AVC: Were you a TV junkie as a kid?
TF: Yeah, I watched a lot of TV.
AVC: Your parents didn't mind?
TF: Not so much. We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch The Flintstones if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of The Honeymooners. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old Honeymooners. So there was some discerning taste. And we certainly did other stuff, but yeah, we watched a lot of TV.
AVC: Had you always intended to go into comedy?
TF: For a pretty long time. Probably from middle school on. I remember me and one other girl in my 8th-grade class got to do an independent study because we finished the regular material early, and she chose to do hers on communism, and I chose to do mine on comedy. We kept bumping into each other at the card catalog. The only book I could find was Joe Franklin's Encyclopedia Of Comedians, which stopped in the '50s, so I read up on guys like Joe E. Brown.
AVC: "The Big-Mouth Comedian."
TF: Yeah, huge mouth.
AVC: Were your initial intentions to become a writer or a performer?
TF: I think everyone's intentions are to become a performer at first. But by the time I was in high school and college, I discovered that I liked writing and that I was probably a little better at it. And then when I went to Chicago, and I got to be an improviser and do Second City, that was the best blending of the two, because I was creating my own material and then performing it.
AVC: You graduated college in 1992 and were writing for SNL five years later. Is it common for someone to rise through the comedy ranks so fast?
TF: It sounds fast when you say it like that. I graduated in '92, and then I went to Chicago and started doing Second City. I took a class there for a couple of years, then I toured for a little less than a year, and then I was on the main stage there for about a year and half before moving to SNL in '97.
AVC: And then head writer two years later?
TF: Yes.
AVC: So is that common?
TF: I don't know that it is. It's funny, because when I'd hire staff writers at SNL, sometimes we'd hire Harvard kids where this was their first job, next to working at some golf course during the summer. They come right out of school. My friend Mike Schur, who's at The Office now, he and I interviewed for a job the same day. That's when we met. I was 27, and he was 21. I remember thinking, "Man, I'm an old lady around here." It's a young person's gig.
AVC: When you come out of college with the intention of becoming a comedy writer, is there a network of people who all know each other and know what jobs are available out there?
TF: I just knew I wanted to get to Chicago to study with Second City. The Chicago improv-comedy world is one big outlet. In L.A. it's the Groundlings, and Upright Citizen's Brigade in L.A. and New York. There's a bunch of different roads. You might be a stand-up, or a Harvard grad, or a Northwestern grad, or an improviser… those are the most common roads.
AVC: Did you ever do stand-up?
TF: At a very amateurish level in Chicago. Very safe open-mic nights. More like coffeehouses than actual comedy clubs. But I really admire stand-up, and I think I would have loved to learn how to do it. I think it's terrifying and thrilling. A really cool thing to do. It's a dying art, in a way.
AVC: It's sort of a distinct art form from being a comic actor. There's a great Mitch Hedberg joke about how when you get really good at comedy, they want you to be an actor. "You're a really good chef. Can you farm?"
TF: Right. It's a separate, special skill. And so many people get into it just to get opportunities as an actor. That's why, when you look at people like Colin Quinn… that's their art form. The art form they want to master and are so brilliant at. That's what I think is cool.
AVC: What is the difference, from a craft perspective, between writing a screenplay, writing a sitcom, and writing a sketch?
TF: Of the three, sketches are the most different, because you're not dealing with story at all, and it will kill you if you try. With the other two, you have to tell a story in a long form or a super-short form. When I wrote Mean Girls, I went into it knowing, "Okay, I don't know anything about story; I really have to try to learn." I did what everyone does: I read books. Same thing here with 30 Rock. Luckily, I'm surrounded with a writing staff that has more experience in the sitcom form. It's a good mix, because they know how to break a story into a half-hour, but at the same time, we're avoiding bad habits or getting into a rut, because a few of us have less experience and aren't locked into any specific way of doing things.
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