A Holiday Battle of the Guest Actors: 30 Rock Recapped

30 Rock arrived bearing a gift last night (just in time for Liz Lemon's yuletide spent aboard a bus to Whitehaven): a cavalcade of the show's finest guest stars, including Alan Alda, Elaine Stritch, Will Forte, and Elizabeth Banks. That's delightful already, but Movieline believes no such assemblage of characters is worthwhile without declaring a winner. After much debate, we have our choice for last night's best guest performance. Take heed, Emmy voters.

Though Stritch, as Jack's menacing mother Colleen, tore up the scenery when she feigned a heart attack in front of hippy-dippy Milton Greene (Alan Alda) and pregnant Avery (Elizabeth Banks), I'm giving the win to Will Forte as Jenna's ex-beau/doppelganger, Paul. He's always been ideal as the eerily reasonable character, an unassuming mix of absurdity and conscience that Jenna needs. Plus, he has the kind of forehead that makes for a terrifying drag queen. Alan Alda's would require more loft.

"I don't even think about Jenna anymore," Paul claimed mid-episode. "I don't think about kissing her, laughing with her, photographing her with just salamanders covering her nipples."

If that weren't uproarious enough, we also watched as he and Jenna reunited over an idea they'd both conceived independently of one another: a "couples costume" concept of "black swans."

That's Natalie Portman in Black Swan and "former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann," for the record, which is a pretty unbeatable gag. If you were Milton Greene, you might even call it "a druid solstice miracle." At the very least, if Forte doesn't nab an Emmy nomination for this episode, his chances for an Oscar just skyrocketed.