Sometimes, iconic Jewish women don’t exactly see eye to eye. That’s what happened when “Saturday Night Live” queen Gilda Radner, one of the original cast members of the hit sketch show, started sharing her Barbara Walters impression on SNL in 1975.
Baba Wawa was, and remains, iconic. Radner’s impression helped raise the profile of the first woman to become co-host of the “Today” show. It was silly, impossibly charming thanks to that infectious Gilda Radner smile, and completely unforgettable.
But Barbara Walters, the Jewish news maven who inspired her, was admittedly not a fan.
“The sketch immortalized me — but at the time I wasn’t so thrilled,” Walters, who passed away in 2022 at age 93, once shared with the New York Daily News. Perhaps it was because Walters was already feeling insecure at the time about her looks and her enunciation, as she recalls in the recent, and excellent, documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything.”
That all changed one day, when Walters had a conversation with her then 7-year-old daughter, Jackie.
“I walked into my daughter’s room one night and she was up watching it. It was a Saturday night,” Walters recounted in a 2009 interview. “I said, ‘What are you doing up?’ And she said, ‘I’m watching Baba Wawa, Mom.’ And I said, ‘Well! I mean, how — you know — look what she’s doing!’ And she said, ‘Oh, mommy, lighten up.'”
Walters took her daughter’s recommendation to heart. After that, she learned to embrace the SNL impressions of her, including that of another great Jewish comedian, Rachel Dratch. She had a TV “interview” with Cheri Oteri’s iconic Barbara Walters, and when she retired from “The View,” the phenomenon of a show she created back in 1997, she went on SNL to spoof herself:
When Gilda Radner passed away in 1989, Walters sent her husband, Gene Wilder, a condolence letter signed by none other than Baba Wawa. “Gilda was so wonderful,” Walters shared in a 2012 interview.
We couldn’t agree more. Gilda and Walters were both so wonderful. May the memories of these incredible Jewish pioneers be for a blessing.
