by America was a very different place back in 1975, when the first edition of Saturday Night Live hit television screens across the nation. Since the sketch show’s introduction into pop culture, multiple generations have passed, attitudes have changed, and, inevitably, there are quite a few SNL moments which haven’t stood the rest of time.
A core part of SNL’s humour, like virtually all forms of sketch and character-based comedy, has always been rooted in stereotypes. From the peanut farming days of Jimmy Carter to the terrifying fascist descent of Donald Trump, SNL has been parodying, playing upon, or contributing to an endless cacophony of stereotypes – with some dealt with more tactfully than others.
After all, stereotypes are the bread and butter of comedians and impressionists like Bill Hader, whose extensive eight-year run on the programme saw him tackle a wealth of different characters, impersonations, and accents.
Hader certainly earned his place in the SNL hall of fame, having created a litany of beloved characters, from Lyle Round to Stefon, and impersonated everybody from Tony Blair to Vincent Price. As anybody who has ever watched an entire episode of SNL can attest to, though, the show is a complex balance of hits and misses, and for all the legendary sketches that Hadar played a part in, there are a whole lot more that have been rightfully lost to the depths of obscurity.
Even Hader himself readily admits to the fact that some of his characters are best left in the past, namely the talk show host, Vinny Vedecci. Drawing upon just about every stereotype of Italian people that has ever surfaced, Vedecci interviewed various actors in a barrage of gibberish Italian, all the while making bizarre comments and smoking like a chimney in his trademark cream suit.
Vedecci was one of the very first characters that Hader created, using the same accent and mannerism which would act as the framework for the character in his audition for SNL in 2005. Ultimately, though, it wouldn’t be until a few years later that the Italian interviewer made his first appearance on the show, during an episode hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus; the first of eight total appearances between 2007 and 2010.
Although Vedecci certainly has his supporters, Hader has since come to regret the character somewhat. “An Italian woman told me she was offended by it,” he recalled to The Independent in 2023. “And I was like, ‘All I’m trying to do is the old comic staple, you know, gibberish and everything.’ And she was like, ‘Right, but my father spoke like that and he actually spoke Italian.’”
Seemingly, that was enough to open Hader’s eyes to the damaging nature of the stereotypes that Vedecci played upon. “Your sensibility changes when you get older. I don’t think I would do that again,” he admitted. Luckily for the comedian, he has an unparalleled repertoire of other characters and impersonations to draw upon without having to rely on Vedecci.
After all, even if you remove the offensive nature of the talk show host in its entirety, there was only so far Hader could have gone with the character before – in the tradition of SNL – it became overly repetitive and moribund.
