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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn 1996, Dana Carvey could have taken his primetime sketch comedy show, The Dana Carvey Show, to any network he wanted. Carvey, then 40, was hot off an unprecedented run as one of the most popular cast members in Saturday Night Live history and the success of two Wayne's World films. And he would soon be armed with what is now a who's who of comedy names: Robert Smigel, Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Spike Feresten, 30 Rock showrunner Robert Carlock, Delocated star Jon Glaser, and Community writer and supporting player Dino Stamatopoulos, among many others. Not to mention a guy who would go on to write some of the most abstract and beloved films in history\u2014including Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind\u2014Charlie Kaufman.\n\nUnfortunately, Carvey chose ABC. Saddled with a timeslot following the Tim Allen family favorite Home Improvement, the raunchy first sketch\u2014featuring Carvey as President Bill Clinton breastfeeding a litter of puppies\u2014doomed the show to cancellation before it could air its eighth episode. But today, The Dana Carvey Show has found new life on the Internet\u2014all eight episodes can be viewed on Hulu for free. Its legacy is that of a cultural oddity and comedy prognosticator, considering its exceptionally talented cast. It also foretold standouts on other shows. Consider: This was the birthplace of \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo,\" soon to be a mainstay on Saturday Night Live\u2014only this was primetime. In this expansive oral history, 15 years later, the cast and writers\u2014as well as devoted superfans like Jon Hamm and Jimmy Fallon\u2014take GQ through the absolute genius and the absolute absurdity that was The Dana Carvey Show.\n\n\n\nRobert Smigel, ecutive producer: At one point Dana was talking about replacing Letterman. He had been offered that, and he wanted me and Conan to work for him on that show. He was red hot and had gotten a lot of offers after he left Saturday Night Live. But he wasn't interested in the grind of a talk show, ultimately.\n\nDana Carvey: Well, the Letterman thing was a couple years earlier. After being in these horrible movie experiences with directors who hated me, basically because they resented that the studio forced me on them, I said, \"Oh, man, I really would love to do something with Smigel who I enjoyed so much.\" I said, \"Maybe we'll do a variety show somewhere.\" That's kind of how it started.\n\nSmigel: It was the summer of 1995, and SNL was in a very bad place. I had two opportunities: to do this show with Dana on primetime, somewhere, to produce and be a part-time performer. And then Lorne Michaels wanted me to come back to SNL and work under him as a producer. Because that show had gone through a difficult year and there was a very nasty article in New York magazine. I chose to work with Dana because I was excited to try and reinvent the format with him rather than rebuild something that was already established.\n\nCarvey: After soul searching, I had really wanted to do it on cable, HBO. But Robert and other people really believed... I was an island on that. \"You have the face for primetime. You should be with a big audience.\" Robert sincerely believed variety should be on primetime at that point.\n\nSmigel: One of the biggest guaranteed offers was from CBS, but they were in the basement at the time. And ABC was the most aggressive pursuer; they were a very hot network and they also promised us a prime timeslot... following Home Improvement.\n\nCarvey: I really ended up being the only one who sort of thought that we should do it on cable. Once we made that choice, our fate was sealed in not being a long running show. And Disney did buy ABC after we made the deal, which had even more impetus to go more conservative.\n\nJon Hamm, Live-Action \"Ace,\" \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo\": I'm such a nerd about that stuff. I remember being super-psyched for it. Dana had just come off of SNL and I remember thinking, Oh, this is going to be awesome. Then the 2011 version of me goes, No it isn't, it's on ABC in primetime, and there's no way it's going to find an audience. It's way too funny and specific and kind of obtuse for a mass audience to get.\n\nCarvey: There was confusion over who and what I am as a performer. I think that ABC sincerely wooed us and threw lots of money at us saying, \"No, no. We want you to do what you do.\" At the time, I think ABC sort of hoped I would be really like Carol Burnett. I mean literally, I think.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nBefore The Dana Carvey Show aired, a long and somewhat tumultuous audition process began, taking hopeful cast members and writers to New York, to Los Angeles, and back. During that process, some of today's biggest comedy stars were discovered. \n\nSmigel: We didn't really audition people until SNL got their shot. There were two shows basically starting up at the same time: SNL completely turned over its cast. [They] went through their entire audition process before we did anything. Then, they were nice enough to give us their videos of auditions after the fact. So then we ended up doing our own auditions from the leftovers, as it were. \n\nCarvey: I had never been on that side of the fence, looking at tapes. It was me, Louis, and Robert.\n\nSmigel: We watched all these videos, I think the only two we wound up hiring were Bill Chott\u2014he did an audition on the video of Ralph Kramden taking a shit, I think?\n\nBill Chott, cast member: I used to do an impression of Jackie Gleason taking a difficult shit and it used to bring the house down at Second City. \n\nSmigel: That was his audition, Ralph Kramden taking a dump with a combination of relief and anxiety. That was probably the hardest I laughed at anyone's audition of anything. I guess part of what made me laugh so hard about both of these auditions is how repellent they might have been to the SNL people watching. I can just imagine Lorne Michaels cringing at the Ralph Kramden bit. The other person who probably made me laugh the hardest from the SNL auditions was Jon Glaser.\n\nJon Glaser, writer: I was working at Second City at the time, this was in '95, and I had auditioned for Saturday Night Live that summer. I didn't get that, but Robert had access to all of the tapes.\n\nSmigel: When I was a co-producer at SNL I would go in the summertime and scout people. So I got to see Farley at Second City and got to see him hired by Lorne. Another year we saw a Second City show and Steve Carell wasn't there, but his understudy was...\n\nStephen Colbert, cast member: Robert Smigel had seen me perform at Second City when he was one of the people scouting for Saturday Night Live. When was Carvey? 1996? So that was in 1992 and I didn't get hired for SNL that time. \n\nSmigel: Colbert completely blew me away. I was all about the understudy. Like, \"Who's the understudy?\"\n\nColbert: And then when Conan was starting in '93, Robert brought Conan to meet me. Conan came to the show. We met at a bar, the Old Town Ale House, had a couple of beers, talked, I submitted some jokes\u2014and didn't get hired. \n\nSmigel: I left SNL for Conan and I actually had Conan meet Colbert. He didn't get that; Conan didn't quite see how Colbert could fit in. So that didn't happen. \n\nColbert: So then, three years later\u2014I spent the next three years working on Exit 57, then that got canceled\u2014I was out with Dave Koechner at a bar, and I gave him a drive home. And I dropped him off and he goes, \"Hey, by the way, I heard Smigel is looking for you!\" I said, \"What do you mean, 'Looking for me'?\" So I called my agent and said, \"I hear that Smigel is looking for me? I don't know why it was hard for him to find me, I have an agent! Could you help him find me, please?\" They weren't coming to Chicago, but I could send a tape in. So I went to the Second City Main Stage and used the camera there and shot myself doing one script that they sent and then I did one old monologue of mine. \n\nHeather Morgan, cast member: It was a grueling series of auditions that went on and on and on. They kept narrowing it down. It was like, \"It's between you and another woman. They're only going to take one woman. And it was really like, \"Jesus!\" \n\nColbert: I had a brand-new daughter at the time\u2014she was not even two months old\u2014and I held up my daughter in front of the camera and did a monologue as my daughter,and I did my voice through the baby. I would like that tape. I would like to know where that tape is to give my daughter. All I remember is that her diaper is so soiled that it was coming up the back of her onesie\u2014which became part of the monologue. And I think that's what actually got me a callback, was holding up my daughter and doing the monologue as her. You can ask Robert, but I think that actually tipped me over because nobody really knew who I was. \n\nSmigel: I have to say, the tape didn't do it for him. People thought it was cute, but it didn't really show what was amazing about Stephen\u2014and by then we were into the callbacks and lots of great people we were considering. I just had to tell Dana, \"I know this guy, I've seen him on stage; he's brilliant, let's just bring him in to New York for a callback anyway.\" And, of course, when he got to really audition in person, everything I'd said was instantly obvious to all of us.\n\nCarvey: I can't imagine Robert having to beg me. Carell came in and was very nervous. I thought I was the one who convinced Louis and Robert to put Steve Carell in the loop and bring him to L.A. I just sensed he wasn't good in that first audition, and then he destroyed in L.A.\n\nColbert: We all got flown to Los Angeles for another round. We went to someplace, you know, just a shitty comedy club like The Grin Room or something like that\u2014The Chuckle Hut\u2014and with a big terrible asphalt parking lot with a highway by it outside. Robert can correct me on this, but I think there were 75 people all doing their monologues and walking in brief circles to themselves, trying to remember what they are about to perform.\n\nChott: They actually had us perform live at Igby's, but we had to spend the whole day in this hot parking lot with no shelter.\n\nColbert: I saw Carell there and I went, \"Oh, man. Well, I'm not getting it. I'm not getting this job\"\u2014because Carell and I got called up for the same thing all of the time in Chicago.\n\nSteve Carell, cast member: You know, my memory of Colbert was not that specific. \n\nColbert: And I thought, Well, he's good and he's here, so he's going to get it and I'm not going to get it. And, evidently\u2014and you can ask him this\u2014but he said, \"Oh, Colbert's here, I'm not going to get this.\" For the exact same reasons; we're always up for the same things. \n\nCarell: I do remember auditioning for Carvey and thinking, They're definitely not taking both of us. I thought for sure that he would be the guy that they would pick. I think very highly of him; I've known him since '88. He's one of the most talented people I've ever met in a lot of different ways. He's a great actor; he's a brilliant singer; he's a great writer\u2014he can sort of do it all. He's very much a renaissance man. \n\nSmigel: We didn't really see them as all that similar. If we didn't hire Colbert, we might have hired someone like Bob Odenkirk\u2014some other kind of pleasant-looking guy to represent authority and straight man kind of roles. We didn't see Carell in that role.\n\nCarvey: We're trying to figure out the whole cast, and I was living two hours away from the studio\u2014I said, \"Just give me the two Steves, then you guys can decide the rest.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nColbert: I found out that I got the gig and I was so excited when I found out, but my daughter was asleep\u2014we were in our apartment in Chicago; my wife wasn't there. I got the gig, hung up the phone, and I wanted to scream so badly that I put my daughter as far away in the corner as I could in our apartment, then went down the hall as far as I could near the bathroom, got in the shower, closed the door and yelled so I wouldn't wake her up from her nap. \n\nGlaser: They got in touch with me and said that they weren't going to hire me as an actor, but would I be interested in submitting as a writer.\n\nRobert Carlock, writer: That was my very first job. I had an interview with Letterman and an interview with Conan when I first got out of school and they were just looking for young, cheap people. I got Carvey because of Louis C.K. and Robert Smigel; I had written a sketch that they liked and I probably cost a dollar a week. They said, \"Be here on Monday.\" I showed up on Monday and they had forgotten that I was coming, so I sat there for three hours before they actually showed up. It was a nice introduction to New York and to television.\n\nMorgan: I had lunch with Dana at one point. But what was interesting was it wasn't only me having lunch, it was with the [five] other women, all together. It was brutal. \n\nSmigel: Heather was an interesting choice that we made primarily because we thought she's a genius and very creative. She didn't do exactly what we had in our minds imagined. We pictured we would hire a woman who would be sort of like a Catherine O'Hara or Jan Hooks: a person who could do a zillion different characters and impressions. But when we made the choice we thought, \"She's just too brilliant not to hire.\"\n\nElon Gold, cast member: Smigel and Dana said, \"Yeah, we're going to hire him, but we're going to bring him in later.\" I think I joined in on episode six.\n\nSmigel: You know, we're proud of the people we picked for The Dana Carvey Show, but I've got to admit that we did pass on Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gasteyer, Tracy Morgan, and some others. Of course, it was a small cast.\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nTrouble found The Dana Carvey Show long before it even aired. ABC, recently purchased by Disney, was pushing its family slate of programming. The network placed an ad in People magazine featuring Carvey saddled up next to his new pals... the Muppets.\n\nColbert: I remember Dana coming in... ABC had done an ad\u2014a full-page, two-page People magazine ad\u2014of their shows that were coming up as mid-season replacements. They had a new Muppet show, and they had Dana on one page and I think Miss Piggy. And Dana is doing the, \"Hey, I'm wacky\" face that kind of fits with Miss Piggy and he's kind of pointing at her. Dana doesn't have anything against Miss Piggy, but he said, \"I would never do that face. What is this? What did they do? I didn't even wear that shirt! I never made that gesture with my arms!\" They put Dana's head on someone else that was doing what they wanted him to do.\n\nCarvey: Yeah, Colbert remembers all that because Colbert and Carell were featured players and they sort of just watched the dance. \n\nChott: In the center of it was Kermit the Frog with his arm around Carvey\u2014I remember that it was Kermit; they Photoshopped Kermit in next to him. And Dana's shirt was a white Polo and they made the shirt pink. \n\nColbert: And Dana goes, \"Who's that asshole? That's not me! Because I wouldn't watch that show.\" In other words, we're not going to please, who they think we're going to please and the people who like me aren't going to like that guy. \n\nGlaser: I remember this ad came out in People magazine: a print ad with a smiling photo of Dana between Tim Allen and Kermit. It was like, \"Oh, boy.\" There was definitely a sense early on, hanging out, thinking, Yep, this isn't going anywhere. It really was a huge bummer of a photo. \n\nColbert: We were screwed from both directions. It was crazy. And then Dana said to me, \"I'm so sorry, you guys. I've ruined your careers.\" And it was before the show ever went on the air. In no way did we take it to heart. I don't even know if he was serious, but he said it with a straight face.\n\nSmigel: I do believe Dana did say, \"We're dead.\"\n\nGlaser: Certainly, you look back at that show\u2014it didn't ruin any careers.\n\nChott: So you've got Dana Carvey in a pink Polo with Kermit's arm around him. And then it turned into Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies.\n\n\n\nAnother problem facing The Dana Carvey Show was its lead-in: Home Improvement. Granted, on paper, having the number one show on television at the time wouldn't seem like a detriment, but the family-friendly Tim Allen sitcom was a stark contrast to the sketches that were coming out of the minds of Louis C.K. and Charlie Kaufman. The trouble is, no one on The Dana Carvey Show had ever even seen Home Improvement.\n\nSmigel: That show just didn't belong on ABC at 9:30 p.m. after Home Improvement. I don't think any of us watched Home Improvement and understood that it was really a family show. I thought, Oh, it's on at nine, Pamela Anderson is on it\u2014this is probably a male-orientated show. Tim Allen seems like a guy's guy. I really didn't watch the show until about four episodes into The Dana Carvey Show... and I was horrified.\n\nColbert: [Laughs] I didn't know that! I don't know, I never watched [Home Improvement] and Robert never told me that story. But I always imagined that it had something to do with it\u2014it was a pretty family-friendly show right across the plate. \n\nSmigel: I was like, \"How could we have made this decision?\" I felt like I had screwed up and felt like we all ruined our show's chances before we even got on the air. It was really so incompatible.\n\nCarlock: Even then it was pretty obvious that the combination didn't make a ton of sense. I mean, you don't say \"no\" to Home Improvement being your lead-in. I was too wide-eyed to know what was happening at all. I was just happy to have a phone to make long-distance calls. \n\nGlaser: When I got the job, all I kept hearing about was \"the dream time slot.\" It just sounded like the worst. It seemed like that killed the show. \n\nColbert: We were doing stuff that, perhaps, wasn't the most family-friendly. Like the Bill Clinton sketch or the bus company whose ad was all about how, \"At least on our buses you don't plummet from the sky and crash and burn and die.\" So I can understand that, perhaps, that wasn't the best slot for us. \n\nSmigel: I'm watching [Home Improvement] and it's a show parents are supposed to watch with their kids\u2014that's why it's the number one-show on TV! And then President Clinton is breastfeeding puppies and kittens on the premiere episode of our show. What a huge mistake. I mean we literally killed our show in the first five minutes. \n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAh, yes, the infamous Bill Clinton sketch. On March 12, 1996, viewers who had just witnessed the latest adventures of Tim \"the Tool Man\" and his family were treated to, by Carvey's own admission, a terrible impersonation of Bill Clinton that culminated in him breastfeeding kittens and puppies with his eight nipples. This was the very first sketch to ever air on the show. Audiences were not amused.\n\nCarlock: Dana is playing Bill Clinton literally breastfeeding puppies\u2014that was our introduction to America. \n\nSmigel: If we had done the Clinton sketch and had just gotten out before the boobs came out, that would have been perfectly acceptable. \n\nCarlock: I had heard there was some pressure to not lead with that and Robert, Dana, and Louis said, \"This is the show we want to do and this is what we promised you.\" And to sort of prove their point, ABC paid Nielsen extra to get a rating graph broken down minute by minute. At around that two-minute mark when the breast came out, like six million people changed the channel. I didn't know much about television, but I knew that was bad.\n\nSmigel: They gave us minute-by-minutes and that's when we knew the breastfeeding sketch had been so lethal. We were still 15th for the week ... but it was apparent that after the first sketch there was a much steeper than normal drop-off in ratings. We knew we had a problem. \n\nCarlock: It was kind of remarkable that we made that many people do something all at the same time.\n\nCarvey: The minute the charts came out, it wasn't fun after that.\n\nSmigel: Louis comes up with, \"What if he says, 'I'm the nurturing president,'and I've developed the ability to breastfeed!\" And I'm like, \"Yeah, that's great! And then let's have him open the shirt and he's got eight nipples and he can breastfeed dogs and cats.\"\n\nColbert: We had already lost a lot of sponsors. [Starts singing] It's a beautiful root beer day, the folks from Mug Root Beer have agreed to stay. But you better not breastfeed any puppies today, or you sure as hell will be on your way. So be careful you little punk, Dana Carvey! Even I think it's odd I remember all of the lyrics. I am very impressive...remembering reasons why shows I'm on failed.\n\nCarvey: That [Mug Root Beer song] was our own conscious choice and people thought Robert and I were getting paid to do that\u2014which we weren't. We just recruited them to attach their name. They couldn't even believe it, but we thought it was sort of a postmodern joke. When I first told Letterman, \"Yeah, it's called The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show,\" he didn't believe me.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nGlaser: I remember reading some hate mail that got sent to the show about that sketch. Yeah, people were upset and offended. I remember one letter in particular said something like, \"I'm a staunch conservative, I'm a Republican, and I would never vote for Bill Clinton. But you do NOT deface the presidency in the manner in which you guys have done!\" \n\nGold: I love how sponsors dropped Dana Carvey for having cats feeding off Bill Clinton's nipples\u2014but shouldn't sponsors drop the White House? You know, after Bill Clinton gets a blowjob?\n\nCarvey: The main thing, when I look at it, is that I suck. I couldn't do Clinton. \n\nSpike Feresten, writer: I had just done Letterman and my first year at Seinfeld. I was watching the show when it premiered\u2014and right from the beginning I was stunned. To see Louis's first sketch with Bill Clinton, I was stunned. And for me, it was right up my alley. And when I saw the \"Stupid Pranksters,\" I just wanted to be a part of it. When my season wrapped on Seinfeld, I called my agent and said, \"If they're looking for guys, I would love to go hang out with them for a little while because this show is hilarious.\"\n\nCarlock: There's so much funny stuff on that show and, you know, the Clinton sketch wasn't not funny. But I could understand maybe wanting to ease your viewership in a little bit more, but I think it's the kind of thing those guys had been doing at Conan and SNL for years with great success. They're not stupid, they were aware they were on in primetime. Maybe Robert should have watched Home Improvement? But they felt that was the best way to declare how different the show was\u2014and America declared, \"We agree.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nEven though The Dana Carvey Show was off to quite an inauspicious start, the show soon settled down and produced sketches that are still brilliant today. \n\nCarell: \"Pranksters\" was fun...\n\nSmigel: I think \"The Pranksters\" was a little bit strange for the Home Improvement audience, too.\n\nFeresten: That was my favorite sketch that I didn't write. My wife and I still watch that sketch, we pull them up on Hulu.\n\nGlaser: Dana and Carell playing the \"Stupid Pranksters,\" that was so funny. Just the thing with them saying, \"Take Off\"\n\nCarvey: Louis C.K. wrote those. The only thing about those is that when we did the first one at the drive-through window, Carell would commit so hard and laugh so hard his vein would pop out on his head. I literally thought he was going to give himself an aneurysm. I'm not even kidding. \n\nCarell: I remember there was one fake commercial they did that just killed me. It was one of these chairs for the elderly. You know the chairs that would help you sit up? They have kind of the booster? [Laughs] This was a chair that not only helped you sit up, but like walked around with you and would take you out dancing and could go swimming with you. And they had these chairs built with people inside of them. I just thought it was the funniest image of this elderly person in a pool doing aquasize, with a big lounge chair behind them in the pool helping them do the ercise. I remember specifically laughing at that. \n\nGlaser: One of the things that I had auditioned with at SNL was a thing that Smigel liked a lot that ended up getting on\u2014it was one of the few things that I got on. It was called, \"World Leaders and Their Baths.\" It was just world leaders hanging out in their bathtubs just sort of talking about why they like the bath. Smigel ended up performing it, which was great because he was extremely funny doing it. But, in hindsight, I wish I had gotten to do it. But I was glad that got on\u2014that was my favorite thing. \n\nMorgan: In my one-person show, I had this little video, which was like two minutes long of me barking. Louis said, \"How can you do that for Dana?\" I don't know if it was him or me, but somehow we arrived at the first ladies. I was in my office looking at these different videos of dogs barking and I think the other writing staff thought, \"She's crazy. Just bark.\" I had to capture the essence of these women as a dog\u2014you can't just do any dog for any first lady. It doesn't work that way. I remember Charlie Kaufman and different writers would walk by and think, \"She's a nut job.\" \n\nCarell: There was a lot of stuff that Dana did and that Robert did that, to this day, are like the funniest thing I've ever seen. I mean, the \"Grandma the Clown\" stuff!\n\nChott: The show had very dark humor, like \"Grandma the Clown.\"\n\nCarvey: That was Dino. In comedy circles, the way I try to describe that is that it's too funny to laugh. It's so funny, you can't laugh while watching it. And it gets funnier the more and more you see it. It's too brilliant as a concept. Can you imagine how abstract that was for primetime television?\n\nSmigel: That was Dino's sketch. It was the dark comedy that Dino did that had nothing to do with anyone in the cast. When people complain to me back then about the show compromising itself too much, I would be like, \"Exhibit A.\" It features no cast members, it pleases no one in the audience\u2014there it is, \"Grandma the Clown.\"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nColbert: For \"Beatles Memories\" they brought in the George Harrison wig and I said, \"What is this?\" The wig person said, \"This is the George Harrison wig based on the photo I was given.\" Research had given him this Harrison photo from this very brief period of Harrison's life when he had that haircut. I mean, like a week! And they showed me the photo of Harrison and it barely looks like Harrison on Harrison! And I said, \"That's not what George Harrison looks like.\" You know how you will be supportive of a performer? Like, \"Yeah, it's looking good!\" Dana walks in and goes, \"Who are you supposed to be?\"\n\nCarvey: But he was funny!\n\nSmigel: The Beatles changed their hair over so many eras. This was supposed to be George Harrison in 1996. I don't remember anyone ever alerting me to this problem.\n\nColbert: Carvey playing Brokaw: that's how I worked briefly for SNL, because Robert told Lorne, \"That was Stephen's idea.\" [Ed. Note: This sketch was filmed for the show's eighth episode but never aired. It was later re-shot and aired on SNL when Carvey hosted.] So Lorne goes, \"Let's have you come over and write for a while.\" That was because of that sketch. \n\nCarvey: Colbert had a big hand in the writing of that. That's one of those things where I came in and read it and said, \"Oh, wow.\" I think they saw a live feed of Dan Rather practicing something?\n\nColbert: I actually saw Dan Rather doing Reagan's obituary on the CBS feed, and I thought it was real. And then he stopped, paused, a did it a little differently, and I went, \"Oh, he's banking it. He's saying very vague things so this can be banked.\" And I thought, What if it wasn't vague? What if it was very specific but they had to cover every eventuality? And Robert said, \"Let's write that.\" Louis was the other person on that.\n\nCarlock: The only sketch that I really got on that was mine was The Wizard of Oz thing where Dana played a guy named Dennis Blanchard who stumbled upon the yellow brick road. The lion needs courage... then the brain and the heart, but Dennis needs an ass. He goes to the Wizard of Oz to try and get an ass. It was a sort of inauspicious beginning to a television career.\n\nCarvey: I liked the Wizard of Oz one\u2014if I only had an ass. I felt like it was under-rehearsed and it was kind of rushed, but I did like the premise of that. It's always fun to sing and dance. One that I got a kick out of was the \"Rich Little Easter Special,\" which Dino did. It was just a lot of impressions that I normally didn't do, because they were so old-fashioned. It's so drippingly sarcastic, but, at the same time, entertaining. Colbert and Carell's \"The Nauseous Waiters\" was a great performance. Or the one where we're on the rollercoaster, that one is memorable. \n\nColbert: A piece that never made it to air, This Week with David Brinkley on the Great American Scream Machine.\" We did \"This Week with David Brinkley, on a rollercoaster; we did it in one take. I played Brinkley. Dana played George Will\u2014I wrote that; that was the first script that I got approved. There's this game I used to play of getting on amusement rides\u2014the more terrifying the ride, the better\u2014and getting on and complaining about something the entire time and never letting the ride affect me. So I thought I could do an impression because I trained myself to not let the ride affect me, so who would be the least likely person\u2014that's how that sketch came about. We shot it really early but we kept on pushing whether we would put it on the air because we were afraid that Brinkley was going to die because he was in the hospital. He lived another seven years, but at the time, he wasn't well, and if he wasn't well, we couldn't put it on the air. \n\nFeresten: I think Steve [O'Donnell] and I wrote a sketch about the Kennedy auction. I think Bill Chott was in it. It was about my judgment about people who were going to buy things from the JFK auction\u2014that they were just going to take these items then brag about owning them: \"Look at me! I'm JFK in JFK's rocker!\"\n\nChott: That's one a lot of people remember, they'll say, \"JFK!\" For me, the part that I was most excited about was playing Phil Gramm because ever since I started doing this I was hoping to do political satire. I had the most fun shooting the Nixon sketch. Dino Stamatopoulos was playing the guy in the Nixon mask. You could barely see it, but when we're all in bed, he's stroking me with his hand. He's not just stroking me with his hand, he's stroking me with his Nixon \"V for victory\" fingers.\n\n\n\nBehind the scenes, things were, to say the least, tense. Louis C.K. was forced to deal with an ABC bureaucracy that he wanted no part of; Heather Morgan was constantly fighting an uphill battle as the only female cast member; and Carvey himself, for his part, was busy raising a family in Connecticut. He now admits he wasn't as hands-on as he felt he should have been. Oh, and then there's that constant dread of cancellation. But some members of the cast weren't affected\u2014notably, \"the two Steves.\"\n\nColbert: I had done a little work on cable, but this was my big break on a network show. I remember, I would joke roughly with them, but they didn't know my sense of humor. I'd be walking by one of their offices and they would say, \"Hey, did you get a chance to read that Nixon scene?\"\u2014a scene I was not in but they wanted my opinion. You know, a very nice thing for these guys to ask. And I'd say, \"Yeah, I looked through it. Not bad. Didn't see my name in it.\" And they would go, \"Oh, I think we could probably put you in it.\" And I'm like, \"I'm just fucking with you, I don't really want to do that.\" Then, like an hour later, they would say, \"You taking off?\" and I'd say, \"Yeah... Hey, there's no couch in my office.\" And they'd say, \"Oh, yeah, we'll get you a couch!\" and I'm like, \"Guys, I don't need a couch, I'm just fucking with you.\" And I realized that I had to be strangely sincere with these people because they don't know me. \n\nCarell: I always thought Colbert was, if not the smartest guy in the room, one of the most talented. I just thought he was incredibly funny no matter what he did. He was somebody that I always sought out to do scenes with and wanted to work with. We always had fun doing scenes together.\n\nFeresten: I was sharing a room with Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. I thought, Well, these guys are pretty clever and very funny. I really hope it works out for them, but I doubt it will.\n\nGold: When I first met Steve Carell I thought, Here's a really sweet, funny guy. I wonder what he's ever going to do with his career? I remember seeing Colbert\u2014we were both going to an audition for something in Manhattan. I saw Steve Colbert just sort of like pathetically putting quarters into the meter and looking at his watch and running late to go to this audition. Again, I looked at him\u2014and this was before The Daily Show\u2014and I went, Ugh, this poor guy. And he's so talented; I wish someone would give him a break. \n\nSmigel: [People] look at the show and think of it as very inventive and brave, I think. But, at the same time, the people that we hired were so creative and left-of-center comedically, that it's a tribute to their inventiveness that there were times when people at the show were very disappointed in what we were putting on. They felt like we were making hacky choices and taking the easy way out. \n\nFeresten: What was kind of odd to me when I showed up there was I kept meeting people from the network or studio\u2014we had the feeling that they thought Steve O'Donnell and I were going to fix the show. You know, like, \"Here we come! The Seinfeld guys to fix what's wrong with the show.\" Every time a conversation like that started, we made it very clear, \"No, no, no... we're just here to support what they're doing. We'll get them coffee if they want.\" \n\nSmigel: [Laughs] I'm sure that happened.\n\nMorgan: Sadly, there was a boys' club kind of mentality there. And Carell and Colbert, none of them wanted that necessarily, but if you have 15 men in the room and one woman... Just being the only female\u2014there were also no female writers. I kind of had that burden all by myself. I really had to work it, man.\n\nChott: She definitely deserves credit, because she had to fight tooth and nail to get material on there, and it was hilarious. \n\nGlaser: She was great; she was so funny.\n\nMorgan: It was crazy. We'd have these pitch meetings, and there would be 17 people and I'd be the only woman. It was brutal. It wasn't like anybody wasn't supportive. They were supportive, but they were so busy doing so much other stuff.\n\nCarvey: Probably just being one woman was hard on her. Although, there was no rivalry\u2014she had all of those parts. She did the \"First Ladies As Dogs.\"\n\nMorgan: I cried. I was kind of the squeaky wheel for a little while with Louis and Robert with \"First Ladies As Dogs.\" Louis was like, \"Heather, I don't think anyone has seen it.\" I finally went up and edited it myself. It was nutty. Then I was like, \"This has to go on the show.\" And Dana was like, \"Are you fucking kidding me? Where has this been?\" And Dana was like, \"That's on the fucking show.\"\n\nCarvey: I did think that immediately. \n\nSmigel: That was one of the two or three funniest things on the show, I think. \n\nCarvey: I know Louis C.K. also really liked her. She's very warm, and I really liked her. She did a thing where it's a woman on the phone talking to a guy she likes and she keeps dropping the idea that she'll blow him. She did it really subtly: \"You know, I was just thinking that we could go out to dinner, then I could blow you.\" The way she did it was brilliant. \n\nMorgan: The one person I've really stayed in touch with is Louis. We became friends; I went to his wedding, and we've tried to stay in touch over the years. And I really am thankful for that friendship.\n\nFeresten: I worked with Louis on Letterman, I remember him lighting his pants on fire during one of the London shows. We were sitting next to each other in this big line of desks\u2014we were doing shows in London with Dave. He would just elbow me to make me laugh and he goes, \"Hey, Spike, look.\" And I look over and his pants were on fire. And he goes, \"Check it out,\" but he wouldn't be doing anything other than looking at me.\n\nSmigel: Louis had a miserable time with the show. He was great, and he tried really hard to be nice, and he loved the cast and the writers. But I gave him a lot of responsibility; I think I made Louis producer. And he had to be the middleman in a lot of ways. At Conan, the first few years were whatever the fuck we found funny. This show, it was the same people in charge, basically, but we were running up against all kinds of issues. Ratings and negative feedback that compromised our enjoyment and compromised our decisions and it was very, very frustrating for Louis. He's never been in that position. I'd been in there with Conan where I was the buffer and protected from people having to see that firsthand and be aware of it. It's not pleasant. I know it made him miserable.\n\nMorgan: It's interesting to see that his new show is written, edited, produced, and directed by Louis. I think there's some sense after all of these years, too, that he finally went, \"What the hell? If anybody is going to screw up my material, it's going to be me.\" \n\nSmigel: He's finally happy doing a show because he's finally left alone.\n\nLouis C.K. declined to speak to GQ for this story.\n\nGold: Let the record show\u2014and Carvey will attest to this\u2014I was brought in later for one reason and one reason only: So that Dana Carvey can do my Charles Grodin impression. So I wouldn't be there to make a stink of why he's doing my Charles Grodin impression. \n\nSmigel: Yeah, yeah, I know. Elon took it to heart.\n\nGold: Then we had a nice discussion/argument about whether or not you can steal an impression after Dana apologized to me about it. \n\nSmigel: Charles Grodin was a guy who was in the ether. Had Elon never met Dana and had Dana never left Saturday Night Live, there's no doubt in my mind that Dana would have done Charles Grodin.\n\nCarvey: I remember with Smigel, we were just trying to find new impressions. And he said, \"Can you try Charles Grodin?\" which I found incredibly difficult to get a take on because I kept running into my Jimmy Stewart.\n\nGold: [Later, in a meeting] it was Louis C.K., Smigel, Dana, and me. And Louis said, \"Well, you can't steal an impression.\" And I said, \"Really? Then I'll do Regis this week.\" And then Louis or Smigel said, \"Uh, Dana does Regis.\" So I said, \"Oh, so if I did it I'd be stealing his Regis.\"\n\nSmigel: He has my full permission to do Regis Philbin anywhere he wants to, but not on The Dana Carvey Show. \n\nGold: After that meeting, Dana said to me, \"Take a ride with me home.\" I went with him in his limo all the way to Connecticut so he could apologize for doing it. And he said, \"Everyone at the show just wanted me to come out with a new impression and not the old stuff and this was a guy that I really wanted to do.\" By the way, Dana, who's brilliant, did a really, really bad Charles Grodin. Dana's just a brilliant guy who doesn't need anybody's help or anybody's impression.\n\nCarvey: I would have been happy to get out of it and have Elon Gold do it.\n\nGold: I don't want this to come across as, \"Oh, yeah, the one guy who's not a superstar yet from the show is sour grapes and bitching about Dana stole his impression.\" Just, to me, that's one of the experiences that stood out. Not that I give a crap about this. At the time, I gave a tiny crap. \n\nSmigel: I didn't want Dana to do stuff that he did on SNL. If there's no motivation for it, it looks like that's all he's got. I was pushing Dana to come up with new impressions. So we did Steve Forbes and Charles Grodin and Bill Clinton.\n\nFeresten: Robert was the mad scientist of the show. Clearly. Louis helped him along and then it kind of trickled down to the rest of us. Dana was the star, developing the characters and using the show as a playground.\n\nGold: Smigel is another comedic genius that everybody knows as a writer, but I personally think he's an incredible performer. \n\nSmigel: I had my notions of what would help Dana and what wouldn't help him. If he were just going to try out everything he had done at SNL, it would make him look like \"the guy who used to be on SNL.\" \n\nCarvey: I totally agreed with that. It would have been a crutch, and it's nice to be challenged.\n\nSmigel: I was much more certain in my mind about that issue than he was. There was some stuff Dana did as Clinton I remember that felt way too easy. \n\nCarvey: My Clinton basically at the time sucked. I learned how to do it better, later. Pencil-neck comedians like myself, you can turn me into Bush or Perot, but Clinton was tough.\n\nSmigel: Dana had two kids that I believe were five and three. Dana is a great father and takes that very seriously, and it was just more than he could handle. There were huge snowstorms that winter going on in Connecticut, and kids are getting sick and stranded, and Dana didn't want to be a disengaged father. I think it was very, very hard for him to approach his own show with the same intensity and focus that he approached Saturday Night Live.\n\nCarvey: I didn't realize; Greenwich, CT, didn't seem that far. Then, with the snow and the ice, sometimes it was two hours up and two hours back. My kid has an ear infection and is up all night. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard being that far away. If we had kept going, I probably would have moved my family into Manhattan.\n\n\n\nTucked away in his office, mostly keeping to himself, was a writer named Charlie Kaufman\u2014a writer who would go on to write and direct some of the most surreal films of the last decade. \n\nSmigel: His writing submission was not fantastic. He had written on a show called The Edge, which was a not very successful Fox sketch show that I know he was disappointed in for not taking enough chances. His submission packet was up and down, but kind of interesting. There was one sketch that was a very meta treatment of Unsolved Mysteries and it was one of the most brilliant sketches I had ever read, and it was enough for me to hire him.\n\nChott: He definitely kept to himself, but he would always have the funniest stuff at the table reads. He would always have this stuff that was really far out there. \n\nCarvey: He was definitely extremely shy and awkward. I guess his IQ is 605 or something? \n\nGlaser: It's not that he hung out by himself; I shared an office with him. It was me and Charlie and Robert Carlock. He's amazing. He's a really quiet, extremely smart, funny guy and submitted amazing sketches. We didn't become friends or anything, but he was a super nice guy. I remember, I think he was just talking about Being John Malkovich, and I think it was just starting to make a little headway. \n\nCarlock: I had a great relationship with Charlie. He was working on those movies at the time; he was working on Malkovich and Human Nature and one other, I think. He's a quiet person and a private person and didn't exactly light up the writers' room, but he was fun to hang out with. The one sketch of his I really enjoyed was Weird Al Yankovic and his brother, Weirder Al Yankovic\u2014who took Weird Al Yankovic's songs and parodied them so they would turn back into the original song. And then Weirdest Al Yankovic would take those songs and make gibberish out of them. The usual meta nonsense. \n\nMorgan: The thing I really liked, to be honest\u2014I will say he was a fan of mine. And he made that clear to me. He kept to himself, but I always got that Charlie was trying to write stuff for me. \n\nGold: He was like our Woody Allen of the Sid Caesar show. It was like, \"Oh, there's a crazy, ridiculous, comedic genius but nobody really knows it at this moment until he's going to go off on his own and show us all what a freaking comedic, sick genius he is.\" If I bumped into Charlie Kaufman on the street three months after the show finished, I would say, \"I'm sorry, sir,\" and keep walking. So he did not make any sort of impact on me. \n\nSmigel: Charlie had to relocate from the West Coast and we gave him assurances that the show was going to take chances. And I don't think that he felt that ultimately it was. I feel like he wasn't happy fairly quickly. \n\nFeresten: It was later on\u2014many years later\u2014that I read that he was there. I'm like, \"Oh! Oh, yeah, that was that weird Einstein-looking guy that never said anything.\"\n\nCarell: Who knew that way back then the quiet guy at the end of the hall was going to become the mad genius of cinema?\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nOn April 30, 1996, The Dana Carvey Show would air its final episode. There was no grand announcement of the show's cancellation. But its death knell didn't seem to come as much of a surprise to the cast.\n\nChott: I had full faith that if it did not get picked up by ABC, the word was out that Lorne Michaels fully intended to pick it up on NBC and produce it from Studio 8H during the week while they were rehearsing SNL.\n\nCarvey: With a lot of energy we could have maybe revamped it somewhere else, but the air was kind of sucked out.\n\nSmigel: It wasn't picked up because networks like to have their own ideas, and they very rarely take on something that has the stink of failure from another network. \n\nGlaser: I don't recall any sort of big meeting or speech. I don't really remember, to be quite honest. I think I blocked it out of my mind. I think there was just a general sense of, Yeah, it's not coming back.\n\nFeresten: I don't even recall how I heard about it, but I know I wasn't surprised.\n\nCarvey: I don't remember a key moment. I remember Carell and Colbert just kind of saying, \"We love doing the show. This is what we want to do. We'd love to do this for years.\" And I just had a sinking feeling at that point. It became very clear to me after the Clinton teat that the network had lost interest. Our ratings had gone down to what would now be a number one show. \n\nGlaser: It definitely felt like the network had given up on it. As far as I could tell, it never affected the mood of anybody enough where people were walking around moping. To me, the whole experience was mostly just really fun. I remember playing hockey in the halls with people trying to walk around\u2014me and Robert Carlock just slinging balls down the hall.\n\nCarlock: I think it was called \"speed zone.\" There were two hockey sticks and a tennis ball lying around and we would just whip this tennis ball back and forth and talk about ideas. At some point an ecutive walked by and said, \"Shouldn't you be working?\"\n\nSmigel: I got a call from the ecutive in charge. We didn't just get canceled, our eighth show never aired. \n\nCarlock: I remember going to the wrap party\u2014and it was a weird wrap party because everybody knew the show was over. There was no formal announcement. I remember walking out, and some New York hustler idiot was trying to get forty bucks from me so he could take a cab and stay in a hotel or something. I remember thinking, Oh, I can tell this guy that I just got fired. So I was able to actually get rid of him. \n\nChott: I guess I read in People magazine, or something like that, that it had been cancelled and I was like, \"Wow, I guess that's what happens at this level of show business.\"\n\n\n\nOne of the lasting influences of __The Dana Carvey Show today is the perseverance of an animated superhero short voiced by Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell called \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo.\"\n\nCarvey: Smigel brought in the sketches for \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo.\" That was another moment when I said, \"Wow, this is brilliant. 'The Ambiguously Gay Duo,\" are you kidding me? \"Let's order six of those.\" That was another one that later broke on SNL.\n\n\"The Ambiguously Gay Duo,\" about a team comprised of two superheroes named Ace and Gary, who seem quite fond of each other, was last seen on Saturday Night Live in 2007. That was, until this past May, when Robert Smigel, using a treatment for a film he had written about the duo, filmed a live action version for starring Jon Hamm as Ace and Jimmy Fallon as Gary.\n\n The Live-Action Ambiguously Gay Duo, 2011\n\nSmigel: Jon Hamm was the only person now that I was at all interested in for the part of Ace, and if he hadn't been interested, I wouldn't have bothered. Obviously he's a big comedy fan\u2014a big comedy nerd himself\u2014and he was way into it.\n\nJon Hamm: Lorne had said, actually, \"We're trying to do this thing. Maybe you would be interested.\" And I was like, \"Oh, yeah, totally.\" Having been such a fan, of not only \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo,\" but all of the TV Fun House stuff. And then I sat down with Robert at a diner on the Upper West Side and he was like, \"Do you want to do this? If we can do it, would you be game?\"\n\nJimmy Fallon, Live-Action \"Gary,\" \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo\": I remember after watching it I thought in my head that it could be a funny movie. I was thinking like Justin Timberlake and me. And then, years later, Smigel is doing this huge budgeted short for Saturday Night Live. He sent me an email: \"We're doing the show, would you like to play Gary?\" And I was like, \"Oh my God, this is an honor.\" I've always wanted to play a superhero, let alone one of \"The Ambiguously Gay Duo.\"\n\nSmigel: Jesus Christ, Steve Carell flew across the country to do three lines in \"Live-Action Ace and Gary.\" He only did that out of the goodness of his heart. \n\nColbert: I knew I'd lose my part to someone with shoulders. It was really enjoyable playing Dr. Braino because I invented Braino\u2014so it was a character that I invented. And I worked on all of Robert's \"Ambiguously Gay\" [sketches] over the years and loved playing Ace and haven't a jealous bone in my body to whoever wants to put on a cod piece.\n\nHamm: I can only respond to that with that I'm very happy to stand on Stephen Colbert's non-existent shoulders. \n\nFallon: Yeah, it was weird because we were in this warehouse in Brooklyn and I had the show as well. So I would go in the morning and we'd film a couple scenes of \"Ace and Gary\" and I'd go back to 30 Rock in Manhattan, I'd shoot the show, then, after the show, I'd go back out to Brooklyn and finish the shooting.\n\nHamm: I'll be dead honest with you. The most awkward moment was getting into those costumes. Me and Fallon laughed more about that than anything else. It's like you're putting on latex fake muscles, girdles and codpieces and ridiculousness. And I remember Jimmy and I sort of standing in our bors with wigs and makeup on going, \"Are we adults? This is insane.\" \n\nFallon: It was hilarious. We were laughing the whole time, it was ridiculous walking around in those outfits. You do feel for Christian Bale because you can't just go to the bathroom because there's too much prosthetics. The most awkward was definitely the stretching. In the middle of our fight, Ace and Gary decide to do some stretching so they can limber up to fight more people. I remember my leg was on Jon's shoulder. At one point I was holding his legs up in the air like a wheelbarrow with my face very close to his crotch. I asked if Smigel wanted to air it in front of my audience to gauge the laughs, then you can make edits and cuts.\n\nSmigel: He offered me to have his audience watch it as a test screening, and I declined because my biggest fear was the Hamm/Fallon live action surprise would leak and ruin it for the SNL viewers.\n\nChott: I did the announcer voiceover for that. And, actually, when I was recording that with Robert\u2014I don't know, but maybe he plans in some way to bring the show back.\n\nSmigel: After we did it there was talk of, \"Well, let's see now if anyone wants to do it as a movie,\" but I'm not counting any chickens there. \n\nHamm: Obviously, it all depends. Robert wrote a brief treatment of the project with Stephen. They wrote what was kind of what we shot, only 50 pages longer. \n\nFallon: I mean, yeah. Of course! It's so fun to do. I mean, Smigel comes up with these really great jokes; it's a very well-written piece. I'm sure if Smigel is involved it's going to be super-hilarious. So, yeah, I'd be honored, of course.\n\nHamm: You're looking at a dude in a skintight suit calling someone by a nickname totally earnestly\u2014it's a little bit hilarious. I'm a huge comic book geek as well. I collected comic books throughout my teenage years, but when you have people called Storm and Magneto and Thor... Thor's a dude that throws a hammer at people. I mean, without the mutual agreement between audience and creator of, \"OK, we're going with this,\" it's a dude throwing a hammer at somebody. Which is a really ineffective way to fight crime or defeat bad people. So it is kind of funny when taken completely earnestly. That's the spirit that Robert and Stephen and all of the people who originally started this mined to really good comedy effect. There is something sort of gay and hilarious about two really close pals who choose to work out together in tight clothes and fight crime. \n\nSmigel: Jon Hamm is a godsend to comedians because he's so funny. We are all huge fans of him and expect him to be appropriately aloof, and it turns out he's one of the biggest comedy nerds in the country. \n\nFallon: He's got that thing of being good-looking but also being very funny and getting the joke. Alec Baldwin is probably the only other guy who has that. It's a weird combination. It's rare. \n\n\n\nWhat's the legacy of The Dana Carvey Show? It's hard to say. Considering the talented cast, is it a sad case of what could have been a long-living television project sideswiped by a couple of key decisions? Or was this a show that was, as they say, too far ahead of its time?\n\nCarvey: When you put Steve Carell, Smigel, Colbert, Louis C.K., and Charlie Kaufman together and doing what we wanted\u2014it does make sense that it was just in the wrong spot. But I'm still really proud of it. \n\nColbert: It was fantastic. I loved it. No complaints. It was wonderful. Dana and Robert and Louis could not have been nicer to me.\n\nCarlock: The way my perspective has changed the most is, we averaged 17 million viewers or something over the seven episodes that we did air\u2014which now would be the biggest comedy on television by far. \n\nHamm: Had that show come on now? There's Cartoon Network and Comedy Central and FX and a million better venues for it to be viewed and appreciated. But back then? It's going to roll in from Home Improvement? No way. It was way, way, way ahead of its time. And you just look at the talent that came of it, of course, and that's the true test.\n\nFeresten: When a show is cancelled that you're on, you kind of park it in a part of your brain and try to forget about it. \n\nMorgan: It was great to work with those people. I'm super happy that some of us are really thriving and still hanging in there. For me it's bittersweet. It is so goddamned hard to get something on the air and all the agendas moving together. \n\nChott: I view it as a time I wish I had been a little better prepared for, because I wasn't as developed as a writer as I could have been. But it was the closest I ever got to my childhood dream of being on SNL. At the time it was frustrating, but I look back on it as a fulfillment of my childhood dreams.\n\nGold: When what happened on that show happens? And it's so rare; it's like the original cast of SNL where practically every single one of them becomes superstars. \n\nCarlock: The legacy for me is that you can have all the talent in the world, but it can still go sideways. And think about what your opening shot is. Those are the two legacies of The Dana Carvey Show.\n\nCarvey: I think it's one of the most abstract variety shows to ever have been on primetime television. You were working on ideas that were so fucking funny. It's very rare. \n\nSmigel: If we were doing it just so that we could be written about on GQ.com years later, then we completely succeeded. I think our goal at the time was to stay on the air\u2014[Laughs] so I think we fucked up."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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