Amy Poehler and Tina Fey Vow to End Friendship With Comedy Tour
There’s no better way to end a beautiful relationship than by agreeing to work together; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler know it better than anyone. That’s why they’re pledging to ruin their longstanding camaraderie with their joint Restless Leg Tour, featuring “an evening of jokes, iconic stories, and conversational entertainment” (no doubt colored by vicious backbiting and backstage acrimony). In a joint statement, the Saturday Night Live co-stars proclaimed, "If this tour goes right, we can finally end this friendship!"
The two comics go all the way back to the Chicago improv scene of the early 1990s, first at ImprovOlympic performing on a team called Inside Vladmir, which they named after a gay porn video. Later, Fey and Poehler were cast in a Second City touring company. The troupe’s job was to tour the Midwest performing “best of Second City” material (it’s the tour on which Fey taught Poehler to pluck her eyebrows), but the two weren’t having it with the tired sketches. “Amy Poehler in particular was tired of being handed dated old blond-girl roles where all her lines were things like ‘Here’s your coffee, honey’ or ‘Mr. Johnson will see you now,’ or ‘Whattaya mean a blind date?!’” remembers Fey in her memoir Bossypants. “Each night we’d pull out an old sketch and replace it with something of our own.”
Fey and Poehler brought plenty of that “we’ll do it our way” spirit to SNL. Fey recalls a freshly cast Poehler goofing around with Seth Meyers and hitting him with an off-color joke. Jimmy Fallon, arguably the show’s biggest star at the time, interrupted to tell Poehler that her vulgarity was “not cute” and he didn’t like it.
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“Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. ‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’ Jimmy was visibly startled,” says Fey. “Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit.”
In her own memoir Yes, Please, Poehler remembers giving a departing Fey a set of dog tags that read “Pleasant Tomorrows” to bid her well on a post-SNL career. Fey gave them back when Poehler was having a tough time. “I like to think we will give them back and forth to each other whenever needed,” Poehler wrote.
Who gets the tags now that they’ll be driving each other bananas on the road? With so much time together on the horizon, fisticuffs or worse no doubt await. But we’re pretty sure they’ll patch it up in time for their next Golden Globes hosting gig.
