Dana Carvey Finds Second Wind to Impress You with his Impersonations in Netflix Special

Face it. Celebrity impersonators meant something entirely different before Dana Carvey — not just in the world of stand-up comedy, but also on television, in movies, and in popular culture, too.

You had Rich Little (still going at 77) or the late Fred Travalena, popping up on The Tonight Show, game shows and the dais for celebrity roasts and White House speeches. You had your other subset of specialized celebrity impersonators, making money embodying a very specific body (see: Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson). On Saturday Night Live, they didn’t even attempt to look or sound like the president of the United States in the 1970s so much as the sense you had of that president’s personality. Chevy Chase merely tripped and fell down a lot as Gerald Ford, while Dan Aykroyd portrayed Jimmy Carter with a mustache.

Compare that to today, with the 2016 presidential election beating us down, and we look to SNL to give us the definitive takes and takedowns on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, much as we had eight years prior when Lorne Michaels called on Tina Fey to deliver Sarah Palin’s lines with enough gusto for audiences to recognize the satire right in front of us.

Dana Carvey represented that line of demarcation when the collective we began to take notice and care more. It was his impersonations of President George H.W. Bush in the late 1980s and pulling double duty in a remarkable 1992 campaign of both Bush and H. Ross Perot that had the then-president and us both wondering whether the leader of the free world was impersonating the comedian or the other way around.

Carvey, now 61, hasn’t slowed down as much as he has found his second wind as a comedian and impersonator. After taking a slight career sabbatical to help raise his children – his two sons, Tom and Dex, are now aspiring stand-up comedians – Carvey is back, presenting a TV competition series earlier in 2016 on USA, First Impressions, and now a Netflix special, Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 (in which his sons actually performed as his unseen opening acts).

Carvey wastes no time getting to the first of his many vocal impressions, telling the audience at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston that he wants to discuss the Trump phenomenon. They boo. “People angry already. What?!?” he remarks, feigning surprise. “I do him a little effeminate. I don’t know why. I just do him, a little soft, a little bit o’ lotion, little bit of chapstick. I just do.”

Carvey boils Trump, and later other politicians, into physical mannerisms and verbal tics. Trump, for instance, has “patented moves” in Carvey’s mind, such as “the seal” – waving his arms back and forth at waist level while making barking noises – or “the index shuffle,” repeatedly saying “OK” as his index finger waves. “He’s like a Batman villain, if you think about it.” Former President George W. Bush, by comparison, was “a drunk marionette.”

He goes in on Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and even Adolf Hitler, not shirking away from any voice he might be able to get his comedy cords around successfully. His version of Hitler imagines him when he’s not on newsreels shouting vociferously, instead dropping into a softer, more seductive tone with his Nazi underlings. “An impression can be anything in my mind,” he says.

Flying on Aer Lingus, Carvey voices an Irish Catholic flight attendant’s reliance on Jesus to keep them safe, whereas the pilots rely solely on pints of Guinness. Traveling through Italy years ago, he voices the nonchalance of the locals, and offers a counterpoint via the disaffected delinquency of his own teen boys. The latter, illustrated in a brooding shuffle, muttering: “Bunch a fucking bullshit, man.”

It’s conspicuously if not ironically timely that a couple of younger audience members arrive some halfway into Carvey’s hour, allowing him not only to address them and their Millennial attitudes, but also service “the TED talk with jokes” portion of his set that explains the experiences he has acquired through age. “If I don’t got wisdom, I got nothing,” he says.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

Carvey has a such a mastery of voices, he can make hays and hahas out of his own father dismissing his ideas and societal progress, turn his older brother Doug into a star-making Wayne’s World character, and even go to the other side of the world to explore the sad-sounding translations from a Chinese documentary. “This bit’s going over better than I thought it would,” Carvey acknowledges about his Chinese gibberish.

It certainly played better in the room than his own account of portraying “The Church Lady” at a Microsoft event years ago onstage with Bill Gates, where the employees and Gates himself seemed shocked to be mocked, even though they had hired him and specifically requested that character for that purpose.

Carvey rounds out his hour with a series of impersonations the audience likely hadn’t asked for, but are wise to indulge him for, anyhow.

Noting he needed to spend more time with his children while they were young, Carvey acts out an alternate universe where young boys were raised by a British nanny, Michael Caine and Liam Neeson, respectively. He imagines Al Pacino as Scarface’s Tony Montana at Thanksgiving dinner, and Sir Paul McCartney trying to explain to John Lennon in heaven about Kanye West, the Kardashians, cell phones, and Facebook.

A teenager might watch this, hit pause, and mutter, “Bunch a fucking bullshit, man.”

Perhaps. But it’s just the kind of b.s. that’s ripe for mockery, and Dana Carvey still knows how to give proper voice to that.

[Watch Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 on Netflix]

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.