Liz Lemon - Personality

Personality

After a mere glance at her in the pilot, Jack sums up Liz as a "New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single-and-pretending-to-be-happy-about-it, over-scheduled, undersexed, you buy any magazine that says 'healthy body image' on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for...a week". This is confirmed by Pete to be accurate, commenting that the "knitting" part, in particular, was uncanny.

Liz is generally portrayed as something of a "geek". So, while she is an apparently skilled writer, she seems to have very few social skills (in "Rosemary's Baby", Jack describes her as "socially retarded"). For example, while she was trying to pick up men at a karaoke bar, a man asked her if the seat next to her was taken, leading her to ask him why she should have to move her coat just so he could sit there. Liz is often shown to be generally insecure and holds a strong concern for how she is perceived by others. Liz is sometimes dismissive of others, a personality flaw that can be connected to her lack of social skills.

Liz has a rather satirical sense of humor. She has frequently been shown to be a stress eater, a trait she shares with Jack. Despite the fact that she often ingests high-amounts of junk food on a daily basis, she seems to keep her weight under control, perhaps because she does not seem to have proper meals. According to Fey, the character is not bulimic; "she just likes to eat". Liz does have some knowledge of cooking, though she admits to only using her oven to warm her jeans in the morning. She is allergic to both dogs and cats, as well as "anything warm and adorable". However, she does believe her allergy to dogs is psychosomatic, as she mentions that a dog bit her during the time of her first period.

Like Fey, Liz is a big fan of the Star Wars film franchise, often using events from the original trilogy to explain her feelings and actions in daily life. For example, in the episode "Jack the Writer", she compares Jack to the Sith lord Darth Vader, and contemplates that entering his office is like "stepping onto the Death Star". In "The Source Awards", Liz mentions that for the four past Halloweens in a row, she has dressed up as Princess Leia. She has also dressed as the character during jury selection in order to be disqualified from serving. Liz considers Attack of the Clones to be the worst film of the series. Criss Chros proved his love for her when responding to her "I love you", with "I know", quoting Han Solo's response to Leia in The Empire Strikes Back.

She is also a fan of the television series Heroes, in which her favorite character is Hiro Nakamura, Lost, Little People, Big World, Ugly Betty,Top Chef, Designing Women and The Daily Show. Her favorite drink is white wine with ice cubes and Sprite, a blend she calls "Funky Juice". She is obsessed with men in green tights. As of "Cleveland", her ringtone is "Ride of the Valkyries", which she and Jenna consider a reference to What's Opera, Doc?. Her ringtone for "Future Husband", is "Fuck the Pain Away" by Peaches.

In the episode "The Fabian Strategy", Liz reveals that the three things she likes in the world are Ina Garten, "sweater weather", and when Muppets present at awards shows. Over the course of the series she has shown an aversion to exposing her feet under any circumstances, except when she mistakenly believed that Oprah Winfrey counted high-heeled flip-flops among her new "favorite things". She usually prefers sex to be either non-existent, fast or "only on Saturdays".

Liz appears to be a Philadelphia Phillies fan. In "Reaganing", it is mentioned that at nine years old, she sported a Pete Rose inspired haircut and had posters of Mike Schmidt and Tug McGraw in her bedroom. These three players were active with the Phillies during this period. It is also noted that she uses a "Phillies Sport Wallet" in "It's Never Too Late For Now". In the season 6 finale "What Will Happen to the Gang Next Year?" Liz tells Jack that in payment for officiating at his and Avery's renewal of vows, "I get your Yankees tickets on A-Rod bobble head day. And I'm going to throw that thing in front of a train. Go Phillies!"

By "Christmas Attack Zone", Liz has learned the meanings of body language through watching The Mentalist (due to her losing the remote control to her television, thus being unable to change the CBS channel it was on). Because of her newfound talent, she dubs herself "The MentaLiz".

In contrast with her friend and foil Jenna, Liz seems to have little interest in stereotypical female interests, such as fashion. In "Blind Date", her "bi-curious" shoes led Jack to erroneously believe she was gay, and set her up on a blind date with his friend Gretchen Thomas, the "brilliant plastics engineer/lesbian". Except when she is pressured to dress more femininely, Liz typically appears in casual, gender-neutral attire. In earlier episodes, she almost always wore plastic-rimmed glasses, though she has started to wear them less frequently over the course of the series. Flashbacks reveal that she has worn glasses since she was around four or five years of age. However, according to Jenna in "The Rural Juror", she does not actually need glasses. This is probably intended to parody the fact that plastic-rimmed glasses are considered to be Tina Fey's trademark in real life, despite the fact that she does not actually need glasses except to see far away.

Some of Liz's social problems stem from past slapstick events that left her with long-suppressed traumas and phobias. For instance, in "Reaganing", Liz reveals to Jack that she once ended up falling while wearing roller skates and ending up with her underwear around her ankles while covered by a Tom Jones poster (all while she was trying to find a bathroom to use in her house). When Jack learns she also freaked out when hearing a snippet of music in Las Vegas, she realizes that anything that reminds her of Tom Jones triggers her revulsion to sex. She was also unable to eat eggs for a long time, and Kenneth's impromptu therapy helped her understand why: her aunt's husband left her, causing the aunt to feed a pre-teen Liz unappetizing egg-based dishes while making bizarre requests for company.

James Poniewozik of Time had this to say about an Indecent Proposal type situation involving a former classmate in the episode "Leap Day": "his story is about more than that. It’s about nerdy, neurotic Liz recognizing that she is, after all, a legitimate object of desire—a successful, smart woman who looks like Tina Fey—and embracing it rather than being freaked out by it."

Liz also has a tendency to say "blërg!" (the name of her home office furniture from Ikea) "nerds", "what the what?", "nertz", "nerf herder" (quoting Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back), "whuck?" and "son of a mother" as replacements for curse words; she has also notably used the phrases "shut it down", "I want to go to there", "deal-breaker", "pwomp", and "by the hammer of Thor!".