Oh, when "30 Rock" returned for its sixth season a couple of weeks ago with new episodes that included penis mentions, the allegation that the Phillie Phanatic has "a menstrual cycle" and a reference - by Jane Krakowski's Jenna Maroney - to "vaginal mesh," the show might have seemed a little late to the party, the 2011-12 season having started off months ago with a rash (sorry) of vagina shout-outs.
Fey, though, had been ahead of her peers all along, having written an episode way back in 2007 in which Jenna uttered the memorable line, "My vagina is a convenience store: clean and reliable. And closed on Christmas."
It was two locally grown writers, Bala Cynwyd's David Crane and Broomall's Marta Kauffman, who co-created "Friends" and wrote the show's 100th episode in 1998, in which Lisa Kudrow's Phoebe, in labor with triplets, tells Ross (David Schwimmer), "I don't see three kids coming out of your vagina."
(Kudrow, interestingly, remembered recently that on "Friends" "we could say penis a certain number of times, but we could not say vagina.")
Philadelphia also helped educate Whitney Cummings, the Penn grad and comedian behind two of the fall's more in-your-face pilots, CBS' "2 Broke Girls" (which she co-created with "Sex and the City's" Michael Patrick King) and NBC's "Whitney," in which Cummings also stars.
Maybe you laughed, maybe you didn't, when Max, the waitress played by Bryn Mawr's Kat Dennings, snapped her fingers under the nose of a finger-snapping would-be hipster in the first episode of "2 Broke Girls," telling him, "This is the sound that dries up my vagina." But to Cummings, that wasn't really a joke about a body part.
