The X-Rated Reason That Robin Williams Apologized to Dana Carvey
Despite the fact that he was never a Saturday Night Live cast member or host, Marc Maron was this week’s guest on Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast. “Did you guys run out of SNL guests? How did I get this gig?” the comedian and podcaster questioned. Maron didn’t even talk about his failed audition for the show and subsequent “obsession” with Lorne Michaels.
But Maron did chat about the comedy icon who was one of the most memorable early guests on WTF: the late great Robin Williams. Maron recalled that the episode took on another life following Williams’ death in 2014. “It was everywhere because he never talked like that (in interviews),” Maron told Carvey and Spade.
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Maron attributed this candor to the fact that no one else was present for the intimate interview, which was conducted at Williams’ house. “It was just me and Robin,” Maron noted. “If there had been one other person there, they would’ve had the Carnegie Hall set.”
As we’ve mentioned before, Williams had a habit of stealing other comedians’ jokes — not because he couldn’t come up with new material on his own, but because his rapid-fire improvisations sometimes inadvertently conjured pre-existing bits that he’d heard in comedy clubs. This came up during the Maron interview, when Williams confessed that he “paid shitloads of cash” to comedians who had accidentally been plagiarized.
Carvey then revealed that Williams once apologized to him for stealing a line that Carvey claims he never actually told. “He had made amends to me in Mill Valley on a sidewalk just after a show. And I didn’t know why.” Carvey was particularly surprised because Williams had been such a huge inspiration for his act. “I said, ‘I tried to do you. You don’t understand, I had a trunk of props, I worshipped you.’”
Carvey suspects that the apology might have been part of Williams’ recovery process, “from AA or something,” and it all concerned a penile nickname. Throughout his career, Williams routinely referred to his junk as “Mr. Happy.” There’s a whole track on his 1983 album Throbbing Python of Love titled “Shake Hands with Mr. Happy.” Williams once claimed that dick jokes were the “essence of my act” for a time.
But did the nickname really originate with Carvey? “He thought I had a thing where I named my dick ‘Mr. Happy’ and that he took that from me,” Carvey explained. “I know that’s not true, I never did ‘Mr. Happy.’”
“That was the amends?” Maron responded. “It wasn’t even like some deep personal affront. It’s like, ‘I know you might’ve called your dick Mr. Happy.’”
That encounter wasn’t even the first time that Williams brought up “Mr. Happy” with Carvey. “He said it to me 20 years earlier at Dennis Miller’s wedding. We were at the same table (and he said), ‘Oh, I wonder, perhaps I got Mr. Happy from you.’ And I go ‘No!’ And it tortured him.”
The confusion may have stemmed from the fact that Carvey repeatedly referred to “Mr. Happy” during his SNL audition — but this was during his impersonation of Williams, and it was in 1986, years after Williams had put the same joke on his album.
Hopefully Williams accepted Carvey’s denial and took a certain amount of pride in having originated his go-to dong alias himself.
