We were all sort of lost after the low moment of Donald Trump‘s presidency (is it? we don’t even know anymore), when he winked at the Nazis whose Charlottesville rally claimed the life of a counterprotester.
So Tina Fey stopped by Saturday Night Live just to deliver a hilarious rant about how all this insanity made us all feel.
Unfortunately, many people weren’t happy with what appeared to be the message of her manic diatribe.
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So when David Letterman complimented her on the controversial bit during her episode of his new Netflix talk show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, she thanked him. But she also said it wasn’t perfect:
“Here’s what was wrong with it.”
In the Weekend Update monologue, she jokingly suggested stuffing the horrible feelings with cake — something many viewed as a call to step aside and let Nazis win.
She told Letterman she feels she “screwed up” with the ending:
“You try your best, you try to have your eyes open, you try to be so mindful. But it’s also a fast-moving train. So I felt like a gymnast who did a very solid routine and broke her ankle on the landing.”
She landed by literally telling “sane Americans” not to show up and “let these morons scream into the empty air.”
She explained to Letterman it was those “last two or three sentences of the piece” where she missed the mark:
“The implication is that I was telling people to give up and not be active and to not fight. That was not my intention, you know, obviously.”
She says she wasn’t trying to tell people to do nothing!
“The idea was just like a Souther Poverty Law Center thing of, sometimes, if you feed these trolls… if you take the air out of it, they disappear faster. And I just didn’t want any more people, young people or old people in the crowd… I didn’t want any more people to get hurt.”
What should she have said then?
“I wish if I could put one sentence back digitally, I would say to people, ‘Fight them in every way except the way that they want.’
But I didn’t write that at the time. I wrote it two days later when I was pacing in my house, and that’s the nature of SNL.”
You may have noticed this wasn’t exactly an apology. She noted:
“I’ve decided the culture of apology is not for me… So what I will do is I promise, I swear to God, anybody who was mad at me, I hear you and I will learn, but I’m also not going to stop trying.”
Not much more we can do than that!
If you haven’t seen the bit, watch and imagine the new final line (below)!
[Image via NBC.]
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