‘SNL’s Darrell Hammond Wrote a Bill Clinton Sketch — With Bill Clinton
Do sitting U.S. presidents become pals with the Saturday Night Live comics who impersonate them?
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Surprisingly, the answer is sometimes yes. Gerald Ford did a clumsy “I’m Gerald Ford and you’re not” to show America he was in on Chevy Chase’s joke (even though he really wasn’t). Dana Carvey and the first George Bush struck up an unlikely friendship, with Bush inviting the comic to the Oval Office to cheer up his staff after he lost to Bill Clinton in 1992.
As for Clinton? He took the next step, inviting his SNL doppelgänger Darrell Hammond to write comedy with him. “I’m in the Oval Office in full Clinton drag, with the fake putty nose and the whole thing,” Hammond told Howard Stern back in 2001. “He wanted me to play a clone in a sketch he was doing for the Washington Correspondents’ (Dinner).”
Clinton even wanted Hammond’s help writing the sketch, the comic told Stern. “I didn’t think that was what was going to happen, but lo and behold, you walk in and he’s like, ‘Do you think yada yada yada would be funny if I said that?’” (Remember, Clinton was in office when Seinfeld ruled prime time.)
Hammond believes Clinton would have made a great comedian. “His jokes worked really well,” Hammond told Stern. “And not only that, he was a really good stand-up. This cat’s pretty good with the spoken word.”
Stern wanted to know if it was a strictly work situation or if Hammond struck up a friendship with the president. “Friends in the sense that once he sent me a box of M&M’s,” said Hammond. “When my baby was born two days later, she got a letter from him: ‘Dear Mia, welcome to this world. Because in this next century, every person matters, north and south, east and west.’”
Hammond shared some of his secrets for developing a killer Clinton impression, including studying videotapes to pinpoint the Clinton’s mannerisms. Along the way, he discovered 37 hand gestures.
“You picked up 37 different hand gestures,” marveled Stern.
“I quit at 37,” Hammond replied.
One other key was Hammond realizing that Clinton was also doing an impression. “When I was learning Clinton, I learned it by doing (John F.) Kennedy’s inaugural address because I realized that Clinton was doing Kennedy,” Hammond explained.
Stern could see it, noting the similarities between the two presidents’ hand gestures. “The only difference is that, as Clinton explained the time that I was with him, ‘Kennedy’s hand went down, mine goes up. I ascend, he descends.’”
Lorne Michaels agrees with Stern that Hammond’s Clinton was uncanny. “Darrell inhabits characters. His Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton,” Michaels said in SNL oral history Live From New York. “When you saw Clinton, we could not not think of Darrell.”
