It’s been a week since SNL‘s controversial parody of The White Lotus aired, but it’s still dominating the pop cultural conversation.
Brief recap: During last week’s Jon Hamm-hosted episode, the long-running sketch show aired a White Lotus parody called “The White Potus.” (Subtlety has never been this show’s strong suit.)
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Part of the parody involved cast member Sarah Sherman portraying a character that resembled White Lotus cast member Aimee Lou Wood. When Jon Hamm-as-RFK Jr. made a reference to taking fluoride out of drinking water, Sarah’s character replied through huge fake teeth, “Fluoride? What’s that?”
Aimee was not happy. She took to her IG story the day after SNL aired to call the portrayal “mean and unfunny,” and later claimed that SNL had offered her an apology (which, for what it’s worth, there seems to be conflicting reports on).
“However she reacted to that sketch is completely valid,” he said in an interview with Extra. “With parody, you kind of forget the sort of human, emotional cost that it sort of extols on someone.”
“Everyone at SNL is just a fan of the show, obviously a fan of her. We just think that she should be so proud of the work that she put into the season, it was just water cooler television again that we desperately have a craving for. I feel like it’s this thing that we tend to forget sometimes and this is a reminder and it seems like she has spoken to people at the show about it and hopefully there’s room to sort of move on from it.”
Bowen also specified that the entire kerfuffle serves as a reminder to SNL‘s writers that sometimes their work has an impact that they don’t quite expect.
“You need those reminders every now and then that parody can go too far sometimes and that we, as comedians, can take account for that instead of banging our foot and saying that we should be able to say whatever we want,” he said. “That’s just culture, it’s not PC or woke culture, it’s just culture.”
Maybe this’ll be the last of this story…we’ll see!