Wonder Woman of the Week: Tina Fey

After a week of violence, bigotry, and terrorist attacks, Tina Fey eating and screaming into a sheet cake on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update spin-off is literally all of us.

This week has been incredibly upsetting on so many levels. When we were already on edge from the escalating rhetoric about potential nuclear war with North Korea, the violent events unfolded in Charlottesville, followed by the president’s shocking (but also not shocking) response, followed by news of horrific attacks in Spain. So, we all we’re grateful when Tina Fey showed up on Thursday night’s Weekend Update and embodied a lot of the frustration, fear, and helplessness so many have been feeling.

Fey, who graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1992, was a surprise guest on the Saturday Night Live spin-off and she arrived armed with a sheet cake to demonstrate a new coping mechanism for dealing with the headlines: it’s called, you guessed it, sheet caking. Fey encouraged viewers to buy their cake from a Jewish or African American-owned bakery, and then, basically, the idea is a combo of stress eating and rage venting. As Fey pointed out to Colin Jost in her hilarious and cathartic segment, “sheet-caking is a grassroots movement. Most of the women [she] knows have been doing it once a week since the election.”

Next: Malala’s going to Oxford and there’s still good left in the world

Yes, this is, mostly, a joke and eating our feelings won’t make much tangible difference considering the weight of what’s going on in the world, but like she did when Sarah Palin landed on the scene and she returned to SNL to do the world’s best impression, Tina Fey was there when we really needed her and for that, she’s our Wonder Woman of the Week.