baby mama

Hollywood's newest odd couple aren't just having marital issues, they're having babies (and I don't mean the old fashioned way). Since their good old days with Second City, Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have played their comic genius off one another to great avail, and their performances in Baby Mama are no exception.

In this comedy, written and directed by fellow SNL alum Michael McCullers, Fey and Poehler take their witty partnership to the next level with a little help from modern science. Kate Holbrook (Fey) is a 37-year-old, successful businesswoman, who has finally decided her single status will have no further bearing on her chance to be a mommy. That is, until Kate learns of her slim chances at adoption and her evidently problematic "T-shaped" uterus. She enlists the help of a surrogacy agency, who for the small sum of $100,000, will provide her with the oven for her dream bun.

Enter Angie (Poehler), a high-school drop out with a stripper's wardrobe and many an unwholesome habit-in short, she is white trash personified. Angie promptly agrees to serve as her surrogate mother. However, Kate gets more than she bargained for when Angie, after discovering that her common-law husband Carl (Dax Shepard) has been sleeping around, shows up on Kate's doorstep hoping for a place to stay.

As these two women from utterly opposite ends of the social spectrum try to cohabitate, the audience recognizes the time-old tale of conflicting characters who end up learning a lot from one another. Yet, while the plot may be cliche, Fey and Poehler, along with the aid of SNL veteran Steve Martin (who plays Fey's hilarious tree-hugging boss), provide the film with comedic charm that steers it away from uniformity. Some of the twists in the plot do seem a bit forced, while certain moments with great comedic potential are not stretched far enough (look for: birthing class teacher with speech impediment).

However, Baby Mama is truly refreshing in its highly atypical exploration of female friendships and similarly as an innovative commentary on the issues facing the modern woman and family. Fey and Poehler make this highly controversial topic digestible with laughter and bring a feminine freshness to the frenzy of Apotowian testosterone that dominates the genre today. Whoever said women aren't funny owes these hormonal comedi-femmes a serious apology.