Tina Fey is still waiting on some amends from Conan O’Brien.
“I was just at [Saturday Night Live], and I saw Tina with her husband Jeff Richmond,” O’Brien explained on Monday’s episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast to guest Amy Poehler. “And I’m sorry, Jeff, but I immediately go to when we first used Jeff Richmond, and he played Cupid,” O’Brien said, referring to a Late Night with Conan O’Brien sketch. “He was in a diaper hanging on a rope with a bow and arrow and like some glitter in his hair and no shirt.”
O’Brien claimed that he “didn’t know who Jeff was” at the time, but when Fey saw Richmond “kind of just spinning at rehearsal awkwardly,” she was none too pleased. O’Brien recalled, “Tina had passed a monitor, and she went, ‘That’s my husband, you f—er. What have you done to him?'”
Reps for Fey and Richmond did not respond to Entertainment Weekly‘s request for comment.
Fey and O’Brien discussed the sketch during Fey’s first appearance as a guest on Late Night in 2001. Fey was only engaged to Richmond at the time, not married, and at least in the clip of the sketch played during Fey’s interview, Richmond was mercifully only standing, not hanging suspended from a rope.
“He’s an actor, and he’s actually done a few bits on your show. He actually did one this week,” Fey told O’Brien. “This is who I’m marrying,” she said with mock solemnity. The interview then cuts to Richmond facing the audience in a diaper and cupid wings, with a bow and blonde, curly wig, reading the names of sexually transmitted infections from a list scrolling from the bottom to the top of the screen like a late night infomercial.
“Me and him gonna make a baby some day!” Fey excitedly joked.
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Like most of the great comic luminaries of their generation and the generations preceding and following, O’Brien and Fey both spent time working on Saturday Night Live, but their paths only crossed once, when O’Brien hosted the program in 2001. O’Brien wrote for the show from 1988 to 1991, and Fey started as a writer in 1997 before becoming a featured player in 2000, a dual role she held until she left the show in 2006.
Fey and Richmond met in 1994 in the Chicago improv scene. Richmond told The New Yorker in 2003, “I don’t want to say she was funny ‘for a woman,’ but there were so many talented men there at the time, and then suddenly there was Tina, who was so funny — and she was at home with all those boys on the stage.” The couple were married in 2001 and have collaborated on virtually every project Fey has helmed or produced since, from 30 Rock to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to the recent Mean Girls musical adaptation.
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Richmond’s accomplishments as a composer are as staggering as Fey’s — who’s won three Emmys out of 18 nominations — as a comedic actor. But that doesn’t impress O’Brien much. He joked to Poehler, “I don’t care what he does. He’ll get an Oscar for scoring something, and I’ll still think, ‘Heh, you were Cupid.'”
You can listen to the rest of O’Brien’s chat with Fey’s friend and former Weekend Update co-anchor below.