Gatecrasher: Where's the Tina Fey we love?

Lovekin/Getty

Actress Tina Fey is pregnant, but the timing of her announcement gave birth to a mini-controversy.

Has success spoiled Tina Fey?

After rightfully becoming a media darling through her incisive mocking of the famous and the powerful on "Saturday Night Live" and "30 Rock," Fey has begun behaving strangely like one of the garden-variety celebrities she twits so well.

Perhaps Fey, 40, is pulling some brilliant prank on the celebrity marketing process. If she is not, her Wednesday taping of the Oprah Winfrey show ? where she promoted her new memoir "Bossypants" by dropping a little bombshell about being five-months pregnant ? is one of the oldest publicity clich�s in the fame playbook.

Such revelatory moments are expected when celebrities flog their latest mass-marketed book, movie or iPad app on a major talk show. As was the case with Fey's pregnancy, the news leaked to the press, serving to promote Fey's book and her Oprah appearance, which airs this week. Alec Baldwin-generated rumors on the future of "30 Rock" also contributed to a perfect storm of PR.

Then there's the book itself. The reviews have been mostly glowing, with the literati lapping up Fey's riffs on her onscreen lovable-loser Liz Lemon persona. But one critic who expected more from Fey was Anna Holmes, founder of the website Jezebel, who reviewed the book for Newsweek.

Holmes wrote that "as an author, Fey takes such careful pains not to ... offend anyone's sensibilities that she comes off like one of the politicians she and her colleagues so roundly mock."

The reviewer also noted that "Bossypants" is a memoir, not a humor sketch, and Fey is in the unique and enviable position to say something important and definitive: about being a woman, about boys' clubs, about contemporary feminism and female representations in pop culture," If Fey "won't give us the straight dope, who will?" Holmes wrote.

No such territory was covered when Fey partook of that other default promotional opportunity for high-brow funny people: a combination book-signing and Q&A with New Yorker Editor David Remnick at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Friday.

When Remnick asked Fey to talk about her "intentions for the book," she replied that "because I am a writer," she took the book "very seriously". Then, with a laugh she added: "I was having lunch with Snooki, and she was like, "Just do it! You've got a voice."

The press didn't get the chance to ask any tougher questions at the packed appearance. Citing the need to take it easy because of her pregnancy, handlers said she'd be doing no interviews.

Her condition will not, however, prevent her from hosting "SNL" on May 7;

Ashley Scott Ashley Tappin Tessie Santiago Monet Mazur Angelina Jolie