Tina Fey knows she 'screwed up' in her Charlottesville sheet-cake segment for 'SNL'

Though Tina Fey's Charlottesville sketch for Saturday Night Live is a couple thousand controversies in the past, the actress and comedy writer now admits she "screwed up" when she suggested people stay home and ignore white supremacists rather than protest their presence in person.

But first, a quick recap: After white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 for an alt-right rally that turned physically violent, Fey appeared on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" and told would-be protesters to buy a sheet cake and eat it, instead.

The bit ends like this: "In conclusion, I really want to say, to encourage all good, sane Americans to treat these rallies this weekend like the opening of a thoughtful movie with two female leads: Don't show up. Let these morons scream into the empty air."

While some praised Fey for her irreverence, many felt the segment reeked of privilege and an overall lack of self-awareness.

As writer Isha Aran wrote for Splinter at the time, "Ignoring Nazis isn't taking the high road. Protesting and facing potential danger is taking the high road. Obviously, we cannot afford to sit at home."

Now, in Fey's new interview with David Letterman for his Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, the comedy writer reexamines the backlash and where she believes she went wrong with the sketch (h/t People):

"I felt like a gymnast who did, like, a very solid routine, and broke her ankle on the landing. Because it's literally within the last – I think – two or three sentences of the piece that I chunked it. And I screwed up. And the implication was that I was telling people to give up and not be active and to not fight. That was not my intention, you know, obviously."

And after reflecting on the feedback she received in the aftermath of her SNL appearance, she offers up the ending she wishes she'd written at the time:

"If I could put one sentence back digitally, I would say to people, 'Fight them in every way except the way that they want,' but I didn't write that at the time. I wrote it two days later as I was pacing in my house and that's the nature of SNL."

Fey famously isn't one for big public apologies – she says as much in the interview – but stressed that she's listening to criticism, and that she doesn't plan to "stop trying" to do better.

"You have to be an athlete about it...I broke my ankle on the landing. Next time, I'll try again," she says.