In this partisan age, where everything is either this or that, where everyone has to take sides, I chose mine. Amy Lou Wood, the star of White Lotus, is now world-famous, and she was absolutely right to criticize the legendary American entertainment satire show Saturday Night Live for making a joke about her teeth.
Our special relationship has been under enough pressure without falling into the stereotype of British people gnashing their teeth. I still have a hard time with the “British smile collection” gag on The Simpsons, which is why I floss my teeth every day.
If you haven’t seen it, the SNL joke is actually part of a skit that pokes fun at the Trump administration. (Because if there’s anything that can curb the rise of the right wing, it’s parody.) In the show, a White Lotus character hangs out with people around Robert F. Kennedy, who mention fluoride, and a Wood-like character asks, “What’s that?”
This is interesting at first glance, because if there’s one thing that transcends White Lotus, it’s Wood’s smile. I haven’t seen White Lotus myself, but I know three things. It’s set in Thailand, it stars Arnie Schwarzenegger’s son, and one of the highlights of the film is Wood’s gap in his teeth.
However, on closer inspection, the joke isn’t funny. First, fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that’s added to toothpaste and water to keep teeth healthy. The premise of the joke is therefore that Wood’s teeth are unhealthy, which they are not. The joke is fundamentally dishonest, and as a result, the initial laughs are followed by a wave of shame that seems to bring down the star of a global hit TV series.
Secondly, if British people do have “bad” teeth, it’s not because of a lack of fluoride, we’re full of it. Hell, I think they even put fluoride in their cider now. It’s because the dental services provided by the NHS through contracts, known as “general dental services”, are extremely complicated and considered impractical. It’s easier to find someone to do a free gut check than to find someone to check your mouth. But with that premise, it’s hard to tell a joke in three seconds.
After watching the show, Wood took to social media to call the sketch “mean and unfunny.” There’s a lot to like here. Some of the jokes are funny, some are mean, some are both funny and mean, and, as Wood says, some are both mean and unfunny. It’s best to avoid those.
As a professional punchline finder, I think comedy lines aren’t that complicated. If you’re telling the truth and the angle is clever enough, the joke is worth telling. If a joke only works if you’re blind to the fact that it’s based on a fallacy, then it should probably stay on a Post-it note on the writers’ room wall. But if these lowbrow jokes are occasionally overlooked, they’re also a reminder that comedy writers are not perfect, that a cultural vacuum can confuse reality with prejudice, and that the power of celebrity response means that such transgressions can’t go unpunished.
Ultimately, the skit says more about America’s obsession with having teeth as straight and white as Trump’s swing than it does about Wood’s teeth. So she was absolutely right to criticize them. But there’s one more thing the SNL writers need to consider: If we’re talking about Wood’s characterization today, and not the other points they were trying to make — about anti-vaxxers, illegal deportations, ridiculous tariffs and a collapsing economy — they seem to have missed the mark. In this case, another casualty is satire itself.
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