“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.”

Peter remembers a drawing that Tina made when she was about seven: it showed people walking down the street holding hands with wedges of Swiss cheese, and the caption read, “What a friend we have in cheeses!”

Lorne Michaels waves off Fey’s classification of herself as a square, and compares it to the tendency of the show’s first cast to claim they were rebels. “This cast is young. They’re ambitious. They pride themselves on being less self-destructive,” he said. “But we didn’t pride ourselves on being self-destructive in the seventies. People were experimenting with freedom. The spirit was more fraternal than maternal.” He added, “I think that being geeky is just another way of being Holden Caulfield or the Graduate. Comedy people are always outsiders.”