Saturday Night Live’s Aimee Lou Wood gag proves the show has lost its bite

Once a bastion of sharp satire, the US sketch show’s latest ‘mean and unfunny’ skit, which punches down not for the first time, proves it’s lost its edge – and its decency, writes Fiona Sturges

The US sketch show Saturday Night Live is well known as a TV institution, forever hailed as a hotbed of talent and for being a safe space for comedic experimentation and the slaying of sacred cows. But there’s a difference between experimentation and plain crapness, and a skit in last Saturday’s edition – which somehow got past the show’s filtering system and made it on to air – fell into the latter category.

In a sketch called “The White Potus”, characters from the newest season of the hit TV show The White Lotus were replaced by Donald Trump (played by James Austin Johnson) and his inner circle. Very apt, you would think, given the show’s portrayal of morally reprehensible rich people.

But after Jon Hamm’s Robert F Kennedy Jr (RFK) asked: “What if we took all of the fluoride out of the drinking water? What would that do to people’s teeth?” – a reference to Kennedy’s anti-fluoride stance – up popped SNL regular Sarah Sherman, wearing exaggerated prosthetic teeth, and quipped: “Fluoride? What’s that?”

Sarah Sherman in 'The White Potus' (NBC)

The joke, such as it is, is linked to the fact that Aimee Lou Wood, a British actor on The White Lotus, has slightly protruding front teeth.

In the pantheon of powerful people ripe for satire, she is certainly not an obvious choice, being neither a world leader with a criminal record (Trump), nor a high-ranking politician and unapologetic conspiracy nut in charge of a nation’s health (RFK). Nor, for that matter, is she your typical self-regarding Hollywood actor with more money than sense.

She is a rising young performer making her way in a ruthless industry that prizes a narrow and homogenous form of female beauty. So all power to Wood for using an Instagram post to decry the skit as “mean and unfunny”, adding, “The whole joke was about fluoride. I have big gap teeth, not bad teeth. The rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on.”

The skit certainly seems to misjudge the current feeling around Wood, a hugely popular actor who has cornered the market in playing big-hearted young women, from the loyal, daffy Aimee in Sex Education to her sweet-natured waitress helping Bill Nighy’s office drone make the most of his final months in the movie Living.

Aimee Lou Wood (centre) as Aimee Gibbs in Sex Education (Sam Taylor/Netflix)

As The White Lotus’s Chelsea, yoga-teacher girlfriend to Walton Goggins’ troubled older man, Wood once again plays an earnest young thing with a heart of gold.

Near the start of the series, Charlotte Le Bon’s Chloe says to Chelsea: “I love your teeth. You’re from England, right?”, a line that prompted a lengthy disquisition in The New York Times about Wood’s “broad, beautiful” smile being a novelty in a “sea of actors with straight, evenly spaced teeth having been apparently willed into submission by orthodontics or cosmetic modification.”

That the gag has backfired for SNL is hardly shocking in a show that is only fitfully funny and has long been riding on its own inflated myth.

The series has produced some comedy greats – Bill Murray, John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler – the list goes on. But it has also featured characters in blackface, mocked domestic abuse survivors (in a sketch about the Depp-Heard trial), and welcomed Elon Musk into its midst to deliver a monologue. Poking fun at an actor’s teeth is by no means the show’s worst faux pas, but it does suggest a writing team struggling to differentiate between cutting-edge humour and schoolyard bullying.

SNL has also perhaps forgotten that young actors are increasingly willing to call out mockery and criticism they deem to be unfair. See the Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown’s public takedown of the MailOnline journalists who criticised and dissected her appearance during her press tour for the film The Electric State.

There is a sense, nowadays, that the media has moved on from the bad old days of 2000s celebrity culture, when women in the public eye had to deal with gross intrusion and judgment about their bodies and behaviour.

But Brown and Wood’s treatment shows it’s naïve to think it has been stamped out. The SNL skit reveals misogyny lives on in supposedly liberal institutions and that old habits die hard.