Tina Fey doesn’t play around when it comes to her marriage.
Over 20 years ago, Fey, 54, flipped out because her husband, Jeff Richmond, ended up in a humiliating sketch on Conan O’Brien’s “Late Night” show, O’Brien recalled on Monday’s episode of his podcast.
“I was just at ‘SNL’ and I saw Tina with her husband Jeff Richmond,” O’Brien, 61, told his “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast guest Amy Poehler. “And I’m sorry, Jeff, but I immediately go to when we first used Jeff Richmond, who’s very brilliant and incredibly successful, he played Cupid.”
O’Brien recalled that the now-64-year-old composer “was in a diaper hanging on a rope with a bow and arrow and like some glitter in his hair and no shirt” during the 2001 sketch.
“He’s kind of just spinning at rehearsal awkwardly,” O’Brien explained, adding that he “didn’t know” who Richmond was at the time.
“Tina had passed a monitor, and she went, ‘That’s my husband, you f—er. What have you done to him?’” O’Brien said.
The comedian added of Richmond, “I don’t care what he does. He’ll get an Oscar for scoring something, and I’ll still think, ‘Heh, you were Cupid.’”
Fey and O’Brien previously addressed Richmond’s “Late Night” bit when Fey made her first appearance as a guest on the show in 2001.
“He doesn’t like for me to be the only bread winner in our little family,” said Fey, who was engaged to Richmond at the time. “So he likes to work and have his own money, because he has a big sense of pride and dignity, so he does bits on your show sometimes.”
O’Brien then showed a clip of Richmond’s sketch, featuring the shirtless composer wearing a white diaper, cupid wings and a blonde wig while holding a bow, and reading out a list of sexually transmitted diseases to the camera.
“Me and him gonna make a baby some day!” Fey joked. “I’m gonna make a baby with that man.”
Fey and Richmond began dating in 1994 when they were both working at Second City in Chicago.
“I don’t want to say she was funny ‘for a woman,’ but there were so many talented men there at the time, and then suddenly there was Tina, who was so funny — and she was at home with all those boys on the stage,” Richmond told The New Yorker in 2003.
The couple tied the knot in a Greek Orthodox ceremony in June 2001. They went on to welcome two daughters, Alice, 19, and Penelope, 12.