Fey, similarly, is married with two daughters; she’s the face of Garnier hair color treatments, and lives in a posh apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But many of the running gags on 30 Rock revolve around Liz Lemon’s sloppiness and chronic singledom. So why are we laughing at Diller and Fey for their shabbiness, their sofa dependency, and their chronically sad love lives? Why do these well-loved, impressively accomplished women invent incompetence to fuel their comedy?

Barreca, a humorist herself, puts it simply. “Women lead with their vulnerabilities,” she says. “This is how we get men and other women to like us.”