Saturday Night Live (SNL) has always been a sorry affair, prime time proof that the American sense of humour is remarkably underdeveloped. You could find more amusing sketches playing out in the dingiest of regional British comedy clubs. But last Saturday’s offering was truly dire, nothing short of a cruel and unprompted attack on the UK and our new national treasure — Aimee Lou Wood.
In their latest grimly unwitty offering, The White Potus, comics and stars such as Scarlett Johansson and Jon Hamm do a ropey send-up of the Trump administration as White Lotus season 3 characters. Hamm plays US Secretary of Health RFK Jr as a Walton Goggins stand-in, opposite Sarah Sherman as... just Aimee Lou Wood.
With offensive prosthetic teeth and a terrible attempt at a Mancunian accent, Sherman gurns her way through the scene. It’s supposedly funny because RFK Jr wants to take fluoride out of the water and a British person wouldn’t know what that is because we have bad teeth ha ha ha.
Are we to believe that America’s brightest and best comedians find a pair of garish gnashers side-splittingly amusing? There’s a country that gave the world tooth-rotting beverages in vast potion sizes, and it’s not England. Jokes aside, it’s a bit rich to take potshots at the British smile and accent in a sketch which is all about how President Trump and his cronies are tanking the world economy.
While politicians’ personal appearances are fair game — their public image is a key part of how they project their politics to the masses — a young entertainer’s looks shouldn’t be. Especially someone like Wood, who has been open and vulnerable about her insecurities in a notoriously image-obsessed industry. The actor has been candid in the press about growing up working class, being bullied for her appearance, and her experiences with body dysmorphia and eating disorders.
Having won a Bafta for her work on Sex Education, she was cast in the third season of The White Lotus, an exciting opportunity for any actor. But when someone told her that showrunner Mike White had “fought” to cast her, Wood was plagued by insecurities. “It was honestly from the nicest place,” Wood told GQ. “But my little head goes: ‘HBO didn’t want me. And I know why HBO didn’t want me, it’s because I'm ugly. Mike had to say ‘Please let me have the ugly girl!’”
Wood is gorgeous in many ways, and her unique smile is a huge part of her appeal. Britain has an illustrious history of producing some of the world’s most beautiful women with one-of-a-kind-smiles. Just look at Kate Moss with her signature pointy incisors, or Georgia May Jagger and her trademark tooth gap. Wood is now part of that canon.
The SNL sketch was sexist and bullying, and it’s only correct that they apologised when Wood called them out. But it also speaks to the bizarre and retrograde obsession with teeth in America.
The American press have already covered Wood’s smile with a gawping wonder that makes their nation seem unfortunately parochial. “Aimee Lou Wood’s Teeth Aren’t Just Charming — They’re Inspiring” trilled Vanity Fair. “The Novelty of Aimee Lou Wood’s Natural Smile” trumpeted The New York Times. Anyone would think Americans hadn’t seen normal teeth before — and perhaps they haven’t.
Joking that British people have “bad” teeth has always been an American punchline, our smiles satirised everywhere from Austin Powers to The Simpsons. Not only was it misogynistic and mean to target the actor, the “joke” was underpinned by classist assumptions about teeth, health and wealth. Uniform white teeth are a visual signifier that someone has regular access to a dentist — something that has become a growing problem here.
Yet the UK’s dental crisis pales in comparison to the US, a country where tens of millions of lower income people are living without dental insurance or access to oral healthcare. It’s a shocking cognitive dissonance that the same country where a 12-year-old boy was left to die for want of an $80 routine extraction valorises “the million dollar smile” being wielded by most Hollywood actors.
America’s obsession with bright and shiny movie-star teeth has always had a dark and rotten core. Veneers were invented for Hollywood. In the 1920s, Californian dentist Dr Charles Pincus created the first sets of fake tooth covers that could be temporarily attached to an actors teeth for filming, before developing an acrylic version that could be stuck on with denture glue.
This was a time when movie studios began to set the modern Western beauty standards in earnest, having their actors bleach, pluck and sculpt themselves with treatments and surgeries. Stars could even undergo a ghoulish dental procedure called “the buccal” (not to be confused with buccal fat removal, another recent trend) where their back molars were removed to give their cheeks a more sculpted and sunken appearance.
By the 1980s, advances in techniques meant that veneers could be more permanently bonded to people’s teeth. And where celebrity beauty trends begin, the masses follow, and veneers have spread far beyond the starry California enclaves. Increasing numbers of young people both sides of the pond are spending vast amounts of money to mess with their teeth in pursuit of a different oral aesthetic.
Sometimes a tooth veneer may be a medical necessity, but more often than not they are a gruesome project that permanently destroys healthy teeth and leaves the patient with a permanent financial commitment.
Dentists do not simply stick a gleaming façade onto existing teeth. They grind the tooth down, at minimum shaving down layers of irreplaceable protective enamel, at worst leaving a mouth full of stumpy pegs. How depressing and ironic that the pursuit of beauty should be so gross.
Many of those A-listers on the red carpet probably have a mouthful of scraggly nubbins behind the fake too-white too-bright chompers. If any of them fell on harder times, they could be left without the money to keep their megawatt smiles in their heads.
Veneers can lead to many painful and expensive complications, from tooth decay to gum disease, and in the worst cases the jawbone itself can deteriorate. The pain can be permanent and chronic, and people may either go into debt or choose cheaper options that are less regulated and carry higher risk of a botched job.
Ironically, most of the people in that SNL sketch probably have fake teeth themselves. Their careers may depend upon it. But mocking people who don’t live up to some fake standard of what teeth should look like while selling a false ideal is no joke.
Wood’s lovely smile must be protected at all costs. Comedy should be biting, but to be funny it should have a real target. In taking aim at her teeth, SNL revealed nobody is smiling about the ugly realities of dental politics.
