Tina Fey regrets the way she ended a Weekend Update bit she did for Saturday Night Live in August, after a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned violent, leaving one counter-protester dead and 19 others injured.
“It’s literally within the last, I think, two or three sentences of the piece that I chumped it, I screwed up, and the implication was that I was telling people to give up and not be active, and to not fight,” Fey told David Letterman during an interview on his Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
“That was not my intention,” the 47-year-old continued, adding that she had simply wanted to help ensure the situation didn’t lead to further acts of violence.
Toward the end of Fey’s appearance on SNL’s Weekend Update: Summer Edition, she advised people to “find a local business you support … order a cake with an American flag on it and just eat it” instead of “participating in screaming matches and potential violence.”
“In conclusion, I really want to encourage all good, sane Americans to treat these rallies this weekend like the opening of a thoughtful movie with two female leads: Don’t show up,” she added.
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“If I could put one sentence back digitally, I would say fight them in every way except the way that they want, but I didn’t write that at the time. I wrote that two days later as I was pacing in my house, and that’s the nature of SNL” Fey explained.
“I wanted to help, and I chumped it,” she continued, adding that it wasn’t going to stop her from trying to address difficult political moments in the future.
“You have to be an athlete about it,” Fey said. “Yup, I broke my ankle on the landing, next time we try again.”
