Nov. 8, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of Chevy Chase’s comedic portrayal of U.S. President Gerald Ford as a bumbling klutz on Saturday Night Live. Nowadays, we expect SNL to mock the president. (There’s even speculation going into each administration about who will play the president.) But when Chase did it for the first time, it was groundbreaking. In fact, in the years before SNL, mocking the president on what was still the relatively new mass medium of television often had to overcome resistance from network censors and presidential pressure alike.
In the early 1960s, NBC executives would not allow a comedy sketch about President John F. Kennedy to appear on its Art Carney Show. As a network spokesperson explained, "we thought it would have been improper to have performers actually portraying the President and his wife," adding that the "decision was based on a matter of good taste."
The networks were similarly reluctant to mock Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson. In 1964, NBC imported the British parody show That Was the Week That Was, which was specifically developed in England to "prick the pomposity of public figures." Although the show did get in an occasional poke at Johnson, NBC censors constantly battled the show’s producers over LBJ jokes. NBC also took the step of suspending all political humor on the show around the 1964 presidential election.
Another show that tried to make fun of the president was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. The show, which premiered on CBS in 1967, even got pushback from Johnson himself. One skit that mocked Johnson prompted Johnson to tell CBS Chairman William Paley in a late-night call, "get those b------- off my back." Paley asked the show to go easier on the president.
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When Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, the brothers pledged to "lay off the jokes" about the incoming president for a time. But that pledge did not stop them from having the comedian David Frye impersonate Nixon on the show. Still, the show was cancelled in April of 1969, over a host of controversies, including sex and religion jokes, as well as political ones.
On the final episode, the brothers read a letter from former President Johnson, claiming that he had been ok with being mocked: "It is part of the price of leadership to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to us. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate humor." Although the words were admirable, it was a little hard to take Johnson seriously given his earlier intervention with Paley.
As for Frye, with the show canceled, he continued to impersonate Nixon on comedy albums. But even here, the networks continued to obstruct. In 1973, the three major networks refused to accept advertising in New York for Frye’s Watergate-related album. According to a WABC-TV spokesman, "It's such a serious matter we've decided not to accept advertising for any comedy material relating to Watergate."
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With this backdrop in mind, SNL must have known that it was taking a risk when it had Chase send up the president on live TV. Chase’s portrayal went beyond light jokes at the president’s expense. Chase was pratfalling around the Oval Office, holding up a glass rather than a phone to his ear, and pouring water from a pitcher onto the papers on his desk. Yet the show not only survived but it thrived.
That first SNL presidential skit was a watershed moment that helped fundamentally change the relationship between the American people and the president. The 1960s and 1970s had brought the U.S. presidency down in the eyes of the American people. The Kennedy assassination shocked Americans who did not realize the president was so vulnerable. The Johnson years punctured the bubble of presidential honesty about foreign affairs. Nixon’s Watergate scandal punctured a similar bubble about domestic affairs. And then the unelected Ford came to power and almost immediately pardoned Nixon for Watergate. The decision is lauded in retrospect, but was controversial at the time.
Chase’s opening the show as Ford on that day in 1975 brought mocking presidents out from the narrowcast world of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl comedy routines and more regularly into the mass media. That first SNL sketch ushered in a period in which presidents became both closer to and further from the American people. Mockery can keep physically-removed politicians less distant from everyday citizens. As a result, presidents are now nearly ubiquitous in a world of TV and social media, with constant mockery taking them down a peg—or more. In this world, even a short presidential disappearance of a day or two can lead to unfounded rumors of a presidential demise.
At the same time, presidents are further from the American people in that the security bubble around them is so much tighter. The White House resembles an armed camp. Presidential motorcades are unapproachable and presidents are hard-pressed to continue to communicate regularly with friends. George W. Bush gave up e-mail. Obama resisted pressure to give up his BlackBerry.
In our current Chevy Chase-enabled world, presidential mockery is a constant. While Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel learned that presidents and network suits can still target an individual comic or show, those are unfortunate exceptions rather than the rule, and even Kimmel’s exile lasted barely a week. The continuing mockery of the president on Kimmel, as well as South Park, Jon Stewart, social media and a host of other places, shows that the genie of mass market, largely uncensored, mockery of presidents unleashed by Chevy Chase on SNL a half century ago is not going back in the bottle, and for that we should be grateful.
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