Reigning queen of comedy

The critical reaction to Bridesmaids, and its box office success, might make you suspect that no woman has ever demonstrated comic flair before. But Kristen Wiig sees herself as just the latest in a long line of successful female comic actors, she tells TARA BRADY

HAVE YOU HEARD the one about the funny woman?

The moment Bridesmaids, a raucous gal-pal riposte of The Hangover, sailed past its first $100 million at the US box office, there was no avoiding the patronising pseudo-feminist claptrap. Newspapers and professional chin-strokers duly appeared – exclusively across all newspapers and media outlets – to trumpet the late arrival of the Funny Woman.

Long-time consumers may well have felt a frisson of recognition as the same fetid thought-pieces once attached to Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman reappeared in recent weeks with Kristen Wiig’s name parachuted in.

Hours before the film’s Dublin premiere, screenwriter and star Wiig, a dainty sylph of a woman, puts her head in her hands.

"Oh God, that stuff makes me want to poke my own eyes out," she sighs. "I think if you look at newspapers and magazines from 20 years ago, you'll find that same article except it's about The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I don't know where these people have been. I grew up watching SNLwith Carol Burnett and also Madeline Kahn and Dianne Wiest and Catherine O'Hara and Gilda Radner. Maybe what they're seeing is that women have more platforms now; Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have their own shows now. But even then, they're ignoring The Mary Tyler Moore Showand all kinds of stuff."

Many other commentators have dwelled on the film's significance as a Judd Apatow production; the perennially whiny shrew-women who have previously populated Team Apatow's comedies – Leslie Mann, anyone? – are rarely tolerable let alone funny. But Bridesmaids'fresh, innovative screenplay avoids traditional chick-flick tropes in favour of a structure that looks and feels like a bromance picture, a sort of hos before bros comedy. Wiig nods in agreement yet insists that any similarity to the Seth Rogen milieu is entirely coincidental.

“The bromance thing keeps coming up, which is funny because when we wrote it we didn’t think about any of that stuff,” says Wiig. “Now that the movie has come out we’re suddenly getting questions about this whole female/male thing. We were like ‘let’s write a comedy’. We need something with a lot of funny women because we know a of lot of them. Annie – my writing partner – has a very similar sensibility. We finish each other’s sentences. We wrote something we thought made us laugh. We didn’t think through the other stuff. But a lot of people have noticed it so there must be something to it.”

Bridesmaidsis a huge deal for Kristen Wiig. Long identified as the funniest thing in any TV show or movie to bare her name on the credits, she routinely wipes the floor with Saturday Night Liveco-star Tina Fey and has swiped scenes from under the noses of Ricky Gervais ( Ghost Town), Ellen Page ( Whip It), Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie ( Flight of the Conchords). Just minutes into Knocked Upshe walks off with the picture when she informs Katherine Heigl's character that she cannot legally ask her to lose weight. "We would just like it if you go home and step on a scale and write down how much you weigh," she says. "And subtract it by, like, 20."

Her sudden elevation to headliner and box-office attraction has, she says, taken her entirely unawares.

"I did feel pressure coming up to Bridesmaidsin that it was a first leading role, and it was a movie I have co-written. I laughed but I didn't know if anyone else would. It's always a little scary when you create something and you feel it represents your humour or style or whatever you want to call it. You don't know what people are going to think. We had no idea whether people were going to like it or not. So this has all been a nice surprise."

Wiig’s most notable gifts as a comic performer derive from the art of self-defence.

At their most hilarious, her characters lie, obfuscate, backtrack and squirm convincingly as they attempt to maintain their dignity. ("You died but just a little bit," she mumbles inaudibly at Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town.) She is equally adept at the sweetly delivered passive-aggressive barb: "I do believe in you," she tells her husband in The Dewey Cox Story, "I just know you're gonna fail."

“I don’t know where it comes from,” she says. “Maybe just from observing people in the world. A lot of performing just basically comes from looking at people in the world and then in movies and books. Family and friends are usually the best place to go. But the thing is I don’t see it when I do it. I’m not aware in real life at all.”

Her SNLcolleagues have often marvelled at the sheer variety and number of people to which Kristen Wiig has been exposed. A professional nomad, she's worked as a florist, as a fruit seller and as the computer-imagining person showing pre-op cosmetic surgery patients what they'll look like after the procedure.

“I was a little bit of a drifter,” she says. “Mostly because this business is hard and the odds of making it are low. And when you have people who love you in your life they will point out that there are smarter choices you might make. Living in LA, I had no experience when I moved there. But as soon as I started with the Groundlings Theatre I knew that this was what I wanted to do. And it didn’t matter if I had to work the shittiest jobs in the world as long as I could keep doing it. If I’m honest, too, working shitty jobs and saving money to print flyers just so me and my friends could put stuff on, those were like the happiest years of my life. So the shitty jobs became part of my happiness.”

As Americans rush to declare Kristen Wiig the “Funniest Woman in the World”, it’s interesting to note that she doesn’t consider herself a comedian at all. A quiet, unassuming interviewee, she says she’s more about craft than getting a laugh.

"I really don't see myself that way," she says. "Comedy is where I got my start but I don't do anything there that I don't do with dramatic roles. The minute I saw improv something clicked in me; it just seemed less scary than acting. I had never acted. I was a munchkin in The Wizard of Ozat school and I was nervous doing that. But I just got improv. I just needed to do it. I still do. But it's not just comedy."

Improvisation, she says, is the secret to Bridesmaids'success.

“The people we hired are all amazing so we just had fun with it,” she says. “People think improv is throwing away the script but it’s not. You shoot the script, you let the actors make the material their own and play around with it a little bit and shoot that. You could say whatever you wanted and sometimes that makes it in the movie and other times it’s the script. But in improv we do stick to the script; it’s only then we throw it away.”

DEFENSIVE PLAYS: LINES FROM THE BACKFOOT

Comedy, wrote Freud, is sadism. For this reason, nothing quite tickles like the backtrack gag. In it's classic form it's a simple "Er, I didn't mean you; I meant some other marine biologist". But the backtrack always works best when someone attempts a U-turn only to become increasingly desperate.

Like when Tina Fey finds gum under her table in Baby Mama, Amy Poehler's wide-eyed denial soon goes on the offensive: "I don't know! Maybe you stuck some of it under there. Bitch, I don't know your life!"

Or when Will Ferrell "agrees to disagree" after his attempts to impress Christina Applegate with historical factoids in Anchormancome to nothing: "Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means a whale's vagina . . . I'm sorry, I was trying to impress you. I don't know what it means. I'll be honest, I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. Scholars maintain that the translation was lost hundreds of years ago."

And so on. Here are our handpicked favourite squirms...

Sarah Silverman  apologises to the same-sex couple next door on The Sarah Silverman Show

"I don't mean gay like homosexual. I mean gay like retarded."

Kristen Wiig, drunk on a plane, keeps pulling open the curtains between coach and business in Bridesmaids

"It's called civil rights. This is the '90s."

Julia Louis-Dreyfus apologises to a friend getting married on Seinfeld

"No, no, no – it was years ago, before you met him! And, I gotta tell you, it was very mechanical."

Rebel Wilson explains to roommate Kristen Wiig why she's been reading her diary in Bridesmaids

"At first I did not know it was your diary, I thought it was a very sad handwritten book."

Bridesmaids is on general release