After British actress Aimee Lou Wood called a Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch that impersonated her using exaggerated prosthetic teeth “mean and unfunny,” impressionists have told BBC News how they tread the line between being funny and offensive.
Titled The White Potus – a spin on hit HBO dark comedy The White Lotus – a SNL sketch depicted US president Donald Trump, his family and top team spending time at a fictional tropical hotel.
After jokes showing Eric Trump blending a gold Rolex watch and Ivanka Trump rejecting a spiritual call to give up material wealth, Wood’s White Lotus character Chelsea is portrayed by cast member Sarah Sherman using a pronounced accent and large teeth.
In response to a comment made by a character playing US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, she asks: “Fluoride? What’s that?”
The mineral is added to some water supplies and brands of toothpaste to help prevent tooth decay.
‘Bit of a cheap shot’
For BBC Radio 4’s Dead Ringers star Jan Ravens, the first misstep of the writers behind the SNL sketch was “not reading the room”.
It was a bad idea to joke about someone’s appearance in a sketch about The White Lotus, Ravens says, given Wood’s casting has been praised for a character lacking “those all-American, fake-looking teeth”.
“In the wake of all that, she’s been talking about how she was bullied at school and the butt of jokes. So then you think, ‘why would you do that joke’?”
It meant that in making fun of Wood’s appearance, the sketch “punched down,” says Ravens.
“You might make a joke about Donald Trump’s appearance because you’re definitely not punching down on the most powerful man in the western world.”
Ronni Ancona, co-writer and star of the early 2000s TV series The Big Impression, said she “could see” that the writers were also trying to make a point about US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s pledge to remove fluoride from US drinking water.
After the show aired, Wood, 31, said she was “not thin skinned” and understood that SNL was about “caricature”.
“But the whole joke was about fluoride,” she wrote on Sunday. “I have big gap teeth not bad teeth.”
Later on, in a post on social media, she said: “I’ve had apologies from SNL.”
However, Francine Lewis, a comedian whose impersonations have earned her a large following on social media, says the whole purpose of the US show is to “take the mick”.
While she can sympathise with someone being “embarrassed” by being the target of a sketch, Lewis adds that she thinks Wood’s response was “too sensitive”.
In her own impressions of celebrities, which include TV stars Gemma Collins and Stacey Solomon, Lewis has stuffed a pillow up her top to appear to be physically larger and put cotton wool on her teeth “to make them really white and jut out a bit”.
In recent times, both fans and some of her targets have taken offence.
“I don’t know if it’s just the new generation of young people that just take offence to every little thing,” she says.
“People that say you’re a troll, you’re a bully… I find myself hiding at celebrity events because I think ‘oh I do their impression, they might not like me’.”
But she believes that being impersonated is actually a marker of someone’s popularity and fame, saying that “it means you’ve arrived”.
Rather than adapting her impressions, Lewis is steadfast in her belief that “to make comedy funny, unfortunately you have to overstep the mark.”