Want proof that the TV writers’ strike is really over? Saturday Night Live is back in the controversy business. In its first new show of the year, SNL chose non-black cast member Fred Armisen to portray Barack Obama in a presidential debate skit. It wasn’t exactly Sinéad O’Connor ripping up a picture of the pope. Still, some bloggers and other critics thought that making up Armisen—whose background is German, Venezuelan, and Japanese—as a black man was offensive. “They couldn’t find an African-American performer who was funny enough?” asked Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Tribune. Invoking the word “minstrel,” Hannah Pool wrote in the London Guardian, “If you can’t do a believable impression of Obama without face paints, then you shouldn’t be doing one at all.”
That will come as news to anyone who thought that actors are supposed to transcend their own skin. Besides, wasn’t this issue settled in 1991? That was when the distinctly Caucasian Jonathan Pryce, after igniting a firestorm of protest, won a Tony for playing a Eurasian in Miss Saigon on Broadway. A few years earlier, Linda Hunt got an Oscar for playing a half-Australian, half-Chinese man in The Year of Living Dangerously. Armisen’s portrayal is in the best SNL tradition, too; Darrell Hammond and Billy Crystal, both white, played, respectively, Jesse Jackson and Sammy Davis Jr. And who could forget Will Ferrell as Janet Reno, or Amy Poehler as Kim Jong II? Maybe we should just ask Obama what he thinks. As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, he’d probably have some opinion on the subject. -Thomas Vinciguerra
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Team of bitter rivalsOpinion Will internal tensions tear apart Trump's unlikely alliance?
-
6 elegant homes in the Mediterranean styleFeature Featuring an award-winning mansion in Colorado and an Alhambra palace-inspired home in Washington
-
Harriet Tubman made a general 161 years after raidSpeed Read She was the first woman to oversee an American military action during a time of war
-
Editor's letter: Dealing with the fiscal clifffeature Lincoln, the new film by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, is a timely reminder that sometimes we must cast off our sanctimonies and compromise to get a big job done.
-
Editor's Letter: America's heartbeat
feature Bruce Springsteen’s new single, “We Take Care of Our Own,” could easily serve as the soundtrack for reporter Dan Barry’s story about a little town in Maine, where neighbors depend on one another to survive the long, cold winters.
-
Editor's Letter: Of hearth and home
feature In spite of all the turmoil during the last few years, Americans continue to think that buying a home is “an important part of the American dream.”
-
Editor's Letter: If the Tea Party were black
feature For the sake of this exercise, imagine that members of Congress in March had been surrounded by thousands of angry African-Americans, yelling insults at white, Southern politicians.
-
Editor's Letter: It seemed like a good idea at the time
feature Dear Reader: Okay, okay, we should not have sacrificed the Music Page for the Puzzle Page.
-
Editor's Letter
feature White House Press Secretary Dana Perino should have gone with “no comment.” Engaging in some good-natured bantering about her job on the NPR news quiz show last week, Perino confessed that when a question about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis came up during
-
Editor's Letter
feature When I’m in a masochistic mood, I survey the 8:03 into the city to see how many of my fellow drones are passing the time by reading. Only about half the people have their noses in newspapers, magazines, and (rarely) books. The rest are either dozing or en