You might expect to find Dana Carvey bereft as George Bush leaves the White House. Hey, the president gave him his finest material. For four years, the 37-year-old comedian has seemed to accompany Bush every step of the way, from the fall of the Berlin wall through the triumph of Desert Storm. Carvey’s parodies-a mix of manic gestures, goofy smiles and awkward expressions–took on a hyperreality that all but subsumed the president’s real identity and made Carvey the top political impressionist of the day. Yet Carve doesn’t feel bad at all. “Bush has been a wonderful character, but I’ve had four years of him,” he says. “I like to let go of things before people get sick of them.”
Unlike the president’s political fortunes, Carvey’s Bush only got better. He began working on the character in 1988 by studying tapes of Bush press conferences. Carvey quickly latched on to two Bushisms: “that thing there” and “wouldn’t be prudent.” The early Bush lampoons were barely fleshed out, but Carvey deepened the voice, added a horselaugh and a repertoire of hand movements. As the economic recession deepened, Carvey’s Bush exploded into a cacophony of mangled syntax and weird shorthand phrases. “Not going to do it” became the barely intelligible and classic “Na ga da it.” It all suggested a man unraveling as he desperately tried to stop his political slide. “We went from the Berlin wall to ‘Please vote for me. Please’,” says Carvey. After four years, he had abstracted Bush to such heights of absurdity that, he says, “there was really nowhere else to go.”
But if Carvey views the passing of Bush with relief, others at “Saturday Night Live” are less comfortable about the transition. “I faced this painfully between Chevy [Chase] doing Gerald Ford and Danny [Aykroyd] doing Jimmy Carter,” says producer Lorne Michaels, who created the show in 1975. He’ll be facing it again with the new administration: Phil Hartman’s rendition of Bill Clinton is meager at best. Carvey, who attempted Clinton briefly but ultimately ceded to his wider-bodied, baritoned colleague, is kinder. “Phil was such a natural,” says Carvey. “I made my concession phone call to Phil, and congratulated him.”
Ross Perot, on the other hand, is, well, a dish of Mickey Mouse salad. “He was an incredible gift,” says Carvey, relaxing after an “SNL” rehearsal. The mere mention of the diminutive candidate, whom Carvey began doing in May, makes his face light up like a happy 7-year-old’s. Carvey’s eyes narrow, his jaw tightens and suddenly he’s a folksy Perot lecturing the press about the recession: “That’s just like a crazy aunt down in the basement, see? Everyone just ignoring her, see? And she’s just going to get ornerier and stinkier!” Soon, he’s off and running with a slew of impressions, his rubbery face reshaping itself into Ted Koppel (a sonorous “Thiiiis… is ‘Nightline’”), Strom Thurmond (a stream of Carolinian gibberish) and a breathlessly pedantic Gov. Jerry Brown: “We can have high-speed trains and we can have solar energy, and I don’t see why we can’t, and I’ll just keep talking until I run out of ideas!”
Everybody has ideas for Carvey these days. Last week he was in L.A. meeting with NBC about becoming the host of “Late Night,” should David Letterman bolt to another network. But unlike Michael (“Wayne’s World”) Meyer, who is rumored to have left the show permanently for Hollywood, Carvey has no plans to depart “SNL.” No other format, after all, can let him so freely indulge his appetite for topical satire week after week. “I’m already working on my Al Gore,” he says. Not to mention Phil Gramm, Jack Kemp and other nascent political stars. Give all that up? Na ga da it!
