Robert Carlock ’95 met Tina Fey at Saturday Night Live in the 1990s—an environment known for relentless competition.
“My memory of you was, I was intimidated,” Carlock told Fey during a conversation at Harvard on January 30 to mark the 50th anniversary of Learning from Performers, a lecture series put on by the University’s Office for the Arts. On SNL’s writing staff, they fought week after week to produce comedy sketches that, out of a pool of several dozen, would be among the handful that would make it into each episode.
“You were so prolific, and hit that sweet spot,” Carlock said during the discussion, titled “Creative Mischief and the Art of Being Funny Together.” “It was really kind of annoying.”
Thus launched a decades-long creative partnership that has spanned SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment and TV shows including 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. During their discussion in Sanders Theatre, Fey and Carlock (who began his comedy writing career at the Harvard Lampoon), shared lessons that emerged from those projects—on effective partnerships, the value of bombing, and the nuts and bolts of writing an effective joke or comedic set piece.
“Jokes are just surprises, most of the time” Carlock told the crowd.
“Both improv and SNL,” Fey said, “the biggest gift they give you is the constant failure and the feeling of like, okay, I failed so deeply and I survived.” She wore a T-shirt that, peeking from under a blazer, seemed to say “Harvard,” but when fully in view read “DEMAR VARNISH”—one of a line of misleading Ivy League-style T-shirts crafted by TV writer Meredith Scardino. (The Princeton shirt says “BETTER SINCE TOE SURGERY.”)
Working at SNL, Fey and Carlock honed a shared comedic sensibility born out of of-the-moment topicality, sheer volume, and leaning into what Carlock called “benign grandiosity and the imp of the perverse.” All three elements shaped 30 Rock, a show whose rapid-fire joke delivery and satiric metacommentary became the duo’s calling card.
Writing the show, collaboration often meant egging each other on to new heights of absurdity, they told the audience. As an example, the two shared a clip of the character Dr. Leo Spaceman (Chris Parnell) giving an increasingly implausible, disturbing explanation of his being covered in blood.
“This is one of my favorite jokes we ever did,” Carlock said, recalling he and Fey writing it at a desk, daring each other to take it ever further.
At other times, collaboration meant sharpening and editing the germ of an idea. In their latest project, The Rise and Fall of Reggie Dinkins, which will debut later this month on NBC, Tracy Morgan plays a retired football star who hires a disgraced filmmaker (Daniel Radcliffe) to direct a documentary aimed at boosting his NFL Hall of Fame chances.
During shooting, it became clear that a key scene, meant to reveal why Radcliffe’s character had fallen from grace in Hollywood, wasn’t working. “He went viral for this embarrassing moment on a Marvel set where he lost his mind,” Carlock said. But the scene felt unformed, and it wasn’t hitting with focus groups.
“I thought, we might need to make it clear why this little documentarian was in over his head,” said Fey, the show’s executive producer. “Why did he fail?”
Her solution: “Just rewrite it and make it all about the tennis balls that they use to track people on motion capture.”
It worked. The reshoot, with Radcliffe having a nervous breakdown over tennis balls representing CGI moons, spaceships, and actual tennis balls connected far better with both TV test groups and the Sanders audience.
“So much of collaboration is trying not only to amuse each other, but to ask the most annoying questions—does that track, could this be better?” Carlock said. “It’s torture in the process, but it does ultimately lead to a better product.”
Fey and Carlock, who also answered student questions and were serenaded with an a capella version of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt theme song by the Harvard Opportunes, were the latest in a long line of cultural icons who have come to the University through the Learning from Performers series. Founded in 1975, the program’s early guests were primarily from the music world, including composer Stephen Sondheim and jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughn. In the five decades since, speakers have ranged from the playwright Arthur Miller to actors Matt Damon and Susan Sarandon.
For its 50th season, the program will continue to highlight fruitful partnerships like Fey’s and Carlock’s, Office for the Arts director Fiona Coffey said in her introduction of the pair.
“One thing we've learned in this past 50 years is the boldest, most lasting art is almost never a solo act,” Coffey said. “It’s deeply, gloriously collaborative.”
