I'd love to marry a woman as smart, funny and eyeglasses-classy as Tina Fey.

Oh wait, I did.

That's okay. Princess Di completely understands my crush, even mock-cringes when Fey says something sounding like her. She really loves it. Except that time when "Tina" slipped into our pillow talk.

Anyway, there’s no business
like “lady business” for Fey, who coined the term in a Saturday Night Live
commercial for the Woomba, a robotic feminine hygiene product.

Like much of Fey’s
humor, the joke made men blush while women felt as if someone read their minds.
Switch the genders and you’d have caveman comedy like Knocked Up and Forgetting
Sarah Marshall. Fey is the anti-Judd Apatow, reversing the curse of penis
raunch with naughty lady business.

Baby Mama isn’t
officially Fey’s idea like her lauded screenplay for Mean Girls or her sitcom
30 Rock. She obviously hijacked Michael McCullers’ movie with SNL’s Amy Poehler
as an improvising accomplice. Watching Baby Mama is akin to witnessing gender
reclassification, something born of maleness realizing feminine comfort. The
transition isn’t easy but the results beat what would have been.

Without a solid
female perspective, Baby Mama could simply be The Odd Couple in Lamaze class
with cervix jokes and breaking water (as preview trailers suggest). Fey and
Poehler polished McCullers’ script into something more substantive with jokes
speaking from experience that men can’t know. Now it’s our turn to wonder: “Do
they really think like that?”

Fey plays Kate Holbrook, a nervously
successful marketer for health food products. She has it all except for
maternal bliss but her misshapen uterus prevents pregnancy. Adoption takes too
long – Kate is a real go-getter – so employing a surrogate is her best option.

Angie Ostrowiski
(Poehler) isn’t a great choice but she’s available, urged into her sixth, maybe
seventh, pregnancy-for-pay by a shiftless husband (Dax Shepard). Angie is as
irresponsible as Kate is uptight, as co-dependent as Kate is fussily
independent. Obviously they can learn a lot from each other, and they will.

The movie also
features male characters that aren’t entirely disrespected or blamed for
women’s woes. Greg Kinnear is more charming, less self-conscious than usual as
Kate’s potential suitor while Shepard’s character, even when abusive, is too
stupid to take seriously, which is funny. Fey’s tweaking of the screenplay
turns Kate’s boss from a typical office pig into a New Age nimrod, giving Steve
Martin an excuse for silliness. (Tina and the wrong "Steve" are at left.)

How two women find common ground among such guys sets Baby Mama apart from other preggo-comedies. The movie looks beyond the bulging belly to hormones and social expectations churning inside. Not all of the jokes work -- some sound like 30 Rock rejects -- and some improvs strain for worthiness. Yet even in slack moments Baby Mama has Fey and Poehler's subversive vibe going for it.