Actor Alec Baldwin has hosted Saturday Night Live a record 17 times, but if you ask him, he doesn't think he's funny. In an excerpt adapted from his upcoming book, Nevertheless: A Memoir, published Tuesday in Vanity Fair, Baldwin said his first stint on Saturday Night Live in 1990 made him realize what it really takes to be funny:
Whenever anyone told me I was funny, I was reminded of when people in high school tell someone that he can hit a fastball or shoot a basketball well. Then he gets to college and everyone is big and fast and strong. After that, if he turns professional, everyone around him seems inhuman. They're the biggest, fastest, and strongest. That's what Saturday Night Live was like for me. The worst idea the writers there came up with was funnier than the best thing I could think up. My definition of funny changed while working with them. If people think I can say a line in a way that gets a laugh, I'll take it. But I'm not funny. The SNL writers are funny. Tina Fey is funny. Conan O'Brien is funny. You're only funny if you can write the material. What I do is acting. [Alec Baldwin, via Vanity Fair]
Baldwin admitted Fey's funniness swept him off his feet the first time he laid eyes on her. "When I first met Tina Fey — beautiful and brunette, smart and funny, by turns smug and diffident and completely uninterested in me or anything I had to say — I had the same reaction that I'm sure many men and women have: I fell in love," Baldwin wrote.
Read the rest at Vanity Fair.
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