the success of 30 Rock and Baby Mama, I ask him if it really is harder for women to establish an enduring comedy persona. 'They have less time,' he says. 'If they want it all, they've got to know who they are fast. There's no wandering around in a haze for 10 years.'

And you sensed that Tina knew who she was? 'From the very beginning,' he says. 'I think she wanted it all, and if she doesn't get it all she's going to get most of it.'

US TV: the hits and misses of a turbulent season

Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...

We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.

But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.

Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.

It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.

Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.

The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.

Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...

The fall and rise of the Baldwin dynasty

One is in celebrity rehab, another's an evangelical preacher. And the other two? They're in hit TV shows. Andrea Hubert celebrates the rise, fall and miraculous return of the Baldwin brothers...

Audiences are notoriously fickle creatures. We'll happily hum along to our favourite tarnished pop princess' catchiest tracks while simultaneously giggling over her latest mental breakdown, justified in the smug knowledge that if she presents us with even a half decent attempt at her former glory, we'll welcome her back with open arms. Ultimately, despite our tabloid-addicted bitchy streaks, everybody loves a star that bounces back. Which is why, right here right now, it's good to be a Baldwin.

Currently riding the glorious comeback wave are Alec, in the hit comedy 30 Rock, and William, in new drama Dirty Sexy Money, as an arrogant TV exec and a politician respectively. Over in the US, the two younger, less successful Baldwins, Stephen and Daniel, are keeping their end up with appearances in Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Fat Club and, naturally, Celebrity Rehab. A few years ago, you'd be hard pressed to recall the last time you saw any of their faces in your living room. Now, the challenge is finding a Baldwin-free zone on your box.

Not that you'll want to. 30 Rock marked a brilliant return to form for Alec, cementing his status as not only a great dramatic actor, but a truly talented comedian. His portrayal of Jack Donaghy, the obnoxious "vice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming" (also a member of a clearly parodic multi-siblinged Irish Catholic family prone to violent fighting), showcases his dry wit and seductive voice. It takes a truly engaging charisma to make shrink's dream client Donaghy ("I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman") as likable as he is. Meanwhile, former heartthrob William, now in his forties and slightly jowlier than the good old verging-on-gay-porn Backdraft days, is finally proving he's more than just a pretty face as Patrick Darling VI, a reluctant senator who (in the grandest departure from former roles one could imagine) enjoys sleeping with transgendered prostitutes. Which makes a welcome change from whatever he thought he was doing with Sliver and Fair Game.

William, though he has more skeletons in his movie closet than his older brother, has at least held down a stable marriage, to former Wilson-Phillips singer Chynna Phillips, since 1995. Alec has been far more noticeable over the past few years for his politics, his loud mouth, and an epic public divorce battle of Mills-McCartney-esque levels of bile with ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger. Their ongoing war came to an ugly head in 2007, when a ridiculously angry voicemail message from Baldwin to his 11-year-old daughter Ireland was posted on the internet, in which a publicly excoriated Baldwin called his daughter, among other things a "thoughtless little pig". With repeated reports of on-set histrionics and some amusingly inappropriate diehard democrat political descriptions (Dick Cheney is a "terrorist" while George W merely "a trust-fund puppet"), Alec's public profile has taken something of a battering.

Which only makes his return to popularity all the more remarkable. Perhaps it's because everyone loves a celebrity dynasty. The Kennedys, the Barrymores, the Arquettes (don't laugh) - all occupy a sacred space in the hearts of Yanks who cling to any scrap of legacy that could be deemed as historically significant. They'll put up with a lot from their dynasties, and even when every member is wading neck-deep in a cesspool of career sludge, they'll still give them enough wiggle room to dazzle us with a brilliant new album/movie/TV show/presidency (delete where appropriate). And there's something endearing about those slightly chubby Baldwin boys.

No matter what risible antics they get up to, they're an indelible part of popular culture, scratched into our consciousness firstly in Clueless as a byword for hot ("Okay, so he's kind of a Baldwin") and later by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, first in South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut, when Canada bombs the shit out of their cartoon mansion ("Hey Alec," yells 'toon Billy, in painfully ironic last words, "you know what sucks about being a Baldwin? Nothing!") and later in Team America, where they remind us, cheerfully, in cruel song, "You are worthless Alec Baldwin/You failed in every way/And now my stock in you has fallen/Your career is stallin'." Sung with love, obviously.

Besides which, the Baldwins are significantly useful in areas of life that people actually care about. While William's the poster boy for happily ever after, everybody's least favourite Baldwin, drug-addled overweight Daniel (does anybody even remember that two-year career zenith on Homicide: Life On The Street?) is drying out and losing weight on camera. And Alec, despite his marital strife, self confessed OCD, and unsteady string of girlfriends (Ally Sheedy, Kristin Davis and Tatum O'Neal to name a few), has fully embraced an issue close to many people's hearts - animal rights. A strict vegan, he recently narrated Meet Your Meat, a promotional PETA video that shows the appalling conditions of tasty animals. "What you are about to see is beyond your worst nightmares," he warns, leaving you terrified, a little turned on, and (ashamedly) waiting for a punchline. Now how many PETA videos can claim that?

Fresh from his onscreen feud with Piers Morgan in the US Celebrity Apprentice (we love you Stephen!), the littlest Baldwin has gone one further, heading straight to the heart of middle America by eschewing a potentially successful acting career (he was one of The Usual Suspects) to become an evangelical preacher, combining the word of the Gospel with extreme sports. And in true Baldwin fashion, he's not holding back even a little bit. His best-selling memoir, The Unusual Suspect, includes an open letter to Satan's alleged disciple Bono, criticising his dedication to erasing third world debt.

Oh, and he also promises that if you try and stop him making disciples of the youth of America, he's going to "break your face". It's a tough call working out which is funnier - 30 Rock or this?

As champions of the underdog, even us Brits have to agree there's no feeling warmer than seeing formerly chubby, formerly shamed or formerly addicted members of a notorious dynasty blast their way back from the brink of oblivion. Our boys may once have been a laughing stock but if you think they're ever out of the game, you really don't understand what it means to be a Baldwin.

Dirty Sexy Money, Fri, 9pm, C4

Tina Fey is ready to rock

The sexy satirist returns to TV, silver screen and magazine stands – declare April her month states Rob Salem...

Tina Fey. "TinaFey" ... you somehow can't keep yourself from stringing the name together, like Tracy Morgan always used to on Saturday Night Live – before he started calling her "LizLemon" on 30 Rock. TinaFey, now less a name than an established brand, with the comedy quality seal of approval. TinaFey, creator, producer, head writer, screenwriter, sitcom and now movie star ... one-stop shopping for all your humour needs.

Snarky, sassy, cynical, smart and, yes, sexy – just check out that recent cover of Vanity Fair – even behind those clunky nerd glasses and that intriguing little hint of a scar on her chin (a childhood accident she declines to discuss because it "bums out" her parents).

Fey, television's uncontested "it" girl at the age of 37, who will essentially own the month of April with tonight's return of her sitcom hit, 30 Rock (8:30 on NBC and A-Channel) and the April 25 opening of her new film, Baby Mama, which she wrote as a vehicle for herself and her Weekend Update co-anchor, Amy Poehler.

From Fey's perspective, she's just glad to be back at work. As one of the few legitimate hyphenates in the business, the recent writers' strike split her loyalties: to her show, her staff and, as a relatively new mom, to her 3-year-old daughter, Alice Zenobia Richmond (with husband Jeff Richmond, an SNL composer she met in 1994 at Chicago's Second City).

"I did my union duty on the picket line," she says, addressing the press in a telephone conference call. "But mostly I stayed at home with my daughter, which was sort of the only blessing of the strike. For me, it was a little bit like a maternity leave that I did not previously have. It's tough now, because my daughter is old enough to say, `No, you not go to work. You not go outside.' That's hard for any working parent."

Occasionally, she says, she'll bring Alice with her to work. "I do try to bring her sometimes and she likes to come. She likes to hang out in the makeup room. But at the same time, it is a busy workplace and I always feel mindful that not everyone gets to bring their kids. "Actually, at 30 Rock, we do try to do special days where we have parties where everyone can bring their kids. We had a really fun Halloween party and a sort of a spring/Easter party (last month)."

But then, 30 Rock has always been something of a family affair, from favoured SNL host Alec Baldwin – and there is no one better at hilariously underplaying Fey's consistently clever dialogue – to her old comedy comrades from New York and Chicago. "A lot of these parts who are regulars, I wrote with people in mind," she says. "For example, Jack McBrayer, who plays Kenneth, is an old friend of mine from Chicago. I really wanted him for that part and was very happy when no one objected. Scott Adsit is an old friend of mine. I wrote that part (writer Pete Hornberger) with him in mind. And we wrote Jack (Donaghy) with Alec in mind, too ... and were very pleasantly surprised when he agreed to do it. We've used a lot of people from Chicago. We've used Brian Stack some and he's going to come back – he was a Second City guy. And Miriam Tolan, Brian McCann ... it's like, every time we have a small role, I'm going through my mental Rolodex of the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York or the Second City and ImprovOlympic in Chicago, just to see who we haven't used yet."

Born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey in the Philadelphia suburb of Upper Darby, she developed an early interest in TV comedy, inspired, in large part, by Catherine O'Hara's work on SCTV. "I also grew up on a lot of classic TV," she says. "Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett ... all that kind of stuff." Earning a BA in drama at the University of Virginia, Fey immediately relocated to Chicago to study improv at Second City, joining the mainstage cast there in 1994.

In 1997, she landed a job as a writer for SNL. Just two years later, she was made head writer, the first woman ever to do so – and, at 5-foot-4, also the shortest. During her nine-year SNL tenure, she only rarely appeared in sketches, aside from co-anchoring the weekly news parody. As recently as her guest-host monologue last month, she admitted to still thinking of herself more as a writer than a performer.

Which, in the early days of 30 Rock, was made fairly evident by her apparent unease and a certain awkward stiffness in the delivery of her own dialogue.

Now, I suggest as diplomatically as possible, she seems much more comfortable in front of the camera. "I think you might be right," she allows. "I am having a very good time shooting these episodes now. It feels like the pressure is off. I feel so grateful to have been recognized for the stuff that I did on the show last year, that maybe that has helped me relax a little bit. I've really fully stopped apologizing for being in the show."

And now that she's back on the job – or rather, jobs?

Not-so-alter ego of Kenneth the Page

When Jack McBrayer began pursuing an acting career, the first quality that agents and casting directors noticed was not his quick wit, his excitable nature or his youthful countenance, which seems not to have aged a day since he left Conyers, Ga., to attend college. It was his accent, a Southern-fried drawl that would curl the toes of Tennessee Williams. That was never a good thing, writes Dave Itzkoff.

“The first words out of their mouths would be, ‘Can you lose the accent?’ ” Mr. McBrayer, 34, recalled in a recent interview. “And, unfortunately, I can, but it sounds like I’m making fun of people.” Yet as Mr. McBrayer honed his skills in the improvisational comedy theaters of Chicago, he realized there was no reason his inflection should impede his career. “We could be anyone and say anything,” he said, and he became more comfortable playing other characters or “just playing a heightened version of myself.”

And what would a heightened version of Mr. McBrayer look like? “Well,” he said, “it’s pretty much Kenneth the Page. ”

Kenneth the Page is, of course, Mr. McBrayer’s character on 30 Rock, a wide-eyed, blazer-clad naïf who works the most thankless of thankless jobs at the sitcom’s fictional incarnation of NBC yet remains in rapt awe of colleagues like the self-important executive Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin) and the harried producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey). In that sense Mr. McBrayer really isn’t too different from his inexperienced alter ego. “People in television can get a little jaded a little quickly,” he said. “Fortunately, I have done so little of it that I have not had the opportunity to grow weary of it.”

Though he grew up a fan of subversive children’s television shows like The Electric Company and classic sketch programs like The Carol Burnett Show, Mr. McBrayer did not consider comedy his calling until after he had graduated from the University of Evansville in Indiana. In the summer of 1995 he moved to Chicago during a blistering heat wave and took refuge in the Second City comedy theatre simply because it had air-conditioning. There he found himself entranced by the performances of troupe members like Ms. Fey, Rachel Dratch (the future Saturday Night Live star) and Adam McKay (the future director of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby), and he quickly joined the group himself.

After leaving Second City in 2002, Mr. McBrayer appeared in small roles on Late Night With Conan O’Brien and Arrested Development and in Talladega Nights. But he also worked in numerous menial jobs that would provide unexpected preparation for the role of Kenneth, which Ms. Fey, creator and producer of 30 Rock, conceived specifically for him.

Mr. McBrayer has worked in a colorful array of places: a factory that made swimming-pool liners; an Applebee’s restaurant, where he was named employee of the month; an office where his job required him to reorganize a huge storage closet. “If I was hung over,” he said, “I would stack boxes just so I could curl up in a fetal position for 15 minutes. Money well earned.”

As a star of 30 Rock (whose new episodes resume on Thursday) he has somewhat brighter career prospects. He recently appeared with the pop singer Mariah Carey in her video for “Touch My Body” playing a nebbishy computer repairman who arrives at Ms. Carey’s mansion. Shot in a single day and directed by the filmmaker Brett Ratner, the video was a surreal experience for Mr. McBrayer.

“To hear Brett Ratner say, ‘O.K., now walk more slowly with the unicorn’; ‘O.K., Mariah, spank Jack more,’ ” he said. “What is happening to my life?” The fantasy was nearly derailed, however, when an errant Frisbee tossed by Mr. McBrayer hit Ms. Carey in the face. “Her bodyguard came and explained to me that I should probably be more careful,” he said. “And we never saw that Frisbee again.”

He can be seen beginning April 18 in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, playing a newly-wed who finds connubial bliss as awkward as Mr. McBrayer felt shooting his character’s sex scenes. “For me I had to wear these little nudie pants, and they are not flattering on nobody,” he said. “I looked smooth like a little Ken doll.”

As he continues to build his résumé, Mr. McBrayer doubts he’ll ever be able to shake the sense of wonder he feels working with 30 Rock co-stars like Mr. Baldwin. “The hardest acting for me was not to freak out and say, ‘Oh my God, I loved you in Prelude to a Kiss!’ ” he said. “But ask me again in five years. ‘Ugh, I’ve got to do a scene with Alec again? Boring!’