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EDITORIAL:
SNL's Will Ferrell
We salute the American people in their recent selection of George W. Bush as president.
Initially, the rationalization behind Mr. Bush's victory puzzled us. Although the Texan handily captured the coveted ignorant white trash vote, very few people seemed positioned to benefit from a Bush administration. (In fact, this group was limited to only one person: Dr. Carter Theodore III, a moneyed anti-environment enthusiast whose daughter was recently murdered by a mentally retarded 11-year-old black man.)
In the months following the election, The Lowbrow Reader has recognized the foresight of the American voting populace. From Justice Rehnquist to Justice Scalia, the American people have spoken not for a George W. Bush administration, but rather for a Will Ferrell one.
Throughout the long campaign season, Ferrell's portrayal of Bush on Saturday Night Live ranked heads and tails above the work of his colleague, Darrell Hammond, who sent up Democratic candidate Al Gore. While Hammond's earlier work as SNL's resident Bill Clinton elegantly tapped our former scoundrel-in-chief's smirky seductiveness, his Gore impression failed to penetrate the Vice President's surface. Hammond's Gore was stiff, tedious, pedantic -- a newspaper cartoon sprung to half-life. Missing was Mr. Gore's real gaucheness: the tentative attempts at loosening his tie, the plastic eyes that gave Midwest voters the creeps, the caustic inferno that his handlers neglected to quench in the first debate. With little muscle to support the accent, wig, make-up and hand-gestures, Hammond's Gore made for suitable imitation but limp parody.
Ferrell, on the other hand, never bothered looking much like George W. Bush. Although his presidential impression wasn't quite as raw as Chevy Chase's work on the early Saturday Night Live -- Chase isolated elements of President Ford's persona but never invoked his subject's appearance or voice -- Ferrell succeeded in attacking Bush from the perspective of a comedian rather than an actor. Ask Ferrell's Bush a question and watch his subject's brain process the information in agonizing slow motion; listen to his response and hear Beavis and Butthead filtered through a layer of Connecticut, Connecticut hubris. This is the essence of George W. Bush, who will guide America into its inevitable plunge -- at least on Saturday night, we can go to bed knowing things are safe in the able hands of our newly elected fool, Will Ferrell. May he guide us into the gulf with a grin.
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