Tiny Fey's revolution

TV & MOVIES | Ex-'SNL' star now one of comedy's leading ladies

You've heard of glass houses. Well, Tina Fey lives in a house of glasses.

"There are four or five pairs everywhere," says the Queen of Comedy. "I can never find them. Sometimes I bring ones home from the set and half of them don't even have prescriptions in them because they're just props. I went and got an eye exam the other day and my doctor even said, 'These are props, Tina, right?' But I am aware that I look a little better in them than without them."

Fey doesn't really care about what she's wearing on her face, because the 36-year-old writer-director-actress, is changing the face of comedy.

"Yes, I'm leading the revolution!" she says sarcastically. "Everyday, I talk about that revolution. Then I go to my TV series and we figure out how to keep the revolution going. No, the truth is I just think about my character and what stories I want to tell."

Fey recently was on the cover of Vanity Fair for leading the new wave of women in comedy. "There are more women obviously than were even included in the article," she says. "I love that there are so many women succeeding in comedy. It doesn't put that individual pressure on anyone to be the face of ladies in comedy."

Fey plays Liz Lemon on the hit NBC series "30 Rock," and also stars in "Baby Mama," opening Friday. She plays Kate Holbrook, a successful, single businesswoman who always planned on having a baby. She discovers that she has fertility problems and hires a working-class woman (Amy Poehler) to be her surrogate.

Fey says that she enjoyed being a bit hands-off with the project at the beginning. " 'Baby Mama' was really the first time I ever had the luxury of someone saying, 'I want to write this for you. Do you want to be in it?' So that was a great, great gift."

"Baby Mama" is a great role for Fey, who could riff forever on motherhood. She and husband Jeff Richmond are the proud parents of Alice who was born in September of 2005. "My daughter likes to watch people get their makeup done," she says. "When I come home she goes, 'You got makeup? I like your makeup. Who did your eyes?' I have a very girly girl on my hands.

"She also likes the snack table, but who doesn't?" she says with a laugh. "Now, I'm back at work and it's tough because my daughter is old enough to say, 'No, you not go to work! You not go outside.' "

Fey studied drama at the University of Virginia and then went to Chicago to study with Second City, where "you're trained to improvise and to take your ideas from stories in the news that are important to you. There you're taught that you can really affect change with your improvisation and with sketch comedy.

"And so I think sometimes after that you have to kind of re-learn that you can also be silly as part of your comedy," she says. "But I think people from Second City make great actors when they come in because they're used to working as an ensemble."

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