Dana Carvey does a spooky good Donald Trump impression.
In his new Netflix standup special Straight White Male, 60,Carvey says that due to his race and age he’s expected to be “racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic.”
Yet in conversation, you catch the awareness of a comic who caught a young break, who observed the world intently even while he stepped back as a performer. Carvey has his eye on news and comedy, two longtime partners in crime now interwoven with technology and a bursting market of content.
SEE ALSO:Check out a new trailer for Dana Carvey's upcoming Netflix specialCarvey’s resurgent interest in performing came from his sons, Thomas and Dex, who started going to open mics and showing him videos.
“I said, ‘Let’s do a few gigs together so you can see what it’s like’ -- it would just be comedy showcase featuring me and we would go to the Ice House in LA and different clubs and out of boredom and stuff,” Carvey tells Mashable. “I just started making up stuff, just riffing on things and just doing what I wanted as I was mentoring them and helping them develop, and they’ve now start doing showcases themselves. So that was kind of where it came from.”
“I realized that I was more of a sketch player than I thought,” Carvey adds. “Doing sketches is a different kind of way of doing standup, so I did kind of a mix. When I was playing little clubs I would do a sketch, like I’d do a one man sketch about John Lennon talking to Paul McCartney for five minutes -- stuff like that, which doesn’t sit. I’m kind of an eccentric at this point when I play the Comedy Store, cause I’m older and my act is kind of weird.”
Credit: Michael Sparks Keegan/NetflixOne way Carvey integrates his sketch background with his current standup set is through nano-impressions -- short, sweet impersonations with a light sketch premise, like Katharine Hepburn starting her car, Paul McCartney visiting Mars, or Donald Trump putting on chapstick. Carvey first saw the term online and then realized he had dozens of impressions ready to go.
Carvey slips between micro impressions with absurd ease, changing not only his inflection and cadence but his voice overall. He doesn’t sound like a comedian doing bits but like a dozen different, real people. Even though the special was shot in May, it contains plenty of moments relevant to election season.
“It was a little bit like ‘This is the craziest election ever, so we’ve gotta put it in there!’” Carvey says. “‘We’ meaning me, the producer and the editor, we didn’t know where Trump...we thought he wouldn’t make it somehow. So I did what I could that I thought would still be evergreen in November. I do Bernie cause I was fascinated doing the clubs with my kids, how the whole audience in the greater Los Angeles area, like 85% were for Bernie. That was really interesting to me as a cultural phenomenon.”
“[Trump] just started rhythmically as an impression, now when he’s on the prompter he’s more robotic,” Carvey explains. Without prompting, he launches into a Trump impression. “‘They did…that was very nice…very nasty.’ I started to look into the rhythms of it, but now it’s a full-blown character for me, it’s been really really fun.”
He likes Alec Baldwin’s Trump impression and the continued work of his network alma mater in driving election discourse.
“Everyone does their own thing,” Carvey added. “Accuracy isn’t the most important thing. It’s just a sense of Trump, some core essence of Trump. For me, I love the rhythms and sub-rhythms of Trump...the repetition -- ‘We had a fabulous debate, so fabulous, totally fabulous’ -- that’s one of this things that he does. There’s just a lot there. He says, ‘That I can tell you’ or ‘I can tell you that.’ It’s fun.”
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“Saturday Night Liveis just pure energy,” Carvey adds while reminiscing about his years on the show. “Like being blasted out of a can and you get one shot. I like live, I like everything live."
Of the work he’s done, Carvey is clear on what he works for him. He likes standup, but doesn’t want to tour (he doesn’t like planes). He prefers live to filmed performance, unless he has a measure of control.
“I did a film once where I had to do 125 rehearsals, like say the line 125 times and then we’ll shoot it, and that just destroyed me. It didn’t even sound like English,” he recalls. “With film I think that the only way for me to do it is to just have complete control over it, and make it very quick rather than laborious.”
Carvey got his start in the San Francisco standup scene, performing at clubs with the likes of Robin Williams.
“My first night in a club in Berkeley I just went to watch with some friends and there were comedians who go on up and I thought ‘I can do this.’ I had a few voices but I’d never done standup,” Carvey says. “[Robin] was always the one that would come back and forth from Hollywood and really made me personally work a lot harder cause I’d just see the energy and the confidence and think ‘Wow, I gotta get a lot better.’”
The comedy scene has changed significantly since those days, but Carvey embraces the new landscape.
“20 years ago...you had to really either get Johnny Carson on your side or Lorne Michaels,” he says. “But for me right now it’s the golden age to be on, not only as a consumer. Some of the coolest things I’ve ever seen have been on television lately...and all the live streaming shows. With the tools that are available and the access you can make a feature film, and you can find a place to put it. So it’s just exploded in a million different directions.”
In an increasingly murky social and political climate, Carvey recognizes that comedy is a rare constant.
“It’s impossible to worry and belly laugh at the same time. You can’t, just for that second,” he says emphatically. “The world’s fucked up. Everywhere’s total tragedy. To me we’re kind of on a treadmill and we all know where it ends we’re just going off the end, so it’s how we busy ourselves. Some people are promiscuous, some people dance, they write, they sing, some people just work. But we all -- we know where it’s going."
Even with technology and a shrinking world at our fingertips, Carvey feels uncertain about the future -- not for comedy, but for everything else.
“I just think for your generation…I don’t know, my heart aches a little bit. I’m not sure what’s going on for the young people in this country,” he says. “I think the toxicity of social media and everyone trying to be a star and keeping track of each other and posting these running resumes of their life can give also just a distorted view of what success is like. It just seems like, even to me in my position -- like is everyone just living this other life that’s just fantastic?”
For Carvey, social media and comedy will always be inextricably linked because of his sons. Millennials are what brought him back to comedy, and they are what keeps him here.
“There’s a heaviness to the world right now,” Carvey adds. “Probably we’ll just keep going but I assume you’ll all do fine. I just want you to be happy. Don’t get lost in your head too much, just keep doing stuff, keep moving, keep going. go walk around the park, write a book, read a poem, see a movie, keep moving.”
Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 streams on Netflix beginning Friday, Nov. 4.
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