The actors weigh on Saturday Night Live Sketch

After the British actress Aimee Lou Wood called a Sketch Saturday Night Live (SNL) who invaded her using exaggerated prosthetic teeth “Mean and Funnny”, the Impressionists told BBC News how they crossed the line between being funny and offensive.

It all started with five minutes on NBC last Saturday evening.

Entitled The White Potus – A Spin on Hit Hbo Dark Comedy The White Lotus – An SNL sketch represented US President Donald Trump, his family and his best team spending time in a tropical fictitious hotel.

After jokes showing Eric Trump mixing a Gold Rolex and Ivanka Trump watch rejecting a spiritual appeal to abandon material wealth, the character of Wood White Lotus Chelsea is represented by Sarah Sherman, member of the distribution, using a pronounced accent and large teeth.

In response to a comment made by a character playing the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, she asks: “Fluoride? What is it?”

The mineral is added to certain water supplies and toothpickers to help prevent dental caries.

For the star of the Ringers Dead Ringers of BBC Radio 4, 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 white lotus sketch, said Ravens, since Wood’s cast was rented for a missing character “these all American and false teeth”.

“Following all of this, she talked about the way she was the victim of intimidation at school and the butt of jokes. So you think:” Why would you do this joke “?”

This meant that by making fun of the appearance of Wood, the sketch “struck”, explains Ravens.

“You could joke the appearance of Donald Trump because you certainly do not hit the most powerful man in the Western world.”

Ronni Ancona, co-scriptwriter and star of the television series in the early 2000s, The Big Impression, said that she “could see” that writers were also trying to take stock of American health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s commit to eliminating fluoride from drinking water.

But in doing so, “they would have made this tenuous link between the fluorine and Aimee Lou teeth. It’s a bit cheap,” she told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday.

After the broadcast of the show, Wood, 31, said that she was “not slim” and understood that SNL was a “caricature”.

“But all the joke was about fluoride,” she wrote on Sunday. “I have large gap teeth and not bad teeth.”

Later, in an article on social networks, she said: “I had excuses for SNL.”

However, Francine Lewis, an actress whose imitations have earned her a large part on social networks, says that the goal of the American program is to “take Mick”.

Although she can sympathize with a “embarrassed” person being the target of a sketch, Lewis adds that she thinks that Wood’s response was “too sensitive”.

In his own celebrity impressions, which include the television stars Gemma Collins and Stacey Solomon, Lewis filled a pillow to seem physically bigger and put cotton wool on his teeth “to make them really white and detach a little”.

In recent times, the two fans and some of its objectives have been offended.

“I don’t know if it’s just the new generation of young people who take offense at each little thing,” she said.

“People who say you are a troll, you are a tyrant … I find myself hiding at celebrity events because I think” Oh I do their impression, they might not love me “.”

But she thinks that identity identity is actually a marker of someone’s popularity and fame, saying that “it means you have arrived”.

Rather than adapting his impressions, Lewis is firmly in his conviction that “to make comedy funny, unfortunately, you must go beyond the brand”.

It is a point of view shared by Steve Nallon, known for having came the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the satirical television program spitting image.

“What caricaturists do by nature … is exaggerated physicality. If a caricaturist is prevented from doing this, there is no need for him to be a caricaturist,” he said.

During the 1980s, one of his objectives – the former Labor Minister Roy Hattersley – laughed at a slight obstacle to speech, with water gushing from his mouth while he was talking.

“The joke was that Roy Hattesley Spice,” said Nallon, who adds that Hattesley would have taken on board with the joke after initially taken office.

For Nallon, those who are in the public will always be a fair game. “Maybe it’s not a bad lesson to learn that you have to make the mickey removed from time to time,” he said.

But times have changed. Ravens says that “people are much more sensitive” to target certain aspects of the appearances and ways of people “than before in my career, for example, and I rightly think so”.

This is not the first time that SNL has criticized their representations.

This does not mean that comedy is lost, says Ravens. In the political satire – which was the main push of the SNL sketch – a very good satire impression what the person says, rather than simply fixing what they look like or how they deliver it, she adds.

During our telephone interview, it is perfectly carried out in an impression of the former British Prime Minister Theresa May, but notes that the simple fact of speaking in a tense way, “is not good for a line”.

“You pique pompomosity and you expose hypocrisy. This is the satire point.”

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