Over, Under, Through

I used to listen to Tina Fey’s Bossypants, every morning when I walked to work. The walk took me past Boys and Girls High School, under the overpass at Atlantic Avenue, past a very old clapboard church that everyone liked to pretend had been standing for hundreds of years but I knew, because the job I was walking towards required me to know, had only been built maybe fifty years before. I listened to that memoir so many times that I had it memorized. There was something extremely soothing in her familiar voice, in the breaks for laugh lines, in the cadence of comedy writing, that it was easier to focus on the comfort than in all the ways the jokes didn’t especially land.

In the book, Fey has a bit about trying to figure out how to navigate the famously chaotic work environment of Saturday Night Live. She talks about this with a hint of exasperation, as if it is even an affront to ask, which I suppose is the result of being asked the same question over and over again in interviews for over a decade. I could. try to paraphrase it, but here it is in full:

“My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.”

This is not a post dunking on Tina Fey, just to be clear. I think what I want to talk about here is the disconnect felt in a piece of culture, how you can nonsensically wish you could connect with it while still knowing that you fundamentally can’t and don’t and in fact have questions. I have only been fishing a few times in my life, but I imagine it is like when you tie a lead weight to sink a fishing line and it grazes against the rocks on a river’s bed and you feel that disturbance, faintly, on the tension of your line.

Which is to say, even as I heard Fey confidently read this advice, and knew where the applause line was supposed to land, I couldn’t always stick it. But I listened to it over and over again, anyways.

It’s terrible advice, by the way. I mean, it only works for you on a short term level, and not on a longer term in a terrible job. It takes the same sentiment that many before have said—I’m thinking of Toni Morrison’s famous admonition that “racism is a distraction”— and somehow flattens it. To her credit, Fey doesn’t list racism as a thing to be got around and through—like all good writers, she is very careful to ground a personal essay in her experience. But avoidance is not generally great for the worker’s soul, something I learned the hard way. A few years after that book came out, I took a job with a much bigger company, so different than the non-profits and government agencies I’d worked for up until then. I underestimated what I was walking into. I thought if a company was aiming to turn a profit, certainly they wouldn’t entertain the mild dysfunction and intense personal bonding that had happened in previous jobs. I was very wrong, but I thought the way through it was to play that obstacle course, instead of continually asking myself if this was somewhere I wished to be.

When I first started writing this post, I thought I wanted to explore the ways Fey’s comedic writing have faltered over the years—how her understanding of feminism and drive to satire has gone from the delightfully super specific jokes on 30 Rock to the wincing attempts of later years. I think later-stage Tina Fey is perhaps best summed up in the storyline from a later Kimmy Schmidt season, where in the final scene, after being asked to confront her white privilege, Kimmy tells a bunch of Asian women nail technicians being exploited by their boss that she has, hands down, had a worse life than them and they all agree.

I hate the word “problematic” because it has lost all meaning and also some of my favorite works of art and all of my favorite people in life are “problematic.” In the modern usage of the word, everyone is and so the word is no longer a good descriptor.

But what do you do with artists whose work has always had the seeds of their sourness? It’s difficult to even talk about because as soon as you do, someone is eager to tell you how they knew all along that so and so was trash because they are more sensitively attuned to such things than you could possibly be. And then the contrarian in me wishes to say, “I guess I am also just trash then”, instead of having a longer conversation.

You cannot over, under, through these things. To do so would be to miss the point, I think. I don’t think you should be forced to engage with art that does not move you and that you also, personally, feel to cause you or your community harm. But what about that other area, of things you find some resonance in, but then the sound sinks and you hit gravel again?