Henry Kissinger, as seen and skewered, by Comics

In a November 1976 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Gilda Radner, in her recurring impression of Barbara Walters – aka Baba Wawa – interviews Henry Kissinger, played by John Belushi. After inquiring about his “silly, silly” accent, which she says “really, really annoys” her, Radner asks Belushi to repeat after her, “I’m a very, very fat, roly poly -diplomat.’ He does.

The sketch contains a joke about Kissinger’s German-Jewish background. In a 1987 episode of “SNL,” his religion is brought up again in a sketch called “The Assimilated Jew’s Chanukkah.” In it, Al Franken imitates Kissinger, who sells an album of Jewish Christmas carols. “Dozens of your favorite Christmas songs with lyrics that a responsible Jew could sing with ease,” he says — songs like “Silent Eight Nights” and “White Yom Tov.”

After Kissinger’s death on Wednesday at the age of 100, Franken posted a reminder social media that referenced a U.S. bombing campaign in North Vietnam in December 1972: “Kissinger once called SNL late on a Friday night looking for tix for his son. The Stones were playing that week. I told him that if there had not been a Christmas bombing, he would have the tickets.”

It’s no surprise that Kissinger, a polarizing figure who advised twelve U.S. presidents and was the most powerful secretary of state of the postwar era, has been peppered and caricatured in comics for decades. His distinct accent and manner of speaking were ripe for satire, as was the way he frequently made statements that he seemed to think were quite profound, but which many found banal or endearing. (“Power, for example, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”) He also seemed to be an irresistible target, especially for those on the left, who saw him as an attention-seeking egotist and seemed to delight in pushing him aside by to throw down. just as silly, if sinister.

The British comedy group emerged in the 1980s Monty Python has released a song entitled ‘Henry Kissinger’. Below the lyrics: ‘You’re the doctor of my dreams/with your curly hair/and your glassy look/and your Machiavellian plans/I know they say you’re very vain/and short and fat and pushy/but at least you are I’m not crazy.”

In 1983, on “SCTV”, Eugene Levy took a drunken, stumbling approach to Kissinger in a sketch in which he appeared as a guest on a fictional late-night show hosted by Sammy Maudlin (Joe Flaherty). “I don’t want to talk about Watergate,” he says belligerently. ‘I don’t want to talk about Richard Nixon. He was a great president. He will go down in history as one of the greatest presidents in history. What do you know about Richard Nixon?” he shouts, slamming his fist on the desk.

Early in the 2015 documentary about his life “Call Me Lucky,” comedian and political satirist Barry Crimmins is seen giving a speech at an anti-war rally on Boston Common in 1990. “They tell us it’s not another Vietnam , and then send Henry Kissinger out to tell us about it! he shouts before asking, “What, was Goebbels unavailable that day?” in reference to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Crimmins switches to a Kissinger voice and says, “We must be very careful or war will be averted.”

In 2015, Crimmins told The New Yorker that he was once in a green room with Kissinger, where he avoided being introduced. “I have a policy of not shaking hands with war criminals,” Crimmins said.

Except it’s a guest in 2014Kissinger himself appeared in sketches (which resulted in sharp criticism) about ‘The Colbert Report’, Stephen Colbert’s satirical news program on Comedy Central, in which he portrayed a conservative, hard-nosed caricature for nine years. In 2013, Colbert danced to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” through several scenes with various stars and household names, including Bryan Cranston, Jeff Bridges, the Rockettes and Kissinger, who answers the phone and calls security.

Years earlier, in 2006, Kissinger weighed in at a rock music competition in which Colbert and Peter Frampton competed against the Decemberists. In the episode, Kissinger said, “It’s time to rock” and “I think the American people have won.” In 2013, during an event in the New York Comedy Festival, Colbert said Kissinger should also say, “Where are my pancakes?” I was promised pancakes,” but he didn’t like the sentence. “We have the tape of him reading the copy,” Colbert said, “and then he goes, ‘That’s too much,'” he quoted him in his accent.

Jason Zinoman reporting contributed.