A Quote by Tina Fey

After college, I knew I wanted to work in comedy, so the first thing I did was go to where the comedy was. I moved from Charlottesville to Chicago, because that's where The Second City and Improv Olympics are. You have to go wherever you need to go to study what interests you.
What brought me to L.A. was work! I moved to Chicago after college - I went to Kalamazoo - did my nerd thing, graduated, and moved to Chicago to pursue improv.
My first improv was Second City in Chicago. Before that, I worked at - with a partner, doing comedy sketches.
I joined an improv group in college, which was a lot of fun. After I graduated, I moved to Chicago to try to get into the Second City.
I moved to Chicago when I was 28, and I wasn't completely idealistic about going to Second City and making a living from comedy, but I knew it would be great for the resume.
I love comedy and did a lot of comedy in college. I was in an improv comedy group with my friends.
I did a lot of commercial and theater work when I got out of school and was living in Dallas, and I moved to Chicago to go through the Second City Conservatory Program.
This whole 8 for $8 tour, I handpicked every city, every market on this tour, I handpicked myself. I wanted to go to New York, I wanted to go to Baltimore, I wanted to go to Philly, I wanted to go to Chicago, I wanted to go to Atlanta, of course I wanted to go Memphis, I wanted to go to Oakland.
Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.
More than just romantic comedy, I like romances: drama romance, romance comedy, comedy romance. I also go to the movies to escape. There are times when you go to learn, when you go to be moved, you go to be transported, and there are really times when you go to escape. And I personally escape more happily into a romance than I do violent movies.
I was not one of those people who wanted to be a comedian when I was growing up. I liked comedy, but didn't know it was something you could do for a living. I actually wanted to be an attorney. I did do things on the side like improv and sketch comedy, but law was my focus. I was a very bookish, academic kid. When I got out of college, I was really unhappy. I had a great job that I should have loved, yet I was miserable. I slowly realized that was because I wasn't performing. So I just tried stand-up and fell in love with it after one performance.
When I moved to New York City to go college, my mother said, 'If you want to be recognized, you need to go out to a club.' Because we didn't have computers. We didn't have social media. We didn't even have cellphones. So you had to go out to be recognized.
And writing comedy and it really taught me how to kind of like craft jokes, it sounds like weird but really focus on crafting jokes and trying to make the writing really sharp. At the same time I did improv comedy in college, and that helped with understanding the performance aspect of comedy, you know, because it's different when you improv something vs. when you write it and they're both kind of part of my process now.
I had, like, two goals in my career: One was to try to get into 'Second City.' When I moved to Chicago, my goal was to try to work at 'Second City.' And beyond that, my goal was to make enough money as an actor to not do anything else but act, not have to go and wait tables again.
I did sketch comedy, but I never did improv. So I've just tried to learn as I go.
I was kind of in an experimental phase with The Disposable Rappers. This is boring to me, because it's true, but when I was a sophomore in high school, I visited my sister in college and saw an improv troupe, and that was a genuine moment for me. It was an actual "Aha!" moment. After I saw that, I said, "I want to do comedy." So The Disposable Rappers started doing improv in addition to rapping, and when I went to college, I very specifically went saying "I want to join a comedy group."
If there's one regret I have of my time in comedy it's that I really I was so obsessed with improv for so many years and I exclusively did improv for the first 6 years or 7 years. I was doing comedy and then I started doing solo work and stand up, a bit of writing, making videos, and really going into it on that end.
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