‘SNL’s Darrell Hammond Remembers Dick Cheney: ‘The Guy Had a Sense of Humor!’

After an initial performance by Phil Hartman, Darrell Hammond took over and played the late Dick Cheney more than 25 times on Saturday Night Live. Political impressions were Hammond’s ‘Wayne’s World,’ recurring characters that took on comic lives of their own. 

“I was fortunate enough to be invited to the vice president's mansion a couple of times and meet the family,” Hammond recently told Entertainment Weekly. “On one occasion, I went to the Greenbrier hotel in the basement. He had all of his Republican colleagues there, and I dressed up as Bill Clinton and insulted them all. That was his idea!”

Someone took a picture of Cheney and Hammond-as-Clinton at the event, and hilarity ensued. In the image, “I'm attempting to shake Cheney's hand. He's shrinking in revulsion,” revealed Hammond. “Like I said, the guy had a sense of humor!”

Easy to laugh when Clinton, Cheney’s political enemy, was the butt of the joke. But the vice president was good-natured about some Cheney jokes as well. 

“I still remember his hand pounding on the table when I said this joke as Bill Clinton. I haven't done Clinton in a while, but the joke was, ‘Boy, that Dick Cheney, with his heart condition and that electronic pacemaker? Every time he sneezes, the garage door opens,’” recalled Hammond. “I remember him pounding on the table, and I thought, Wow, he's generous with his time.”

Maybe Cheney was a laugh riot, but punchlines about his pacemaker didn’t pack the same wallop as jokes about shooting his hunting buddy in the face, say, or being the architect of war crimes. None of that mattered to Hammond, who says he was more focused on his impression than on Cheney’s policies. 

“I wanted to find a way to make him funny to both sides of the aisle,” Hammond said, describing the SNL version of Cheney as an “italicized impression, stretched out of shape and exaggerated.” The comedian nicknamed his impersonation “Steely Perspective,” a reminder of what he wanted to bring to the screen when playing Cheney. “When I wanted to key into him before I walked onto the floor, that said it all to me and activated everything.” 

Because Hammond wanted to go the Jay Leno route and “find a way to make Democrats and Republicans laugh at the same time,” he decided that “a wise-cracking tough guy was the way to play him to reach audiences.”

It was also a way for Hammond to lampoon Cheney without offending him. After all, the actual wise-cracking tough guy was not “a man not to trifle with — not even by accident.”