Saturday Night Live has plenty of big moments planned — in addition to all of the upcoming hosts and musical guests who have already been announced — as its return to the 2024 TV schedule kicked off the celebration of 50 seasons of sketch comedy on NBC. The milestone anniversary just happens to coincide with a pretty wild presidential race, and SNL is taking full advantage of the situation (and quite a big risk) by inviting multiple non-cast members to portray major political figures. One of those is Dana Carvey, who recently relayed the full story of how Lorne Michaels got him to return to play Joe Biden.
Dana Carvey is responsible for several of the funniest recurring characters on SNL from his seven-year stint on the show. Since then he’s been back as a host four times, made numerous cameos and co-hosts the Fly on the Wall podcast with fellow SNL alum David Spade. Following Carvey’s surprise appearance in the Season 50 premiere, he explained on the podcast:
Well, Lorne Michaels, our superstar boss, asked me in early June, ‘Would you consider coming out and doing Biden? You know, six shows, and then you can tell us to fuck off.’ So I thought, ‘Well, that's nice and tidy, I guess.’ I said, yes. And then there was that, let's just call it eccentric debate with Trump. And then the other thing happened with Biden. And then Lorne was like a dog with a bone. He's still like, ‘You'll come out, maybe you'll appear as a ghost or something.’ He just wanted me to come out anyway.
Dana Carvey said he’d been talking to Lorne Michaels about making multiple appearances this season before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. They decided to go ahead with the appearance anyway, and fans were surely glad he did. The Wayne’s World actor’s take on the president’s mannerisms stunned people, to the point that a clip of Carvey breaking down how he does the impersonation went viral after the SNL premiere.
He opened up about the process of working with the writers and showing them what he could do, saying:
I had this take on Biden that I developed on this show. And so those clips we did, that was sort of being fanciful about Biden. You know, it was all the different hooks. I wanted to just meet with the writers, and so they said, ‘Fine.’ So I went in on Tuesday for about half-hour and just ran them through the Biden hooks, the Biden walk, ‘Can't Believe It's Not Butter,’ all the stuff, they took notes. They're really nice. … They let me really do the Biden I wanted to do.
While there is the risk that bringing in comedians from the past could upset current SNLers, it sounds like Dana Carvey had a good collaboration with the writers in putting together a script. However, he said when it came to all of those Biden-isms that really make the character, he just added them as he went. Carvey explained:
So then we have the read-through on Wednesday, and we didn't really include it in the script, because I don't know if I even told them the thing that became a catchphrase. ‘And guess what? And by the way, the fact of the matter is,’ so I ad-libbed it at read-through. I just threw it in a couple times because it was in flow, and it got a big laugh there. And the cast members, the current cast members, are all adorable people. They're young and everything. They're like, ‘I didn't know you could ad-lib in read through.’
It sounds like Dana Carvey enjoyed his return to Saturday Night Live as much as the fans did, who also got to see Maya Rudolph reprising the role of Kamala Harris; James Austin Johnson’s scary-accurate Donald Trump impression; Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff; Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz; and Bowen Yang as JD Vance.
Season 50 has only just begun, folks, so no doubt there’s plenty more of this to come. Tune into Saturday Night Live at 11:30 p.m. ET Saturdays on NBC or streaming with a Peacock subscription.