‘Baby Mama’ Makes Fun of Pregnancy More Than Poor People

Shockingly, despite both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler being on my Fantasy Dinner Party Guest List, it took me six years to finally watch Baby Mama, the 2008 surrogacy comedy starring everyone’s favorite FFBFFs (famous funny best friends forever).

Aside from having been released during the pop culture blackout period that was my first year of law school my giant mistake, I also made the classic error of judging a movie by its trailer and thought Baby Mama was going to be 90 minutes of “this old bat has such raging baby fever she lowers herself to associating with—get this—poor people!” and/or “This chick is so poor she sublets her uterus! It’s funny because she’s poor.”

Fortunately, Baby Mama is not as grossly classist as I feared. Yes, Tina Fey’s Kate, the wealthy businesswoman who can’t get pregnant, is shocked by her surrogate Angie (Amy Poehler) for everything from her diet (heavily featuring Tastykakes and Dr Pepper) to her manners (discarding gum under a reclaimed barnwood coffee table) to her interests (the American Idol karaoke video game Kate bought for her niece). But the audience is invited to laugh at both sides of the class divide between these characters,  and there are actually significantly fewer jabs at Angie for being insufficiently classy than there are at Kate for being a yuppie snob. It’s just that peeing in the sink makes for better trailer material than jokes about forced nicknames for gentrified neighborhoods.

However, if you’re looking for any kind of meaningful exploration of the power dynamics and body politics inherent to contracted surrogate pregnancies, Baby Mama is not your movie. This is strictly a situation comedy, with a surprising reliance on plot twists and a mostly superfluous romantic subplot involving Greg Kinnear as a slightly more sincere yippie (Young Urban Professional Hippie) than Kate.  A lot of the humor is derived from the absurdities that apply to pregnancy and parenting more generally rather than surrogacy specifically: birth shaming, strollers with airbags, books like 101 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy.

But, the surrogacy forces the Hollywood Movie Unobtainium that is a central female relationship. And it is the chemistry between Fey and Poehler that keeps this movie afloat despite its meandering pace, some repeated jokes that never quite land (Steve Martin as Kate’s boss is one yuppie joke too many, Sigourney Weaver as the surprisingly fertile surrogacy agent), pointless tertiary characters (Maura Tierney as Kate’s supermom sister, Romany Malco as Kate’s weirdly ubiquitous doorman), and a final plot twist  that made me feel like I had morning sickness.

Really, if the combined powers of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can make a movie as thoroughly mediocre as Baby Mama so much fun to watch, we should probably be legally requiring them to make at least one movie together a year.  Call your congressperson.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who just looked up how many days there are until the next Golden Globes (129).