Comedy is a subjective thing; always has been and always will be. This is something that “Saturday Night Live“ knows full well having been in the comedy game for 50 years now. There has been no shortage of skewering of public figures on the show, from actors, to politicians, to athletes. When does it go over the line though from comedic to unnecessarily mean? If you were to ask actress Aimee Lou Wood, it happened to her on the most recent episode of “SNL.”
Wood’s career started to take off with her portrayal of Aimee Gibbs on Netflix’s “Sex Education” [editor’s note: WHICH IS AMAZING AND WONDERFUL]. She’s become more prominent of late thanks to season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus.” The series has a recurring theme of showing how detached from reality members of the upper class can be, in addition to how bizarrely messed up their lives can be. Seems like ample territory for “SNL” to cover by turning “The White Lotus” into “The White Potus.”
The sketch skewered President Donald Trump, his wife, sons, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and several other members of the Trump administration. In and amongst all these caricatures was an obvious exaggeration of Wood’s character, Chelsea. RFK Jr., played by Jon Hamm, makes a comment about taking fluoride out of drinking water, only for the Chelsea parody to look at him with greatly exaggerated teeth and asking in an over-the-top English accent what fluoride is. Classic, tired joke about English dental care.
For Wood, who does have more pronounced front teeth, it is a distinct, physical feature of hers, and not always in a positive way. “Yes, take the piss for sure – that’s what the show is about- but there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way?,” she said in an Instagram story.
For a sketch that’s supposed to be roasting the political elite, where does a potshot at an actresses’ teeth really fit? Yes, the whole fluoride and dental care thing, but as Wood pointed out, it’s a cheap joke without any nuance. It’s punching down while the rest of the sketch was punching up.
Wood later stated that she received an apology from “SNL” (she did not specify who) and received a lot of messages of support online.
You can watch the sketch, which was directed by Mike Diva, below:
