Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson were the focus of “Hamilton.” John Adams had his own HBO miniseries, and Samuel Adams is a beer. Ben Franklin often appears experimenting with his kite when characters travel back in time to Colonial America.

And then there’s George Washington.

He might be the first president, but the stoic general who led the Americans to an unlikely Revolutionary War victory doesn’t exactly lend himself to memes and caricatures in popular culture. Other founders were immersed in drama and scandal (Hamilton, Jefferson) or at least more quotable (Franklin, Adams).

But Washington — “a marble man of impossible virtue and perfection,” as New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani once called him — might finally be having his viral moment.

Over the weekend, “Saturday Night Live” brought back “Washington’s Dream,” one of its biggest hits last season. Comedian Nate Bargatze, known for his deadpan delivery, plays a subdued, earnest Washington who is trying to inspire his soldiers with his peculiar vision of a free America. In the original version, at camp, he dwells on a new, confusing system of weights and measurements (while consigning the metric system to “only certain unpopular sports, like track and swimming”).

A soldier asks what other numbers would have their own words: “None,” Bargatze replied. “Only 12 shall have its own word, because we are free men.”

Together, the sketches have received more than 14 million views on YouTube. “Washington’s Dream” may say more about the odd ways Americans adopted British customs, but Washington is an unexpected choice for a recurring character on the show, where he’s rarely appeared over its 50 seasons.

Washington may be “all around us,” on money and the name of the U.S. capital, but Americans generally don’t understand him, said Doug Bradburn, president and chief executive of George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Washington has been misunderstood as a “dull” person since the early 1800s, when sanitized biographies made him out to be a “perfect, moralistic figure from childhood,” he said.

“He’s the leader but really comes off more as a symbol than as a living, breathing person,” Bradburn said. “He wasn’t somebody who was just a complete stiff.”

Washington occasionally gets to let loose — on the popular YouTube series “Epic Rap Battles of History,” when he disses Scottish knight William Wallace, and in ’90s episodes of “The Simpsons,” as a ghost who appears to Lisa to tell her to right the wrongs of her town’s past and as a zombie in “Treehouse of Horrors III.”

Usually, when Washington appears on screen or onstage, it’s in a background role, like in the 2000 film “The Patriot,” the 2015 History Channel miniseries “Sons of Liberty” and “Hamilton” (though he does get some fanfare there). In “1776,” the 1969 Broadway show that was adapted into a film in 1972 and revived onstage in 2022, his letters are read aloud, but he never appears.

In “John Adams,” Washington speaks so quietly at his inauguration on Wall Street that nobody can hear him, a scene that Streeter Seidell, one of the writers of “Washington’s Dream,” said was the inspiration for an early version of the sketch, according to an interview with IndieWire.

More recently, Washington has emerged on TikTok. Inexplicably, people are grieving his death, which happened more than two centuries ago. And brides-to-be are embracing Washington and the founders as a theme for their bachelorette parties — dressing up in white wigs and long stockings for their final Declaration of Independence.

When he does appear on late-night television, as during a Weekend Update segment with Jimmy Fallon as Washington on “Saturday Night Live” in 2017, the jokes are usually predictable: quips about his teeth, the mythical cherry tree and slavery.

“Washington’s Dream” is a departure from those themes — except when the future president ignores questions from the only Black soldier present, played by Kenan Thompson, about ending slavery.

Bradburn said Washington’s imperfections helped bring him to life.

“Sometimes when people learn about the flaws, they find the whole kind of facade breaks apart,” he said. “Not having him humanized has really been a problem and has kept people a little distant.”

Dean Malissa, who acted as the official impersonator of George Washington at Mount Vernon for 16 years, said there was plenty of material to use to make him relatable.

“My role is just that: to make him human, make him alive with victories and failures and warts and worries,” Malissa said, adding that he uses humor in his storytelling to make Washington more accessible to general audiences.

“My Washington comes up with anecdotes fairly routinely, which will get a chuckle or a smile out of people,” he continued.

He conceded that Washington lacked “sizzle” and that he was mostly a virtuous person for his time.

“I don’t know if that makes for really good movies,” he said.

Bradburn said the “SNL” depictions would have likely been welcomed by Washington, who enjoyed comedic plays and had a sense of humor that he revealed only in letters to his closest friends.

In a letter to Marquis de Chastellux in France, who was preparing to marry, Washington congratulated him and then compared marriage to smallpox or the plague because it is something “a man can have only once in his life: because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America — I don’t know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole lifetime.”

“It is assuredly better to go laughing than crying thro’ the rough journey of life,” Washington once said.