On the phone from New York, during a brief break from shooting series three of the show – "Standing here in a robe, drinking a cold, disgusting coffee with a gauze wrapped around me because we're doing a parody of Human Centipede," she says by way of scene-setting – the comedian agrees that there's an element of release in acting out these grotesques.
These have included mocking a Herman Cain ad, where they drew moustaches on themselves to mimic Cain's campaign chief of staff, and sang a parody of Justin Timberlake's SexyBack that hit at Cain's economic plans.
SNL originally aired the commercial parody for Annuale – the birth control that only gave you a period once a year – in 2008, when reproductive politics were swinging wildly towards the conservative side and women's rights were squarely under attack (well, more than they usually are).
Yet, despite his frailty and air of innate sadness, he bore the ignominy of this parody of a Psycho with quiet dignity, giving each scene his best effort, never complaining, never talking about the old days, and happy to chat with the other actors.
It'll be a special kind of nerd who treasures his copy of the Lib Dems' mash-up of Uptown Funk, while the Green party's boyband parody similarly prompted the toes to curl into a previously unknown and possibly dangerous position.
Another features the rouble and a barrel of oil floating to the bottom of the ocean in a parody of Titanic.
Or rather, they've gone to war over Girls, their 1987 song, which is at the centre of a legal dispute after toymaker GoldieBlox recorded a parody of the track to advertise their construction kit toys.
Art is an endless game of copying, parody and rejection: imitation and rivalry.
In 2001, Percival Everett published a novel called Erasure, about a disaffected black middle-class writer and academic who writes a bitter parody under a pseudonym of the sort of stereotyped ghetto narrative he sees held up as the only truth of black life in America.
The third part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels describes the floating island of Laputa where fantastical science experiments take place, but they in fact parody the real world of ideas.
The signature Hipgnosis style was easy to parody, and Thorgerson occasionally did the job himself.
