Comedians leave voters with great impression

Although it can’t be verified, there is a better than even chance that, shortly after George Washington was elected first President of the United States in 1789, someone did an impression of him. It’s just human nature. The wooden teeth, the powdered wig, the cherry tree and the ax, the right hand tucked inside the shirt, it was all fair game for some audacious jester of the day.

Naturally, records of such performances are sketchy at best, because “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central and YouTube didn’t come along until much, much later. Yet clearly, throughout history, whenever an individual stepped into the presidential arena, he or she could be reasonably sure that somewhere another individual was copying them for comic effect.  Comedian Vaughn Meader made an entire career in the early 1960s out of his startling impression of President John F. Kennedy — a career that ended at the same moment that JFK was assassinated.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” often encounters faux Lincolns in stovepipe hats and beards along the book promotion trail. But in Lincoln’s day, she pointed out, written accounts substituted for today’s Tina Fey and Frank Caliendo.

“Certainly in the print media there were accounts of how candidates walked, how they talked, their mannerisms,” said Goodwin, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for “No Ordinary Time,” a book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and has also written books about Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedys. “The opposition papers would make note of Lincoln’s bad grammar, how he used to tell dirty stories. But there wasn’t the mimicking the way they do it now, how they have the look down.

Video   Seth Meyers on 'SNL' and politics Oct. 7: "Saturday Night Live" head writer and Weekend Update co-anchor Seth Meyers talks to MSNBC's Tamron Hall about the show's political impact and Thursday's primetime special. MSNBC

“In the 19th century, in the days before photography was widespread, a lot of people didn’t even know what these people looked like. An impersonator in those days would have less power.”

Power. That’s one of the lures for someone to seek the presidency in the first place. And oddly, sometimes the presidential impersonator can have a unique and unintended type of power.

Fey’s recent turn as Sarah Palin is all the rage in impersonation circles. Although technically the performance is not a copy of someone who is president, or even who might become president — John McCain would have to win the election, he would have to become incapacitated, blah blah blah — Fey’s Palin is so eerily close to the real thing that it might actually stick in the minds of voters, for better or worse.

“Tina Fey is now so connected with Sarah Palin that it creates a melding in people’s minds,” Goodwin explained, “and now there is more of a sense of Tina than there is of Sarah.”

Dana Edelson / AP Actress Tina Fey has captivated a nation of television viewers with her spot-on impersonation of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.

Richard Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, said Fey’s performance stands apart from the usual impersonation of a contender in the presidential race because it’s “dead-on” and because, unlike most impersonators, she chose not to exaggerate Palin’s mannerisms and speech too much.

As a result, he said, Fey was able to successfully accomplish political commentary rather than simply elicit chuckles. “Certainly in the last several years, ‘Saturday Night Live’ offered funny impersonations, but they didn’t do much to help shape the impression of the president. They didn’t do much serious political satire like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert,” he said.

What Fey’s Palin also did, he said, was create interest leading up to the now infamous Katie Couric interview, which enabled voters to scrutinize the Republican vice presidential candidate more closely.

“It made sure everybody in the country watched that interview,” Thompson said. “It was on the ‘CBS Evening News, the lowest-rated news show. ‘SNL’ became the delivery system for that CBS interview.

“It was important for people to see that interview. It was a train wreck. Here was someone aspiring to high office who was having trouble completing sentences and answering questions.”

“Saturday Night Live” has a long and storied history of lampooning the chief executive. Chevy Chase stumbled and tumbled as Gerald Ford. Dan Aykroyd was gloriously over the top as a droopy-faced Richard Nixon. Dana Carvey was deliriously goofy as George H.W. Bush. Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond each created brilliant versions of Bill Clinton. Suffice to say Will Ferrell played George W. Bush as homespun rather than erudite.

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