She’s arguably the most famous brunette woman in America, maybe even the world at the moment. If you’ve opened up a newspaper at any point over the last week, you were probably greeted by her face, those trademark glasses and that smile. No, it’s not Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, rather it’s her lookalike, Tina Fey, and they’re both riding high on that brunette bun and crazy accent.

Fey, the Emmy-award winning star of NBC’s “30 Rock,” has been riding a wave of press since her first appearance as Palin on “Saturday Night Live.” After Palin was announced as John McCain’s running mate, rumors circulated about Fey returning to her old stomping grounds to portray the governor of Alaska. Obviously Fey agreed and “SNL” has made a resurgence in the public eye with constant media attention and the best Nielsen ratings in 14 years.

Robert Thompson, Ph.D., the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said Palin herself is the reason why “SNL” and Fey’s performance have become huge hits.

“Part of it is because Sarah Palin is really funny,” Thompson, an expert in television history and media criticism who holds a doctorate in radio, television and film, said. “Nobody had ever heard of her outside Alaska and all of a sudden she’s named vice president and she comes out and gives this really, I would go so far as to say, fun speech at the [Republican] convention. Everybody is all excited about her. She’s got the dialect thing going, everything’s fine, and then she gives these two interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric and she talked in total gibberish; it was hysterical.”

Thompson said there hasn’t been rich comedy material of this nature since the Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton scandal.

“You have her making lipstick jokes, talking gibberish to Katie Couric and wanting to be vice president of the United States, it was really funny,” he said. “So you’ve got this potential here and then it just so happens that Tina Fey, who no longer works at ‘Saturday Night Live’ but still obviously had a relationship with them, not only looked a lot like her even before they do the entire make-up bit, but can be made to look like her body double without a lot of work.”

The videos of Fey as Palin have taken off across the Internet. The first sketch featuring Fey as Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton became the most watched video ever on NBC.com. Thompson cited the Internet as the perfect venue to attract viewers, especially young ones, and to feed the media beast these performances became.

“Now that it’s been out, way more people saw the Sarah Palin things the following days on the Internet than saw them at 11:35 on Saturday night,” he said.

Ben Fedigan, a senior human development major, said he watched the Fey/Palin sketches online. Fedigan admitted he’s never been a big fan of Fey, but he enjoyed her impersonations of Palin.

“She just nails it,” Fedigan said. “The accent, the inflections, even the exaggerations. Everything is dead on.”

Fey’s performances on “SNL” have helped her current show, “30 Rock.” The NBC comedy, created, starring and written by Fey, premiered on Thursday, Oct. 30, to its best ratings ever, no doubt because of the exposure its star has received over the past couple of months from the Emmy Awards to the Palin performances. But can the ratings surge last? Thompson isn’t sure.

“To me, ‘30 Rock’ is one of those shows that most people who have never seen it, when they see it, a lot of them really like it,” he said. “‘30 Rock’ has got the unique opportunity that they have never had before. They’ve got a star who has gotten an enormous amount of attention.”

However, while “30 Rock” has flourished, at print time it’s too soon to tell if “SNL” has influenced the election. According to Chris Ortiz, a senior finance and marketing major, he said he thinks it’ll help Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

“It showed Sarah Palin’s flaws,” Ortiz said.

Fedigan said he disagreed. “I would’ve said yes,” he said on swaying the election toward the Democrats. “It helped [Palin] in the long run because she appeared on ‘SNL,’ showing she can make fun of herself.”