As Dana Carvey appeared Friday on Real Time with Bill Maher, he brought a few familiar voices with him.
The Saturday Night Live alum quickly whipped out his impressions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, noting that he’s “working on” the latter after Musk appeared to be put off by the impersonation during a post-election SNL appearance in November.
“So, Trump’s there, and he’s got the tie, and then Elon is up there talking, right?” he explained. “And I don’t really do it yet, but I’m working on it.”
In his best Musk mumble, Carvey said, “We got to go to Mars, because we can’t sustain life on planet Earth. We gotta go to Mars, it’s just gonna be really cool, OK? Mhm, mhm, mhm.”
Pivoting to his Trump impression, the comedian responded, “What he said. He’s a smart cookie, he’s a tough cookie, he’s a Cookie Monster. This one, he’s smart. Everybody talks about it. He’s like Chips Ahoy.”
Dana Carvey as Elon Musk on ‘Saturday Night Live’
Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images
After Carvey debuted his Musk impression on SNL, Musk shared his criticism to his own social platform the next day. “They are so mad that @realDonaldTrump won,” he wrote in one response on X, adding in another: “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey.”
Musk also took aim at the long-running NBC sketch comedy show. “SNL has been dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Carvey was big enough to admit he didn’t nail the impression. “I can’t do Elon Musk very well,” he said on his 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.”
Nobody was off limits during Carvey’s brief sit-down with Maher as he also served impressions of Joe Biden, RFK Jr., JFK, Johnny Carson, Bill Gates, Gollum, Woody Allen and Paul McCartney.
