Remembering Carrie Fisher’s Guest Appearance on 30 Rock

When I found out that Carrie Fisher died, one of the first things I thought of was her guest appearance on 30 Rock.

When I heard that she was going to be on the show, I was excited and had high hopes. TV and movie appearances by her are rare compared to other movie stars of her caliber, so the idea of her on one of my favorite comedy shows was great.

The premise of the episode was that Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) gets disillusioned with the modern comedy world, so she decides to visit one of her comedy heroes, Rosemary Howard (Carrie Fisher), an older writer whose heyday was the 1970s, when, in Liz’s view, comedy was more daring and progressive.

When Fisher first appears onscreen, it’s great. She adds a life to the show that it sometimes lacked and always needed. The 30 Rock style was one of subtle, deadpan dialogue, but edited like a cartoon. The humor often came from the tight visual punctuation as from the characters. This was funny and great, but it could get tiresome. That was why the show needed Tracy Morgan to bring it to life sometimes. His manic and freeform (even if he wasn’t improvising his lines, it always seemed like he was) style required the camera to linger on him longer than it did on others. A lot of 30 Rock’s hilarity came from the fact that the show could barely contain him.

Fisher, like Morgan, forced the show to play catch-up with her distinctive personality. But her episode, despite her excellent performance, also highlighted some of the worst things about the show, as well as modern comedy and modern gender politics.

When Liz Lemon gets off the subway to visit Fisher’s character, the neighborhood is called “Little Chechnya.” It’s not a subtle joke . It’s an obvious reference to how dangerous the neighborhood is, and how “serious” people like Liz Lemon don’t live in “bad” neighborhoods, but “unserious” people like Rosemary Howard do. It’s another one of 30 Rock’s many jokes at the expense of vulnerable people. Like the show’s many other jokes about immigrants and sex workers, it is less about making the audience laugh and more about Fey and her writing team reassuring themselves that people who have difficult lives in America are irreparably damaged and worthless.

If you haven’t seen the episode, you can probably imagine how it turns out: Carrie Fisher’s character adds a lot of life to the show, says a lot of funny stuff, but then Liz, and the show, decide that she’s crazy and stupid and abruptly discard her on the streets of “Little Chechnya.”

When I saw the episode, I was in my early twenties. I remember being vaguely disappointed in the episode, just like I was vaguely disappointed by all of Fey’s Dead Stripper Jokes. But, at 23, I still had no career nor had I managed to hold down a full-time day job, and I always suspected that maybe the most cynical people were right.

Watching 30 Rock at that age — especially the Carrie Fisher episode — reaffirmed something that my insecure, pessimistic side already thought: that, despite all evidence to the contrary, women who are neither housewives nor wealthy glass-ceiling breakers are insane and not to be taken seriously. When they cry, it’s not serious. When they yell, it’s not serious. When they work, it’s not serious.

If there was an overall message to Carrie Fisher’s body of work — her performances, her scripts, and her books — it was the opposite of that. That women — and people, for that matter — who appear to be on the unserious sidelines of life are… people. Not that they appear to be worthless but are secretly heroes but that they’re no more or less serious than anybody else.

In the end, I can’t think of much else to say other than that Carrie Fisher was great, and that when she died, I thought of the time that she managed to add humanity to the reactionary trash compactor that was 30 Rock.