Dana Carvey Admits His Elon Musk Impression Stinks
No more Joe Biden? No problem for Dana Carvey, who debuted his weirdo Elon Musk impression in the first post-election episode of Saturday Night Live. Jumping up and down in his all-black Musk gear, Carvey did a victory lap. “Check it out, Dark MAGA!” Carvey said in a heavy, inconsistent accent. “Yeah, but seriously, I run the country now.”
The real Elon Musk was not a fan. “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey,” he complained on Twitter when someone asked his opinion of the impression. “SNL has been dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality.” For the record, Musk hosted the comedy show himself in 2021, with his own ideas for how to add a little R-rated comedy to the 50-year-old institution.
Now someone else is coming forward to criticize Carvey’s Musk impression: Dana Carvey himself. “I can’t do Elon Musk very well,” he admitted to David Space on a recent episode of their Superfly podcast. “But I can do something that sounds not like anything. He has an incredible accent — South Africa via Canada via Pennsylvania. It’s almost like, it’s a little bit of Australian in there, a little bit of British, but he’s not totally that.”
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Better was Carvey’s Biden, a popular impression after several celebrities and SNL cast members have taken their shots since the Obama administration. “I didn’t see it out there enough, a Biden impression,” he told Spade on an earlier Superfly episode. “(There are) a lot of brilliant Trumps — Shane (Gillis), James Austin Johnson. Biden is trickier, getting that high-energy part of him, and that didn’t come out until maybe six months into his first term when they asked him some question and he got kind of mad.”
“It sounds kind of corny,” he added, “but the true North Star is to try to make it funny and not really get it to be a political message, per se.”
Carvey’s cameo parade has turned into a full-time gig this year, appearing in every single episode so far in Season 50. And he’s returning for more, he told Spade. “I’m going back in December.”
Has the old dog learned any new tricks upon his return? “I'll tell you a fun fact,” Carvey said. “When you leave the good nights at SNL, sometimes you do it with the host. You go sort of under the bleachers and you come out. So I think it was John Mulaney, he just went right before me and then he started skipping. So I started skipping too and skipping feels really good compared to walking or even running. So now, if you ever seen me on SNL, you see me come off the stage just remember within seconds, I will be skipping for quite a while.”
