Laugh so as not to cry

In honor of the debates, and in hopes of beating Entertainment Weekly to the punch, LYTrules.com presents…THE TEN BEST SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE IMPERSONATIONS OF PRESIDENTIAL CONTENDERS

10. AL FRANKEN as PAT ROBERTSON. Yes, Robertson ran for president back in 1988, and sans glasses, Franken actually looks a bit like the grinning televangelist. Sounded like him too.

9. PHIL HARTMAN as ADMIRAL JAMES STOCKDALE. Ross Perot’s clearly senile running mate was already close enough to Hartman’s Frankenstein that this was just a natural fit.

8. DAN AYKROYD as BOB DOLE. Dole impersonations are hard to screw up — Robert Smigel did a pretty good one on Conan O’Brien’s show simply by superimposing his own lips on a photo of the real Dole. Aykroyd actually looked like Bob, though: You know it, I know it, and the American people know it.

7. CHEVY CHASE as GERALD FORD. Genius simply because Chase made no effort to look or sound anything like Ford — he just acted like a doofus and kept falling over stuff. A gambit that paid off.

6. AL FRANKEN as PAUL TSONGAS. Tsongas didn’t last long on the national radar, and wasn’t that well known when Franken spoofed him, but once he did, speaking in a muppet-like voice and proclaiming to a sci-fi convention crowd that he was the real Star Trek candidate, it became impossible to take the real Tsongas seriously ever again.

5. DANA CARVEY as H. ROSS PEROT. Perot would seem to be God’s gift to satirists, but then so would Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and SNL dropped the ball with those two (Will Ferrell’s Bush and Phil Hartman’s Reagan never impressed me; the new Bush guy has some mannerisms down but doesn’t look like him at all). Carvey was hard-pushed to be funnier and more insane than the real-life Perot, but somehow he managed. When he debated himself as both Perot and Bush, he hit it out of the park.

4. DARRELL HAMMOND as BILL CLINTON. There were several Clintons — the first, Phil Hartman, was pretty bad. Hartman was a funny guy, but he only got half the equation in Clinton’s high-pitched voice, seemingly incapable of adding the necessary Southern accent. Michael McKean did a decent “defiant Bill” for about a year, but Hammond got everything right, including the quintessential lip-biting and bedroom eyes.

3. DARRELL HAMMOND as AL GORE. Hammond’s on a roll! It’s easy, and obvious, to make fun of Gore’s monotone, but Hammond also nailed the Tennessee accent, the vaguely effeminate undertone, and even Gore’s specific breathing patterns. He also turned the metaphor of the “lock box” into a total national joke.

2. NORM MACDONALD as BOB DOLE. Before Mike Myers created Dr. Evil, Norm portayed Dole as a failed evil mastermind who just wanted to be loved. As Dole, he joined the cast of MTV’s The Real World, bit the head off a live chicken, and engaged in increasingly surreal sketches that quickly became the best thing on the show. The real Dole finally confronted Norm on TV once the election was over, and accused him of doing a pale imitation of Dan Aykroyd’s Dole. Wrong — Norm’s Dole was at least as much a thwarted supervillain as he was a direct impression of Dole.

1. DANA CARVEY as GEORGE H. W. BUSH. How do I know this is the best? Try to remember Bush the Elder as president, and I’m betting one of the first things that come to mind will be a Carvey-coined catchphrase like “Not gonna daaaait” or “Wouldn’t be prudent…” Part of the genius of the whole thing is that Carvey’s Bush wasn’t exactly a direct impersonation — he always had a big idiot grin on his face, even though the real Bush rarely smiled in public — but the caricature came to outshine the real guy. That’s brilliance.