Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush impression on “Saturday Night Live” was so good that even the former president believed it.
The actor chatted with “Today with Hoda & Jenna” co-host Jenna Hager Bush on Tuesday about how Ferrell convinced her dad that he’d used a made-up word.
During the tail end of an interview with Ferrell and the cast of his upcoming movie “Spirited,” co-host Hoda Kotb mischievously asked him to do his famed impression of Bush. He impersonated the president often on “SNL” in the early 2000s.
Despite Ferrell admitting that his impression was a bit rusty, he obliged Kotb and began speaking in Bush’s distinctive Texas twang.
“Here’s a funny story,” Ferrell said as Bush. “I didn’t realize that I never said ‘strategery.’ Someone else wrote that.”
In a “SNL” parody sketch of a 2000 presidential debate with Democratic opponent Al Gore, Ferrell, as Bush, used the made-up word “strategery” to describe his candidacy.
As a result, many people believed that Bush had actually uttered it at some point in the 2000 presidential election — including Bush himself.
But as Ferrell explained on “Today with Hoda & Jenna,” Bush never used the word “strategery.” It was a joke written in studio 8H as a play on “Bushisms,” or verbal slip-ups the former president often made during his tenure.
Hager Bush confirmed that her father sincerely believed that he coined “strategery” — and admitted that this is not the first time this misunderstanding has come up.
She said that “SNL” creator Lorne Michaels was the person who broke the news to Bush that he didn’t originate the term.
“Lorne Michaels told my dad, ‘You never said that,’” Hager Bush told Ferrell. “And [my father] said, ‘What? I spent all those years [thinking I’d said it],’”
“Oh, I knew all along,” Ferrell said.
The former president has also confirmed the mix-up. In 2017, Bush joked about the “strategery” conversation with Michaels during an appearance on “ Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
But in Bush’s version of events, the 43rd president got the last laugh.
“[Michaels] said to me ‘No, you didn’t say strategery,’” Bush said. “I said, ‘I damn sure said strategery!’ He said, ‘We invented it.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me ask you this? Did [the writer] come up with misunderestimate?’”
