Learning From Performers’ 50th Anniversary: Tina Fey and Robert Carlock ’95 in Conversation at Sanders Theatre

“Both improv and SNL — the biggest gift they give you is just constant failure,” said Tina Fey.

On Jan. 30 at Sanders Theatre, the Office for the Arts celebrated the 50th anniversary of its visiting artist program, Learning from Performers, through a befittingly witty conversation between one of Hollywood’s most iconic comedy duos: actress, writer, and comedian Fey and screenwriter and showrunner Robert M. Carlock ’95.

The event opened with a speech from Jerold Kayden ’75, the founder of LFP and the Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Kayden shared the program’s origins before showcasing some of the program’s 802 featured artists, from actor Robert Redford to composer Quincy Jones to more recently, “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Fiona Coffey, the director of the OFA, introduced Fey and Carlock — who were then serenaded on stage by The Harvard Opportunes in their a cappella rendition of the theme song of Fey’s and Carlock’s absurdist comedy “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

Fey and Carlock traded jokes and jabs throughout their entire conversation, first at the OFA’s seemingly unintuitive acronym, and soon after, at the name drops in their first “adult” meetings for their NBC satirical sitcom “30 Rock.”

Carlock quickly brought up some of the requirements of a comedy career in his conversation with Fey.

“Doing what we do, particularly, what you do as an actress — which is its own kind of mental illness — there has to be this combination of what we call benign religiosity and a little imp of the perverse,” Carlock said.

Fey traced her “imp of the perverse” back to the sarcastic, suspicious culture of her adolescent environment in Delaware County, Philadelphia. Moreover, she attributed her “delusion” to Chicago’s Second City comedy group and growing up somehow both as the youngest child and only child.

Fey described her requirements for a successful joke to Carlock.

“Oh, jokes are just surprises,” Fey said.

The duo reminisced on their time as writers on “Saturday Night Live.” They emphasized the strengths of the friendly competition inherent to comedic writing, namely through the ominous “see you at the table” often said by a writer to another covering a similar topic. The table was a proving ground for Fey and Carlock alike, where public failure was indeed feared but ultimately inevitable.

The two skipped forward in time, smoothly segueing from discussing Fey’s deceptive “Damar Varnish” shirt — meant to look like a Harvard shirt with a blazer on — to discussing Fey’s departure from “Saturday Night Live” and the eventual creation of Fey and Carlock’s brainchild, “30 Rock.”

Fey and Carlock furthered their comedic back-and-forth while running through their collaborations. They showed one clip of the “30 Rock” Season 1 finale “Hiatus” where a doctor enters the scene drenched in blood and very quickly subverts audience expectations.

“What? This? No, no. I was at a costume party earlier this evening, and the hostess’s dog attacked me so I had to stab it,” Carlock said. “Make the real silly, and make the silly real.”

Despite the sheer amount of jokes in that one scene — and in many of Fey’s and Carlock’s works together — it never came at the expense of telling coherent, poignant stories.

Next, Fey and Carlock showed a clip from “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and even a clip from their recent NBC sports sitcom “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins,” starring Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe. The show premiered this year on Jan. 18.

The comedic duo emphasized that disagreement on what jokes would and wouldn’t land was not only normal but even strengthened their partnership.

They also treaded ground on reusing jokes, notably through their montage of every time they have used some variation of the joke “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.” The joke, originally a satirical rendition of Meryl Streep’s line from her 2002 film “Adaptation,” spanned decades, and its compilation played much to Sanders Theatre’s audience’s delight.

Carlock and Fey closed their conversation with a Q&A on topics ranging from the difficulties of transforming mediums in art to the influence of “Saturday Night Live” on their television comedy to lastly, how well their college experiences prepared them for their careers.

“The extent that Harvard creates a community of wonderful weirdos of all kinds — it was absolutely instrumental,” Carlock said.

—Staff writer Yassin T. Mohamedy can be reached at [email protected].