Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama Courtesy of Universal

VIEW: Baby Mama photos

Do you have the so-called Tina Fey-tigue? Or are you rooting for her to achieve global domination? Scroll down and give us your take.

If movies that deal with pregnancy and childbirth were truthful, they would look a lot more like Alien and a lot less like the dainty portrayals we typically see. But when the onscreen birthing scene in question involves certified Very Funny Lady and relatively new mother Tina Fey, you can expect honesty — and hilarity. Case in point: Baby Mama's climactic childbirth scene finds Fey running down the hospital corridor alongside a gurney-bound, flailing Amy Poehler. "This is like shitting a knife!" she screams. And it doesn't stop there. Still en route to her delivery room, she pulls down a decorated Christmas tree and rips out the IV from a patient she passes in the corridor. "I think the take that's in the movie was the last take of the night," recalls Fey. "We'd done several takes and Amy asked [director] Michael [McCullers]: 'Is this the last take probably?' And he says: 'Uh, huh...' She was being enough of a good girl that she didn't want to wreck the props until the last take. And then she tore the place up." Poehler pauses before reflecting on going crazy in the final take: "There are always a lot of birthing movies that never really talk about how foul people's mouths get during it. We shot that [in] all one long shot. There were real extras who were kind of genuinely startled at me yelling. So that was a lot of fun."

In Baby Mama Fey is Kate, a 37-year-old woman recently promoted to a top executive position at an organic food store chain, who realizes that her childbearing years are coming to a close. After a string of failed in-vitro fertilization attempts — "I just don't like your uterus," shrugs her doctor — she decides to fork out $100,000 to an upscale Philly surrogacy agency and have another woman carry her baby to term. The agency's president, Chafee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), matches her profile with vulgar, gum-chewing Angie Ostrowiski (Poehler) Angie, who was encouraged to become a surrogate by her constantly strapped-for-cash mouthbreather boyfriend of 12 years, Carl (Dax Shepard). Nobody does unrepentantly trashy quite like Poehler — her recurring SNL character Amber, the One-Legged Hypoglycemic, comes to mind — and Fey has all but perfected the successful single woman routine. Naturally, when class meets crass, we have the makings odd couple hijinks that lead to tolerance and eventual appreciation.

Tina Fey in Baby Mama Courtesy of Universal

For lovers of 30 Rock, the NBC sitcom that Fey writes, executive produces and stars in, there doesn't at first glance seem to be much of quantum leap from Liz Lemon to Kate. Director Michael McCullers concedes that it may be difficult for audiences to imagine Tina Fey playing anything except a smart woman, but the two characters are, he says, distinct: "Liz Lemon on 30 Rock is humorously disheveled and doesn't have her life together and is uncertain. The character in this movie is quite the opposite. She is a tightly wound, really together, successful, confident woman. And I think this movie goes into an emotional place that 30 Rock doesn't usually. This is a woman desperate to have a baby. That is the lynchpin of the film. I think that was a challenge for her." Fey echoes the sentiment but says it would have been a disservice to the movie "to go cuckoo far to make that distinction because they are East Coast white women in their late Thirties. They're not that [far apart] but they are different." How so? Kate, she maintains, is higher functioning than Liz Lemon. "She's a successful businessperson. She's a more pulled together, competent person… It's very subtle, but her clothes are different. She's Main Line Philadelphia, pulled together, with old family jewelry." She also notes that Kate's speech is a little different from Liz Lemon's. "I think that this character is certainly WASP-ier than I am in real life," she laughs with self-mockery. "Because I'm not WASP-y at all. We've got to pretend like she really has straight hair, [and my hair is] giant!"

Angie has no fixed income but dabbles in making her own clothes. Her common-law husband drives a Camaro and has a pet iguana. Kate, by contrast, lives in a spacious apartment in Philadelphia in a doorman building and wears designer suits. The film is as much about class and prejudice in America as it is the politics of surrogacy. And if you hadn't already prejudged Angie, the dialogue lays it bare for you: during a heated exchange, Kate lashes out and calls her "white trash." "That's a really interesting moment actually in the film," says Poehler. "There's this moment where they're being their worst to each other. They know ways how they can hurt each other and so that's the moment where Kate really decides to hurt Angie in that way. And she's very, very hurt herself. She's been deceived and she's been tricked and so it's a way for her to strike out." Without groveling to didacticism, the movie attempts to address these social divides with pathos and humor. "There's a lot of that in the film," says Poehler, "the idea of: what makes a person successful? What are you good at? What skills do you have? What does it mean to be smart?" Fey also sees the moment as pivotal in her relationship with Poehler's character: "It's one of my favorite moments in the movie even though I come off as the villain. It's interesting to me that people have such a strong response to it. The moment before my character has been incredibly hurt and betrayed, but I think it's [also] a testament to how much [the audience] likes Amy's character. I think it is the nadir of their relationship". But it is their differences that eventually draw them together, notes Weaver: "I think there the relationship between the two women has those potential pitfalls, and I think the thing that's so touching about it — as well as hilarious — is that they end up having such a positive impact on each other. So they really make it work for them."