Bossypants

Editorial Reviews. leondumoulin.nl Review. Amazon Best Books of the Month, April Tina Fey's new book Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny.
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Talent is not sexually transmittable. Make-up advice, hair styling tips, skincare regimes, they can all be a lot of fun, but Tina reminds us that we should never take it too seriously.

Bossypants - Wikipedia

A hard but important lesson for anyone. You have to go down the chute. Absolutely no offense intended to my yellow-haired sistaz out there. I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so? We already have enough working against us. Oh and try not to say, "like" so much. What it does have, though, when you eventually get to it, is a good old-fashioned mission statement. Poehler was messing around in the writers' room, doing something "dirty, loud and 'unladylike'" when the then star of the show, Jimmy Fallon, told her to stop it.

Or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny? Do you have anything to say to that? We don't fucking care if you like it. And right there is what makes this book worth the cover price and why Tina Fey will continue to inspire girl crushes and why she has been such an influential force on the way that women are portrayed in comedy. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove that it doesn't exist.

It's there later too, her kick-ass, take-no-prisoners attitude, when she points out that any woman over a certain age is automatically assumed to be "crazy": The women, though, they're all 'crazy'… I have a suspicion that the definition of 'crazy' in showbusiness is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her any more. When Fey was first interviewed for the job of writer on Saturday Night Live , it was like "living one's dreams. This must be how people feel when they really do go to school naked by accident. Only in comedy, she notes, "does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity".

And it's when it gets to this stage of her career that the book takes off, though it helps if you have a dweebish interest in a television comedy that was never actually broadcast in the UK and can cope with a parade of American celebrities you haven't necessarily heard of. She tells us what she learned about life from improv comedy: Is this not the absolute worst thing you could instill in a child?

You need to teach them the opposite. They need to be a little afraid of what will happen. I'm with you on this one, sister. View all 40 comments. Mar 01, Miranda Reads rated it liked it Shelves: I really appreciated how this novel had a good mix of heartwarming anecdotes, comedic happenstances and career musings. While I am not as familiar with her SNL and early career, this book was fun and easy to listen to.

As with many a memoir, we start with her childhood love of comedy and processed to her current-day adventures or perhaps more acc Tina Fey. As with many a memoir, we start with her childhood love of comedy and processed to her current-day adventures or perhaps more accurately: Do your thing and don't care if they like it. As a young teen, Tina hung out primarily in the theater department - thus having the pleasure of getting to know all sorts of quirky characters while being a social pariah to the rest of the school.

But to her, the friendships and life lessons were invaluable to shaping her future. So, despite what others may have said, there was no way she would have lived her life differently. Her early career was sporadic and difficult - breaking into the comedy scene was no easy task but she made it - by being bossy and taking no Sht from no one.

Bossypants

I enjoyed how she managed to inject her personal brand of humor throughout her memoir while simultaneously opening up to her real problems and issues: My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne. If you are looking for a light read with great advice - look no further! Audiobook Comments Tina read this one and absolutely rocked it. The comedic time was just superb. I'd definitely take listening to this book over reading it any day. View all 6 comments. May 13, Kemper rated it really liked it Shelves: As Tina puts it: Fey has a lot of fun pointing out her own contradictions.

She considers herself a poor actor yet stars in a TV show. Who said women aren't funny? A lot of people, apparently, most of them men. One of these was Christopher Hitchens, the controversial journalist who published an essay in Vanity Fair titled, quite plainly, Why Women Aren't Funny.

To this and to the dozen other polemics written about the perceived humor gap between men and women, Tina Fey, in her new book called Bossypants , says, "We don't fucking care if you like it.

12 Life Lessons I Learned From Tina Fey's 'Bossypants'

My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist. Man, this Tina Fey person sure is funny. And she's a woman.

And she's her own boss. She's the creator of 30 Rock , one of the most acclaimed comedy series on television today. In Bossypants , Fey relates how she went from being an awkward but intelligent girl in her hometown in Pennsylvania to writing sketches for the aforementioned comedy institution to portraying an awkward but intelligent woman in 30 Rockefeller Center.

Bossypants sustains a deftly calibrated mixture of Fey's signature self-effacing humor and her knack for intelligent storytelling that buoys an otherwise tiresome and self-important account of a celebrity's rise to fame and success. There are some wonderful Filipinos [in the cruise ship] who fold your towels in the shape of a different animal every night. It might be an elephant wearing your sunglasses, or a duck wearing your sunglasses.

Fey hails from a municipality in Delaware County called Upper Darby, where she grew up with her German father, Greek mother, and fellow part-German, part-Greek older brother. There she had her first brush with reality when in kindergarten a boy classmate rudely tore one of her drawings apart. After studying in University of Virginia and, among other crazy things, climbing Old Rag Mountain to impress a boy , Fey became part of The Second City, the improvisation and sketch comedy troupe in Chicago whose accomplished alumni include her close friends and SNL co-stars Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch.

The divide between men, who are funny, and women, who are supposedly less funny if at all, as Hitchens and company would reiterate , was then made only too clear to Fey. The show-runners, she recalls, were hesitant to produce a show with an unprecedented gender-equal cast for fear that "the women wouldn't have any ideas," but in the end they moved forward with the plan.

Fey was one of the three funny women in that cast. My dream for the future is that sketch comedy shows become a gender-blind meritocracy of whoever is really the funniest. You might see four women and two men. You might see five men and a YouTube video of a kitten sneezing.

Once we know we're really open to all the options, we can proceed with Whatever's the Funniest… which will probably involve farts. As with many other luminaries from The Second City, Fey went on to work at SNL , progressively as a writer, a head writer the first female to hold the position , and a cast member. In she left the show to develop and run her own, the highly praised but, Fey admits, low-rating 30 Rock. Aside from being its creator she is also one of the show's main actors, playing a considerably fictionalized version of herself. On top of that she is an executive producer of the show, carrying the unofficial title of "boss.

It was just a matter of knowing what she wanted, persevering to get it, and maintaining her purchase on it, even as she's being belittled by chauvinistic men and beaten in the ratings game by Two and a Half Men. Fey's most demanding challenge, though, came in the person of Alice, her daughter, to whom the book's unexpectedly emotional antepenultimate section is dedicated.

The Mother's Prayer for Its Daughter. Fey ends her consistently hilarious, laugh-out-loud really, it is memoiristic book pondering the possibility of a second child. Science shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after forty. I have one top-notch baby with whom I am in love.


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It's a head-over-heels "first love" kind of thing, because I pay for everything and all we do is hold hands. When she says, "I wish I had a baby sister," I am stricken with guilt and panic. Fey is now five months pregnant. View all 21 comments. Oct 08, Khadidja rated it it was ok Shelves: After 5 and half hours listening to this book i'm not even smiling! View all 8 comments. Aug 03, Jennifer rated it it was amazing Shelves: The tale of a suburban girl finding her voice and making her way in the still entirely too male world of comedy felt so specific and true View all 4 comments.

Mar 16, Raeleen Lemay rated it really liked it Shelves: I listened to this on audiobook, and I'm so glad I did! I can't imagine how much less fun this would have been without Tina's actual voice. I'm not saying the book was boring, Tina is just perfect and makes everything better always. Dec 23, Donna Ho Shing rated it it was ok. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Bryan Cranston and Shonda Rhimes have the best celebrity memoirs out there. Oh, and parts of it were flat out racist.

I'm beginning to think two stars is a tad generous. Maybe celebrity memoirs just aren't for me. I don't find them appealing, entertaining or really funny as some claim to be. Aziz Ansari's 'Modern Romance. I didn't say I was gonna stop reading celebrity books. View all 11 comments. Aug 10, Jeanette "Astute Crabbist" rated it liked it Shelves: So yeah, I was a Tina Fey virgin. Her name meant nothing to me until this book came out. I just tune out nonessential information. Anyway, I like Tina because she's funny in the way I would be funny if I were actually capable of being funny on a regular basis.

I listened to the audio book, which is really the only way to go with this So yeah, I was a Tina Fey virgin. I listened to the audio book, which is really the only way to go with this one, because face it, delivery is everything. Had I attempted the print version, I probably would have dropped it early on. I didn't love it. Parts of it are just so-so. But I did enjoy some parts an awful lot, to the point of hysterical belly laughs.

There's a line from a song in A Chorus Line that says, "Those stage and movie people got there because they're special. Tina Fey is the only person I know of who has used the words "cavernous vagina" in a sentence. Wish I'd thought of that one first. Fey is not suitable for the easily offended. Left me wondering which of Tina's parts were the bossy ones. Apr 07, Jason Koivu rated it really liked it Shelves: Hilarious autobio that touches upon the highs and lows of Tina Fey's life and career.

It's not an in depth, gut-wrenching tell-all memoir. For instance, she only glosses over the incident when she got the facial scar. But if you're familiar with Fey's brand of humor then the lightheartedness of it shouldn't surprise you. She's the sort of average, nice person that has her own strong opinions, but doesn't thi Hilarious autobio that touches upon the highs and lows of Tina Fey's life and career. She's the sort of average, nice person that has her own strong opinions, but doesn't think that they always have to be heard at the expense of others.

She's more apt to poke fun at herself, dissecting her own issues with razor-sharp wit. She's very good about never bludgeoning the reader with microscopic analysis. She highlights key life moments, considering them briefly while avoiding ponderous reflections. Some might say the book stays too surface-level. I say going any deeper would not be the point of Bossypants. I'm reviewing the audiobook and I can't see why anyone would want to enjoy this book any other way.

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Fey is a great writer, but she's also a really good performer. And here, you get her performing her own material, literally her own life. Her cadence and inflection adds such an important element to Bossypants. If you think you can do better justice to this work with your own reading interpretation, then by all means go for it Just realize you are wrong.

Stop being a conceited dickhole. View all 20 comments. Oct 27, Ana rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book is perfection. Undoubtedly one of the best biographies I have ever read. Mrs Fey is an amazing comedian. You still hear people say women aren't funny. I love Tina Fey.

But I loved her more before I read this book. Now I know she's human and capable of disappointing me. This moment was inevitable. But still a little sad. That said, there were portions of this book that killed me. Also, she is a genius when it comes to discussing everyday gender fuckery. I loved her whole take on menstruation and how she thought period blood would be blue because of I love Tina Fey. I loved her whole take on menstruation and how she thought period blood would be blue because of how it's depicted in commercials.

Tina Fey, you are my hero. In so many ways. The Sarah Palin discussion seemed to go on forever and didn't really tell me anything new. Most of the 30 Rock stuff was pretty dull aside from the MVP jokes. She probably just needed a better editor. With several big chops and some precision cutting, this could have been a masterpiece. I figured I would feel exactly about this book as I do about Tina Fey. I was right - that's exactly how this book was. I loved it and I loved her, and I marked something about every other page that I wanted to quote or refer to.

Now I have to figure out which I'll use for my review: You know the expression "the most serious things are said in jest"? Well, even in her introduction I found what I believe to be a Truth. She's saying who the book is for and what the reader will find in it: You'll find that, too. The essential ingredients, I can tell you up front, are a strong father figure, bad skin, and a child-sized colonial-lady outfit. A strong father figure is a big deal. There are several things in this book that make me think Tina and I are soul sisters.

Or at least, that we think the exact same things. After describing how her mother handled talking to her about reproduction and menstruation about the same way as my mom; she didn't , she says about a pamphlet, "The explanatory text was followed by a lot of drawings of the human reproductive system that my brain refused to memorize. To this day, all I know is there are between two and four openings down there and that the setup inside looks vaguely like the Texas Longhorns logo.

After an updated list of How Women Should Be based on Beyonce and JLo , she says, "The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes. Everyone else is struggling. One of her best though is close to the beginning of the book: Gay people don't actually try to convert people. That's Jehovah's Witnesses you're thinking of.

BOSSYPANTS by Tina Fey

If you could turn gay from being around gay people, wouldn't Kathy Griffin be Rosie O'Donnell by now? They had a place where they belonged, and, even if it was because he didn't want to deal with their being different, he didn't treat them any differently. Which I think is a pretty successful implementation of Christianity. I not only like some of her descriptions of "Don Fey", but the point she makes about him when others meet him: My dad has visited me at work over the years, and I've noticed that powerful men react to him in a weird way.

Alec Baldwin took a long look at him and gave him a firm handshake. That they'd better never mess with me, or Don Fey will yell at them? That I have high expectations for the men in my life because I have a strong father figure? I have tons more things marked -- tons, including this: Which is hard sometimes because they look so much better than human beings.

You'll just have to read it yourself. View all 12 comments.


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I was expecting more funny. Having read a small portion of this book online A Mother's Prayer and having found that very entertaining, I had high hopes for this book. And I should say, it's not a bad read. It's just not that funny. I laughed out loud maybe once, and smiled a few times more. Most of the jokes fell under the category of fairly amusing. Maybe as a script, it'd be great. The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement.

You can read why I came to this decision here.

Bossypants by Tina Fey – review

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook Apr 25, Diane rated it really liked it Shelves: Listening to Tina Fey perform this book was much more enjoyable than reading it in print. I first read this back in , and I liked it OK, but after hearing a friend rave about how much fun the audio was, I decided to give the CD a chance. Some mornings I was laughing so hard while driving to work that other drivers would stare at me.

Tina Fey performs different voices and really sells the stories. One of my favorite chapters was about her father, Don Fey: He was a code breaker in Korea. He was a fireman in Philadelphia. He's a skilled watercolorist. He's written two mystery novels. He taught himself Greek so well that when he went to buy tickets to the Acropolis once, the docent told him, 'It's free for Greek citizens.

Many things were labeled 'defective' only to miraculously turn functional once the directions had been read more thoroughly. If I had to name the two words I most associate with my dad between and , they would be 'defective' and 'inexcusable. Not knowing that 'a lot' was two words? The seltzer machine that we were going to use to make homemade soda? Richie Ashburn not being in the baseball hall of fame yet? Don Fey had a large rubber stamp that said 'bullshit,' which was and is awesome.

Tina also had great stories about her youthful adventures in a summer theater program, her experience with the Second City improv group in Chicago, and how she got her start on Saturday Night Live. Tina is good at making fun of herself and her accidental celebrity status.

There is an interesting chapter about the presidential election, when she famously portrayed Sarah Palin on several SNL sketches. Meanwhile, she was busy working on her show 30 Rock, and there was one particularly hectic week that Oprah Winfrey was going to appear on 30 Rock, which was the same day of Tina's first Palin skit. She really does smell nice. And I got to hug her a lot in the scenes Between setups I sat with my daughter on my lap and watched Governor Palin on YouTube and tried to improve my accent. Oprah seemed genuinely concerned for me. Put simply, the rules are that you should agree with your partner, and then build on it.

But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to 'respect what your partner has created' and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you It's your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you're adding something to the discussion. She talked about how much things have changed since she first started at Second City and SNL, in that more women are getting roles on comedy shows. One chapter that dragged was about her sitcom 30 Rock. Tina talks about her favorite jokes and episodes, and I think it would be boring for a reader who has never seen the show.

The chapter was even boring for me, and I watched several seasons of 30 Rock. But overall, this was a very enjoyable book to listen to. It is rare for me to recommend listening to a book rather than reading it, but in this case, I think the performance is better than the print.

First read April Second read May Apr 17, Flannery rated it really liked it Shelves: I was hesitant to start listening to Bossypants because, like seemingly every other person on this planet, Liz Lemon is one of my favorite television characters of all time. My subconscious and let's be honest here, also my conscious mind just wanted to listen to a book about Liz Lemon being Liz Lemon. I don't think Cheesy Blasters would hold up well en route to consumers Seriously, I am practically lizzing about the hypothetical possibilities of a never-going-to-happen audio production here.