I was born in Joliet, Illinois. It was totally Midwestern - small, little house, two great parents, and a sister and a beagle.
Some children challenge themselves to maybe run a marathon or something. I challenged myself to stay up for two days and make cinnamon toast and watch the Jerry Lewis Telethon and laugh and cry.
Young, handsome men never flirt with me. I get heat from old dudes that run the parking garages.
Commercials used to have such a serious tone to them or a really corny tone.
I went to a Catholic girls' school before we moved to Florida when I was 15.
It's easy to trick yourself into thinking something's funnier than it is.
At my confirmation, where you get the Holy Spirit, I came down the stairs at my party and had torn, like, 80 holes in my pantyhose and said I had the Holy Spirit, and just would do things like that all the time.
My sister was three years older than me, and she was like the stone-cold '70s fox. I looked like a short Polish farm woman, and so our journals were wildly different.
Twitter is really - I got very addicted to it just because it's so simple, and it's like a video game for comedy writers to just do a one-liner about something.
I think, as a woman, you have to really make sure that you're taking care of yourself and make sure that you're covered and you have enough material written for you.
It takes a special kind of family to bathe together in their 40s.
When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.
All the women I've grown up with at 'SNL' and other areas, and even the women that work with Judd Apatow, all those women are powerful, assertive women that have great material, and they just produce themselves.
My specialty at 'SNL' was doing triage. There was always a great need for someone to say, 'Make this funnier. Give me an ending for this. What's a better big laugh for this towards the end? What's a better physical joke in this?' And I just really, over time, honed that specific thing so well.
If you're hired to be a funny person, you have to trust your judgment but also be open because sometimes you think something's funny, and the next day you read it and go, 'Oh, my God.'
I was a very earthly, matronly, plus-size little girl with a pure heart.
You're under the gun at all times because it's live TV. A lot of time, between dress and air, you're having to come with an entire ending to your sketch that gets an even better, bigger laugh - which is terrifying... People are filing into the audience, and you're writing a new joke for the end of it.
I was always a bit of a class clown.
Everyone knows people like that: You're looking at their milky, glazed-over eyes, and you know they're not listening.
Tina Fey is a very old friend of mine, and I adore her.
