laughing to crying to laughing
? NBC/Getty Images
DOING SKETCH COMEDY ON LIVE TELEVISION WHILE PREGNANT IS LIKE WEARING A SOMBRERO. You can pretend to be a serious person, but the giant hat gives you away. I have spent an inordinate amount of time on camera being pregnant. Sometimes it was real and sometimes it was not. When I shot the film Baby Mama I wore a fake belly. It was shaped like a watermelon cut in half and it was strapped onto my body with flesh-colored Velcro. I would adjust it to where it felt comfortable and then giggle at the sight of it under my clothes. I would rip my belly off at lunch and the satisfying Velcro rip would announce that my pregnancy was over. Many times I patted my sweaty and firm stomach and thought about how cool it was going to be when I really was pregnant.
Real pregnancy is different.
I always wanted to have kids. I like them. They like me. I’m a mother now and I think I am pretty good at it. I think I am a decent person and very good listener and excellent at funny faces, all necessary when mothering a child. When I was twenty-six, a Japanese healer felt my abdomen and told me I had a joyful uterus and I would have three children. He worked in a dusty office that smelled like envelope glue. He gave me a bunch of herbs to help with my anxiety, which is why I was actually there, but when I boiled the herbs the smell was so horrible that I became instantly anxious at the thought of ingesting them and threw them in the garbage. In addition to my joyful uterus, I have what my nana referred to as her “Irish stomach.” This means that when I get old I should limit myself to buttered saltine crackers and the occasional hot dog. I associate hot dogs with the very young and the very old. Once after a grueling rehearsal at SNL for a Mother’s Day show (where I was six months pregnant with my second son) I asked the indefatigable Betty White what she was going to do when she got home. She told me she was going to fix herself a “vodka on the rocks and eat a cold hot dog.” In one sentence, she proved my theory and made me excited for my future.
Most of my thirties were spent married and without children, which is a state of affairs that I would highly recommend most people try for a while. Married and without children means you can go on vacations with other childless couples. You can eat in any restaurant at any time and have conversations about interesting things. You can decide to learn how to surf or write a slim book on the best place to buy a fedora in Los Angeles, because your spouse will be supportive and no one has to go home to relieve the babysitter. I was in no rush to change this wonderful lifestyle. Then I woke up and realized I was thirty-seven and might need to get cracking.
Pregnancy is such a sensitive and subjective experience. Trying to get pregnant is the most vulnerable thing in the world. You have to openly decide you are ready and then you have to put sperm in your vagina and elevate your legs like you are an upside-down coffee table. It’s all ridiculous and incredibly sci-fi. Everyone’s journey is different and I have nothing to say about how and when someone decides to become a mother. The legacy of my generation will be that we have truly expanded the idea of what “family” means. It is no longer unusual for people who choose surrogacy, gay adoption, IVF, international and domestic adoption, fostering, and childlessness to live side by side and quietly judge each other. We can all live in peace thinking our way is the best way and everything else is cuckoo. I was lucky. I tried for a little while to get pregnant, and at thirty-seven I did.
I didn’t tell anyone at first, as you are supposed to keep it secret. It’s a really magical time, those first few weeks. It almost makes you wish you didn’t have to tell anyone, ever. You could just watch your belly grow bigger and no one would be allowed to ask you about it and you would have your baby and a year later you would allow visitors to finally come and meet your little miracle. I was halfway through my seventh season at SNL, and no one really noticed my nausea or extreme tiredness. That was par for the course at a job that made you stay up all night long and eat cold mozzarella sticks you had to buy yourself.
My ob-gyn was a wonderfully old Italian man I will call Dr. G. Dr. G had delivered Sophia Loren’s children. I know this because everyone from his receptionist to the other doctors in his practice liked to tell me this fact. I was happy to hear that Dr. G was comfortable with beautiful and famous vaginas. I don’t consider myself beautiful or famous, but my vagina certainly is. Everyone knows this. I have the Angelina Jolie of vaginas. And there is your pull quote, editors.
“I have the Angelina Jolie of vaginas.”
But even with my glamorous vagina, I worried about delivery. I have many friends who have had natural childbirth. I applaud them. I have friends who have used doulas and birthing balls and pushed out babies in tubs and taxicabs. I have a friend who had two babies at home! In bed! Her name is Maya Rudolph! She is a goddamn baby champion and she pushed her cuties out Little House on the Prairie style!
Good for her! Not for me.
That is the motto women should constantly repeat over and over again. Good for her! Not for me. I knew early on that my big-headed babies were going to be tricky to get out of my five-foot-two-inch frame. I knew that I was worried about pain and wanted to have the right measures in place. I knew I was the kind of person who could barely go to the movies without being stoned, let alone a delivery room. I remember a very important day when I told my dentist I wanted nitrous oxide at the ready every time I came for an appointment. No matter the procedure. No questions asked. This is what adults do. They demand or deny drugs on their own terms. Luckily, Dr. G made me feel like I would be able to handle anything.
Dr. G was European and old-fashioned in all the right ways. He reassured me I didn’t need an amniocentesis by reminding me that Italian women don’t worry about that sort of thing. I imagined Sophia Loren laughing off the idea of a needle being driven into her pregnant belly as she sipped an espresso. Dr. G dressed in stylish suits and moved very gently, squirting cold gel on my tummy while whistling a slow tune. He didn’t have a 3-D imaging machine. He had a utilitarian black-and-white deal that showed you a blurry picture of what looked like a big-headed frog. “Your baby is very smart,” he would say to me and my husband, Will Arnett. “You are doing everything right. Please drink one or two glasses of red wine a night.”
I was so lucky to have Dr. G as my doctor. I didn’t feel neurotic or stressed. I felt like a success. I ate what I wanted and felt super sexy. I was lucid enough to realize that I was on a total hormonal high and that a crash was just around the corner, but I didn’t care. I loved being pregnant. I loved being at work and still feeling vital and busy while this extraordinary thing was happening inside me. I never felt alone. I always had a companion. I reveled in all the new space I was taking up. When your stomach is big you knock things over and everyone stays out of your path. I was big in brand-new ways and I felt very powerful and womanly.
? NBC/Getty Images
I couldn’t have chosen a better doctor to deliver my first child. Unfortunately that never happened. Dr. G died the day before I went into labor.
Yup.
But before I get to that . . .
The last week of SNL before my son Archie arrived was incredibly exciting. The 2008 presidential race was almost a dead heat and the entire year leading up to the election had been a magical time to work on a live satirical sketch comedy show. Everything felt electric. The audience knew the ins and outs of every political story, and a lot of it had to do with what Saturday Night Live was doing. I think everyone was crushing it that season and the show had never been better.
We could barely keep up with the daily goodies and produced four prime-time Weekend Update Thursday specials during September and October. I was eight months pregnant and did fifteen live shows in thirteen weeks. Everyone came on. I met then presidential candidate Barack Obama while I was dressed as Dennis Kucinich. Maya was dressed as Barack Obama at the time, so the introduction might have been slightly more embarrassing for her. We were doing a sketch about how hot Kucinich’s wife was. That’s how much America was paying attention! Then Tina played Sarah Palin for the first time and blew the roof off the joint.
The anticipation of Tina playing Palin was so fun to witness, and she explains it well in her book Fifty Shades of Grey. She totally took on what was expected of her and it was awesome to stand next to her as she killed. The sketch that night dealt with Hillary Clinton coming to terms with the possibility of a Vice President Sarah Palin. It dealt with fierce competitiveness in politics. It dealt with power and entitlement. It dealt with the way society forces women to define themselves and compete against each other. It tackled old theories about Madonna vs. Whore and Slut vs. Shrew. But most importantly, it was really funny. That sketch was written by Seth Meyers. Tina and I added jokes. SNL and now Late Show with Seth Meyers producer Mike Shoemaker wrote the legendary line “I can see Russia from my house.”
I remember standing onstage and it being one of the few times that something felt perfectly whole. Archie did flips in my stomach each time the audience clapped. It was the closest to what I imagine it feels like to write a hit song. Here is a picture of Shoemaker and Seth rehearsing that skit with us. Look how in love with us they are.
? Liezl Estipona
My stomach grew bigger and the election grew closer. With just a few weeks left, Governor Sarah Palin was asked to come on the show. I had never met her, but many years before I had met Senator John McCain when he hosted and liked him instantly. We did a scene in a shower together and he was totally appropriate while also being very pleased. He was vigorous and honest. He noticed me smoking and told me if he knew the world was going to end the first thing he would do is start smoking again. He invited me to his house in Arizona. We hit it off.
I knew Tina would do a great opening sketch with Sarah Palin, and Seth and I were trying to think of something to do with her at the “Update” desk. I think I made some kind of joke about getting her to do a hard-core rap or something. Then I laughed at the thought of my doing one near her, in the gigantic state I was in. Seth laughed too. It was certainly not some wildly original idea, but as usual at SNL, the time pressure let us do things without overthinking. When you are pregnant you can get away with a lot of shit. Women really are at their most dangerous during this time. Your hormones are telling you that you are strong and sexy, everyone is scared of you, and you have a built-in sidekick who might come out at any minute. There should be some kind of pregnancy superhero movie. Calling Hollywood now. What’s that, Hollywood? It’s a weird idea and also you don’t do movies with female superheroes? Copy that.
I went into my dressing room and wrote the rap. Seth helped. Andy Samberg helped. I met Palin in her dressing room beforehand to go over things and I was honestly surprised that they didn’t make us change more of it. She and her team only wanted to modify a small joke about Todd being a real ladies’ man, I think. Her daughter Bristol was pregnant at the time, and we made small talk about babies. I did the rap and it was super fun. My stomach looked so big it almost seemed fake. It was ridiculous. I was so tired between dress and air that I remember lying in my dressing room like a bear and sleeping deeply in between sketches.
Which brings us to Friday, October 24, 2008. The day I went into labor. The day after my doctor died. The musical guest that week was Coldplay, and it was going to be Jon Hamm’s first time hosting the show. I had been working the whole time and feeling pretty good. Exhausted, yes. But invigorated. And honestly, at the end of a pregnancy any lady will tell you she is searching for anything to take her mind off the creature that is about to burst forth.
So I had done my rap the previous Saturday and slept all day Sunday feeling happy. Will and I had our suitcases packed and a name picked out. We were both so happy and so in love. Nothing brings a couple closer than a baby about to arrive. Each person needs the other so desperately and in such new and deep ways. Each day through the week, I was doing my check-in with the doctor. As we all know, a watched cervix never dilates, and I’d still been tight and sassy that Thursday morning. Dr. G assured me I would probably deliver a few days late like most new mothers. I told him that I was doing the show on Saturday, even though it was technically my due date, but any time after that would be fine. It was the first of many times I ridiculously thought I had any control over my schedule, this baby, or life and death in general.
I was in the middle of rehearsing a Mad Men parody Friday morning and called to confirm my three P.M. appointment. The receptionist answered the phone crying. She told me Dr. G had passed away from a heart attack in his sleep. I burst into tears so loudly and violently that I think water was squirting out of my eyes like in a Cathy cartoon. Nothing is more horrifying than a giant pregnant lady sobbing. Everyone got very quiet. I hung up the phone and told Jon and the hair and makeup people that my doctor had just DIED. And I was DUE TOMORROW. And that I knew it seemed like a weird punch line, but my beloved and dear Italian grandpa was not going to be able to help me. I felt so terrible about the fact that all I was thinking was “What about meeeeeee!” I cried and cried in my Mad Men dress. Jon Hamm held me by the shoulders and looked at me and said, “I know this is very sad, but this is a really important show for me, so I’m going to need you to get your shit together.” This made me laugh so hard I think I peed. Going from crying to laughing that fast and hard happens maybe five times in your life and that extreme right turn is the reason why we are alive, and I believe it extends our life by many years.
I told everyone at dress rehearsal. It freaked them out. At three P.M. I went to Dr. G’s office and was met by his grieving colleagues who had worked with him for decades. One of them, the lovely Dr. B, examined me and told me I shouldn’t worry. Nothing was happening and I would probably deliver a few days late. He had already treated and met with Dr. G’s other patients and would spend the next twenty-four hours delivering five babies. He was kind and professional, but it was extremely weird. He was a stranger. I went back to SNL, where I stayed until two A.M. Maya and Fred Armisen were doing bits on the main stage pretending to be robot versions of themselves, and I laughed and laughed and for the millionth time thought about how lucky I was. Eddie the security guard walked me to the car and asked me how I was doing. “I’m tired,” I said. I went home and got in bed. It was three thirty in the morning and I put on my favorite TV show, Law & Order, to go to sleep. I heard the “bam bam” sound effect in the opening credits and my water broke.
Did you know that when your water breaks the best thing to do is stand up? Your baby acts like a plug. Isn’t that insane? Strange thoughts like this and others filled my head as Will and I tenderly got ready to go to the hospital. I had that nervy feeling you get when you know your whole life is going to change and you realize you’re made of tissue paper. Will raced around and I weirdly brushed my teeth. As we got our car from the garage our doorman predicted we were going to have a girl. I sat down in Will’s car and gushed all over it. I was worried that he would be upset, but he laughed as he helped me in. I looked at him and thought, “I’ve turned into an animal now and I have a feeling this will be the nicest thing you see all night.”
I took drugs and pushed. It was hard and long. I texted Shoemaker and Seth and told them I wouldn’t be coming to work. While I tried to get my little bugger out, SNL scrambled to replace my parts. The real Elisabeth Moss came in to play herself, and she met Fred Armisen, who one year later to the day would become her husband. I would go to their wedding on my one-year-old boy Archie’s birthday. Seth Meyers prepared to do “Update” alone for the first time. He would go on to do it alone successfully for years, although I like to think it was a tiny bit less fun. My big-headed wonder couldn’t get out, and I started to think crazy thoughts. What if this was the one baby they couldn’t get out? What if they just handed me back my clothes and sent me home and said, “We are so sorry, we did what we could but we just couldn’t get him out. We wish you the best.” I felt like the bouncer of my own uterus. I was ready to turn on all the lights and kick that baby out. “Time to wrap it up. I don’t care where you go but you can’t stay here.”
I finally had a C-section. As I was wheeled into the operating room one of the nurses said, “Hey, it’s Hillary Clinton!” and I answered by barfing all over her. Full circle.
Archie was born Saturday, October 25, at 6:09 P.M., just about when we would have been getting ready to do our first run-through for “Weekend Update.” He was, and remains, perfect. My whole world cracked open and has thankfully never been the same since. I watched Saturday Night Live that night, drugged to the gills. I watched scenes that I had rehearsed hours before. I watched Maya and Kenan sing a song to me, and Seth tap my spot at the “Update” desk and tell me they loved me. I cried and cried and then laughed and laughed. I added a few more years to my life. I kissed Archie’s giant head, which was shaped like a beautiful balloon. Today we wear the same size sombrero. He is six.
HELLO, EVERYONE. MY NAME IS SETH MEYERS and I will be writing this next chapter so that Amy can take a break. It is very hard to write a book. I haven’t written one myself but I know it’s very hard because every time I have seen Amy in the past year she has greeted me by saying, “Hello,” quickly followed by, “It is very hard to write a book.” At one of these meet-ups I offered to write a chapter for her so she could rest. She said, “Yes please.” After I complete this favor for Amy I will only owe her one thousand more favors. I am not unique in my great debt to her. Most of Amy’s friends owe her around one thousand favors. She never holds it over you though. She’s not that kind of person.
I’m going to write about the night that Amy gave birth to her first son, Archie.
Before I get there, a bit of background. I first saw Amy Poehler perform in Chicago at a theater called ImprovOlympic in the midnineties. That theater is now called “iO” because the Olympics threatened to sue. The International Olympic Committee was worried people would walk into a one-hundred-seat theater on the corner of Clark and Addison and wonder why no one was jumping over hurdles.
The night I first saw Amy, she and the other performers were playing an improv game called “The Dream.” She asked for a volunteer to come onstage and tell her about their day. I raised my hand and she picked me. My first conversation with Amy was in front of an audience: me in a chair, her standing beside me. She was charming, funny, sweet, and sharp, and I left thinking, “I would like to be her friend.”
The next time I saw Amy perform was with Tina Fey in the same theater. They were workshopping a show called Women of Color. I would learn later that it was the only performance of that show. Amy would move to New York soon after and Tina would quickly follow. There weren’t a lot of people in the audience that night and for a while I thought seeing Amy and Tina perform in Chicago right before they left and got famous would be the most interesting thing that ever happened to me. In my mind it was like seeing the Beatles in Hamburg. And much, I’m sure, like someone who saw the Beatles in Hamburg, I talked about it so much that my friends eventually said, “Genug.”
At this point, my relationship to Amy was the same as everyone else’s. I was a fan.
I auditioned for SNL in 2001. My manager called me to tell me I had been hired. He then listed the other new cast members, one of whom was Amy. My first thought after hanging up the phone wasn’t “Oh my god, I’m going to be on SNL,” it was “Oh my god, I might get to be friends with Amy Poehler.”
I am happy to say we were friends right away.
I won’t bore you with the details of our many years of friendship and collaboration on the show for no other reason than it is likely Amy has dedicated dozens of pages to that topic in this very book. I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo of me graces the cover of this book. To take up any more time talking about it would be redundant.
Instead I will pick up the action years later on the Saturday before the Saturday Amy became a mother. Josh Brolin was hosting the show that week, but this fact would soon be rendered a footnote when Sarah Palin agreed to do a cameo.
In 2008, under intense pressure from the comedians’ lobby, Senator John McCain selected Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. This brought much good fortune to SNL in the form of Tina Fey’s mimicry. However, the fact that Governor Palin would actually be appearing on the show was not immediately greeted with cheers.
It wasn’t that we weren’t excited to have her on; we just didn’t know what to do with her once she got there. When you perform a sketch about a person when they’re not in the room you have a great deal more freedom than when they are in the room. It was understood that we’d have to write a sketch with Tina and the governor, and we did. It was a soup of moving parts; Alec Baldwin, Lorne, and Mark Wahlberg made cameos, there were some jokes, and it went well.
Sensing that the audience might want more, on Friday night Lorne suggested using Governor Palin a second time, on “Weekend Update.” We sat in our weekly joke read kicking around ideas that failed to inspire any enthusiasm. For a laugh, someone said the governor could do a rap, perhaps starting with the line “I’m Sarah Palin and I’m here to say . . .” Someone else suggested that the governor could get cold feet and Amy could do the rap instead. I don’t remember if either of these ideas was meant to be real but I do remember that Amy’s eyes went wide with glee and she left the room with a notebook in hand. The next time I saw her she was on the phone with the wardrobe department barking orders like mission control trying to get a shuttle back. “I need Eskimo suits for Fred and Andy, a snowmobile suit for Jason, and a moose suit for Bobby.”
Take a second here. Go back and watch the Palin Rap one more time. Maybe you forgot how convincing and believable Sarah Palin was when she said she wasn’t going to do the piece; maybe you forgot exactly how pregnant Amy was when she stood up from behind the desk; you probably remember that Amy was good but you likely forgot exactly how good. It is a performance without artifice. She’s not play-rapping. She’s rapping. I still get goose bumps when I think of Amy screaming, “I’m an animal and I’m bigger than you!” And the whole time she was doing it, for every single second of it, there was a little person sloshing (that’s the correct medical term, yes? Sloshing?) around in her belly.
That person, Archie, is getting older every day, and soon he will be aware enough to watch and appreciate what his mother was doing on national television the week before he was born. When I want to smile, I think of that.
A week later, on the Friday before the Saturday that Amy became a mother, the entire cast stayed late to block a sketch called “The Barack Obama Variety Half Hour.” On a normal week, the last piece rehearsed was usually a smaller piece with a handful of cast members cursing their luck that they had to stay at the studio until eleven P.M. the night before a show. This time, having everyone there together was a luxury and a delight.
While we waited for the cameras to set up, Maya and Fred started a bit pretending they were onstage for the seventy-fifth anniversary of SNL. Moving slowly and speaking softly, they delighted us with wooden award-show banter wherein they tried to remember the lines to their old sketches. Bill Hader took the stage pretending to be his own son and gave a speech about how much his “pops” had talked about working on the show before he died.
We were all enjoying ourselves that night, but no one more than Amy. She was laughing the hardest but that wasn’t surprising. In my time at SNL no one was quicker or more gracious with a laugh than Amy—never more so than at the weekly table read, when it was needed most. When a new cast member or writer had a piece bombing to such silence that you could almost hear their pores expelling sweat, you could always count on Amy to give them a laugh. Though to be fair, it was less a laugh and more of a cackle. The writer Alex Baze described it as the sound one hears when running over a raven’s foot with a shopping cart. It is, without exaggeration, one of my favorite sounds on earth.
We all headed home around midnight, in a great mood.
A quick but necessary tangent: For years Amy has called me “Coco” and I have called her “Moses.” These nicknames sprung from a “Weekend Update” joke about a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco, who had escaped from a zoo in Texas. I don’t remember the joke but I do remember that we laughed every time we said “a six-foot-tall camel named Moses and his tiny pony sidekick, Coco.”
At three A.M. or so on Saturday morning Amy texted me. “Water broke, Coco! You’re gonna do great!”
And that text is pretty much all you need to know about Amy. Instead of focusing on any of her fear, her excitement, or the anticipation that comes with giving birth for the first time, she sent me words of encouragement. And when I went out to do “Update” without her I was glad she had. I was nervous and lonely but I remembered that “You’re gonna do great!” and felt better. Amy is rarely wrong.
Doing comedy for a living is, in a lot of ways, like a pony and a camel trying to escape from the zoo. It’s a ridiculous endeavor and has a low probability of success, but most importantly, it is way easier if you’re with a friend.
So that’s my chapter. I am going to shake Amy awake now so she can continue with the hard work of writing a book for all of us. I hope she got some rest!
* * *