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1 day ago
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In these partisan times, when all is binary and everyone must pick a side, I have chosen mine. Aimee Lou Wood, she of The White Lotus and thus now instantly recognisable worldwide, is absolutely right to call out Saturday Night Live, the legendary US entertainment and satire show, for making jokes about her teeth. The special relationship is under enough strain without having to lean into old stereotypes about British gnashers. I am still reeling from the Big Book of British Smiles gag in The Simpsons and I continue to floss every day because of it.
The SNL joke, if you are yet to see it, is part of a wider sketch making fun of the Trump administration. (Because if one thing has been proven to quell the march of the right, it’s parody.) A White Lotus character is mashed up with someone adjacent to Robert F Kennedy, he mentions fluoride, and a Wood-esque character says “What’s that?”
It’s a funny joke, initially, because if one thing has transcended The White Lotus, it’s Wood’s smile. I haven’t seen The White Lotus myself. But I know three things about it. It’s set in Thailand, Arnie Schwarzenegger’s son is in it, and one of its main talking points has been the gaps between her teeth.
However, it’s not a funny joke when you pull at its threads. Firstly, fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that is added to toothpaste and water because it helps keep teeth healthy. The premise of the joke, therefore, is that Wood’s teeth are unhealthy, which they absolutely are not. The joke is fundamentally dishonest and as a result, that initial laugh is followed by the shame of punching down at someone who is the star of a worldwide TV smash hit.
Secondly, if British people do have “bad” teeth, it’s not because of a lack of fluoride, of which we are full to the brim. Heck, I think they even put it in our cider now. It’s because of a NHS that provides dentistry through contracts known as general dental services that are really complicated and thought of as not fit for purpose. It’s easier to find someone who will give you a free check-up of your gut health than it is to find someone to look into your mouth. But then it’s hard to tell a joke with that premise in three seconds.
Wood saw the show, took to social media, and dubbed the skit “mean and unfunny”. There’s a lot there to unpack. Some jokes are funny, some are mean, some are funny and mean and, as Wood says, some are mean and unfunny. That’s the area best avoided.
As someone who professionally mines funny, I think the lines in comedy aren’t that complicated. If you’re telling the truth, and your angle is clever enough, the joke is worth telling. If the joke only works if you turn a blind eye to the fact it is based on a fallacy, it is probably something that should remain on a Post-it note on a writers’ room wall. But, if these poor-taste gags sometimes escape, they serve to remind us that comedy writers aren’t perfect, cultural vacuums confuse actualities with bias, and the right to reply that famous people have means that this kind of transgression is not something you can get away with.
At the end of the day, the skit told us more about the American obsession with having Tippex-white teeth as straight as Trump’s golf swing than it did Wood’s teeth. For that reason, she’s completely right to call them out. But here’s another thing for the SNL writers to consider: if we’re talking today about depictions of Wood’s teeth, and not the other points they were trying to make – about antivaxxers, illegal deportations, nonsensical tariffs and a collapsing economy – they appear to have missed the target. And in that case, the other victim is satire itself.
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Athena Kugblenu is a writer and comedian
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