On Monday night in New York, cancer charity Gilda’s Club honored Amy Poehler as part of their first-ever annual comedy festival GildaFest, and Poehler certainly didn’t disappoint in her acceptance speech praising legendary SNL cast member Gilda Radner. Here’s an excerpt from Poehler’s speech:
Gilda Radner was my favorite, my number one. She was the person whose voice was in my head, the woman my mother was laughing at, the person that seemed kind of like me, the first Jewish woman I think I ever met… I truly wish I was Jewish but I’m too lazy to convert. I love how Gilda was just as funny as the boys and they knew it. They treated her like an equal. And I love how she was a benevolent captain and took joy in other people’s success. You could just tell. I wanted to be that way. I wanted to live in the light and enjoy and celebrate life and try to also be funny, and that’s hard to do, but she did it so well. I like that she had a lot of pain – you could feel it – but she rolled around in pleasure. She was just like a pleasure cat. You could tell by how she moved her body and she abused her body in a way, for our entertainment, which at times got kind of dark but was also beautiful. [When I was on SNL] we just tried to do that. We just copied it. People always ask, what’s the secret to success? It’s like, just do exactly what your heroes did. Just copy them and no one will notice.
The rest of the speech is well worth the read over at The Huffington Post.