Time & Perspective Quote by Tina Fey

The line lands because it catches a working creative in the act of toggling between grind and glory. Fey isn’t selling the myth of showbiz; she’s puncturing it with the most unglamorous truth possible: a job, even the dream job, is still a job. “Most of the time” is the operative phrase. It implies a calendar packed with rewrites, late nights, sketches that bomb in rehearsal, and the constant low-grade panic of making something funny on a deadline. Coolness, in her telling, isn’t a steady state. It’s a brief flare you notice only when you stop moving.

The quote also carries a sly class-of-worker subtext: the real flex isn’t celebrity, it’s being employed in a machine that demands output. Fey frames “Saturday Night Live” as both cultural institution and workplace, the way nurses talk about a hospital or journalists talk about a newsroom. That’s why the little burst of self-recognition hits: “every now and then” you remember you’re inside a famous engine that millions watch, argue about, and use as a shorthand for American comedy.

Context matters, too. SNL has always been mythologized as a launching pad, a pressure cooker, a comedy boot camp. Fey’s joke trims the legend down to human scale. She’s letting the audience peek behind the curtain, then reminding you the curtain exists because people are too busy pulling it to admire it.