Do we like Tina Fey?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record on LGBTQ+ people and women, a real fundraising effort, and a public apology for the blackface episodes, with some old jokes still criticised.
Tina Fey is an SNL alum who went on to make her name as a writer and performer, and in 2010 she picked up the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. She was only the third woman to get it. So she's not exactly a newcomer you need to vet from scratch.
The messy bit of her history is race. In June 2020, Fey and co-creator Robert Carlock wrote to streaming platforms asking for four 30 Rock episodes to be pulled, at least three of which featured actors in blackface. Fey said she now understood that intent was no free pass, and apologised for the pain caused. Critics said at the time that she had more work to do, pointing to other portrayals in her shows.
The other stoush was her 2017 Weekend Update bit after Charlottesville. Fey told David Letterman in 2018 that she'd got the ending wrong, because it could be read as telling people to disengage rather than fight. That's the sort of public backflip you want to see from someone, and she did it unprompted.
On the harm check, nothing turned up of Fey campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no conspiracy-theory slide either. At her Mark Twain Prize speech she joked about the rise of conservative women in politics being bad news for any lesbian who wants to marry her partner. That's a gag aimed at the politics, not at gay people. We found nothing on who she keeps working with that raises a flag, though the search for her recent projects came back thin.
Lately she's been in the news for reflecting on her own past. In April 2026 she said she'd been on the wrong side of some political jokes at SNL, and said she was pretty dumb. In June she had a go on Jimmy Fallon's show at Trump's disastrous 250th anniversary concert. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as a fair crack at a public event or just more late-night point scoring.
The good stuff is real. In May 2020 she hosted the Rise Up New York! virtual benefit with Robin Hood and iHeartMedia, which raised more than $115 million for New Yorkers hit by COVID-19. The money was earmarked for food, shelter, cash assistance, mental health services, legal services and education.