9 ‘Saturday Night Live’ Impressions That Didn’t Have the Real Celebs Laughing

Some celebrities love being impersonated on Saturday Night Live. Hillary Clinton said the “amazing” Kate McKinnon does Hillary Clinton better than Hillary Clinton does Hillary Clinton. Similarly, Bernie Sanders wanted to use Larry David at his political rallies, saying David “does better” than Sander does.

The celebs below, however, didn’t find their SNL impressions funny. From Barbara Walters taking offense to Gilda Radner’s impersonation to Aimee Lou Woods’ frustration with a recent White Lotus spoof, here are stars who spoke out against the show.

Barbara Walters

Gilda Radner amped up Barbara Walters’ Boston accent during her many appearances as the television journalist on SNL. And the real-life “Baba Wawa” wasn’t a fan — at first, anyway.

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“I hated the Gilda Radner ‘Baba Wawa’ until I walked into my daughter’s room one night, and she was up watching it,” Walters said in a 2000 Television Academy Foundation interview. “It was a Saturday night. I said, ‘What are you doing up?’ and she said, ‘I’m watching Baba Wawa, mama.’ And I said, ‘Well, look what she’s doing,’ And my daughter said, ‘Oh, Mommy, lighten up.’ And then I did.”

Sarah Palin

In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Tina Fey portrayed Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on SNL, leading to the now-immortal line, “I can see Russia from my house!” Eventually, the real Palin showed up at Studio 8H to appear alongside her SNL alter-ego.

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“I know that they portrayed me as an idiot, and I hated that, and I wanted to come on the show and counter some of that,” Palin told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “If I ran into Tina Fey again today, I would say: ‘You need to at least pay for my kids’ braces or something from all the money that you made off of pretending that you’re me! My goodness, you capitalized on that! Can’t you contribute a little bit? Jeez!’”

Mark Wahlberg

In the same sketch where the real Palin showed up, the real Mark Wahlberg also made a cameo to complain to Lorne Michaels about the sketch with Andy Samberg playing him talking to animals. The actor had also complained about the impression to the press.

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“Someone showed it to me on YouTube. It wasn’t like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, that’s for sure,” Wahlberg told the New York Post. “And Saturday Night Live hasn’t been funny for a long time. They’ve asked me to do the show a ton of times. I used to watch it when Eddie Murphy was there and Joe Piscopo and Bill Murray. I don’t even know who’s on the show now.”

Kathie Lee Gifford

Kathie Lee Gifford squawked in 2009 after Kristen Wiig imitated her singing her song “Everyone Has a Story” during one of Wiig’s many appearances as the talk show host on SNL. (See a similar sketch below.)

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“Can’t she get another job and go off and do something else?” Gifford said on Today at the time. “Everyone seems to enjoy it. I, personally, I don’t think it’s that funny. … I think I’m going to sue her for ruining my song!”

Anderson Cooper

Anderson Cooper decried the “queened-up” impression of him that Jon Rudnitsky displayed in a 2015 SNL sketch riffing on a Democratic debate during the then-ongoing presidential race.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival

“I didn’t think it was very good,” the CNN host said on Watch What Happens Live, per Entertainment Weekly. “Seth Meyers did a spoof of me years ago that was really funny, and I’m all for being spoofed. It was like the only thing [Rudnitsky] knew about me was that I was gay, so that’s sort of what he went with. I got a little Truman Capote vibe, which I thought was odd.”

Meghan McCain

Aidy Bryant played Meghan McCain, the “princess of Arizona,” in a series of parodies of The View on SNL between 2018 and 2019. But the television personality said the impressions did a number on her mental health.

Lou Rocco/ABC

“People really loved it when SNL dunked on me, and it was not flattering or kind. And, by the way, they were pretty nice to the rest of the [View] cast, just not great to me,” McCain said in a 2021 Rolling Stone interview. “I feel like I have a pretty healthy sense of humor. But I think if people knew what it has done to me mentally, emotionally, the toll it’s taken on me, the depression that has followed … just the dark spirals. I felt like for a while that I was just the laughingstock of the country.”

Carole Baskin

In a 2020 sketch, SNL star Chloe Fineman played a rapping Carole Baskin in a MasterClass parody, but the impersonation didn’t have the real-life Big Cat Rescue CEO purring.

Netflix

“I could just slap that woman!” Baskin said of Fineman on the podcast The Pet Show that year. “This whole, like, ‘My kitty, meow, meow, kitty, meow,’ and she would just say all these really weird words all in a row. And so that became really popular, I guess, in popular culture and people wanted me to talk like that on the [Cameo app]. And I’m like, ‘I have no idea how to talk like that. That is not how I speak.’”

Donald Trump

James Austin Johnson has played Donald Trump on SNL countless times now… not that he has Trump’s presidential seal of approval.

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“A bad show that’s not funny or smart,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2022, after Johnson portrayed him answering a phone call on the toilet. “[Lorne Michaels] is angry and exhausted, the show even more so. It was once good, never great, but now, like the Late Night Losers who have lost their audience but have no idea why, it is over for SNL — a great thing for America!”

Aimee Lou Wood

Sarah Sherman — and a set of prosthetic teeth — played Aimee Lou Wood in a 2025 sketch riffing on The White Lotus and Donald Trump’s administration.

HBO

Following that episode, Wood said on Instagram she found the sketch “mean and unfunny” — and she specifically called out the show for implying she had bad teeth instead of just big teeth.

“Yes, take the p*** for sure — that’s what the show is about — but there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way?” she wrote. “I don’t mind caricature … [but] the rest of the skit was punching up and I/Chelsea was the only one punched down on.”

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