Dana Carvey wants to make people laugh. At the height of his Saturday Night Live career, he had more than 10 million viewers watching him every week, reports The Daily Beast.
Unfortunately, those viewers did not migrate over to The Dana Carvey Show, which lasted only eight episodes in 1996. The short-lived series is now the subject of a new documentary, Too Funny To Fail, available on Hulu.
The Daily Beast writes that though it failed on primetime, The Dana Carvey Show produced some of the funniest sketch comedy “ever committed to film.” Writers of the show included Louis C.K., Stephen Colbert, and Steve Carell, all before they were household names.
The Dana Carvey Show was just finding its groove, The Daily Beast reports, when ABC pulled the plug. It never even ran the eighth and final episode — which is now available on Hulu. The episode contains a sketch that Carvey said is still “one of the favorite things” he’s ever been involved in, according to The Daily Beast.
The Daily Beast sat down and talked to Carvey about his career. He told the Beast that he wasn’t that interested in revisiting that time of his life for the documentary because it was just eight shows twenty years ago. But he said Greenbaum wore him down, and he had a lot of fun doing it.
Carvey has impersonated almost every U.S. president from Ford to Trump, so The Daily Beast asked him about Alec Baldwin’s impression of Trump. Carvey said that Baldwin’s take on it is “great” and it was a “brilliant move to have him there.” But he does wonder about Trump fatigue.
“I wonder where it goes. Where Trump goes and where the satire goes. Do you? Like, where’s it gonna go?” he asked, according to The Daily Beast. Carvey also said that in his own stand-up, he wants to find ways to “thread the line for certain audiences. I want them all to listen and maybe move people on the left a little this way and move people on the right a little this way.”
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