The Dana Carvey Show
The Dana Carvey Show
The Dana Carvey Show was light years ahead of its time. It only lasted a few episodes, but if you’re a fan of sketch comedy . . .
The Dana Carvey Show was light years ahead of its time. It only lasted a few episodes, but if you’re a fan of sketch comedy . . .
If you like sketch comedy and documentaries, you can do no better than the Hulu documentary Too Funny To Fail — about The Dana Carvey Show that aired on ABC in 1996.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 23 years. Even harder to believe is the caliber of writers and performers that were on the show:
Dana Carvey (SNL) and Robert Smigel (Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) were the Executive Producers.
The head writer was a 29-year-old Louis CK (Disgraced Comedian).
Writers included Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)
Jon Glaser (Inside Amy Schumer)
Dino Stamatopoulos (Mr. Show with Bob and David)
Spike Feresten (Seinfeld)
Robert Carlock (30 Rock).
The show also included some other writers and performers. BUT of particular note would be the two Steve’s picked from SCTV — Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell.
How’s that for comedy pedigree?
Watching the sketches from The Dana Carvey Show today, it’s hard to believe the show wasn’t wildly successful. Strike that, it’s rather easy to understand why it wasn’t wildly successful. Some would say the show was ahead of its time, others might say it was too abstract and others would say it was too offensive.
The truth is that it was all of those. And none of those.
It’s simply wrong to say the show was ahead of its time because good comedy is timeless (Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First). It wasn’t too abstract because things that are too abstract are not “laugh out loud” funny and typically don’t work. And this show worked and fired on all cylinders.
Consider the sketch “Grandma The Clown”. Everything says it shouldn’t be funny and yet it’s flawless.
Well, OK, the show could be a little offensive, but only by today’s standards. And given the current political climate, quite incendiary. I think it would be really hard to get “Skinheads From Maine” past the censors today.
Susan Sarandon and Gregory Peck presenting the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Animated Short Subject pretty much plays into every racial trope you can think of. Again, I can’t picture a scenario where it would make it out of the writer’s room today.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the envelope-pushing of both of these sketches they remain wildly offensive . . . and wickedly funny.
I hate using a hackneyed and overused phrase, but here it applies. I think the show was simply too “punk rock” and too subversive to have ever been successful.
Aside from skinheads and racial tropes, to try to put the attitude of the show into perspective one needs only look at the very first sketch of the very first episode where Dana Carvey was playing Bill Clinton.
A Bill Clinton who had himself surgically enhanced to have eight lactating breasts so he could be both father and mother to America; and American’s could suckle his teat during that election year (1996). He also had his behind replaced with a hen’s ass. This was the first sketch on one of the most anticipated shows at the time, starring one of the most beloved SNL alumni.
The show was making a statement.
Whatever that statement was, backfired. Robert Smigel points out that, according to Nielsen ratings, more than six million people had turned the show off during that first sketch. SIX MILLION!
Lactating Clinton was not anywhere near the banality of The Dana Carvey Show lead-in (and ABC’s big sitcom success), Home Improvement. But as far as absurdist comedy goes, that opening sketch belongs in the pantheon of great sketches like Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” or The Whitest Kids U’Know’s “Abe Lincoln.”
Hindsight being what it is, almost everyone involved with the show agrees that “Lactating Clinton” was probably not the best sketch to lead off with. But it certainly set the tone for the seven aired (and one unaired) episodes that followed.
Other sketches from that first episode included “Germans Who Say Nice Things” and Carvey’s beloved, and wildly misunderstood, Church Lady, doing a top ten on new names for Princess Diana (slut, in ten varying forms).
The second episode saw the introduction of, what would later become a hit on SNL, “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”, voiced by the two Steve’s — Colbert and Carell.
The fourth episode has “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food”, which Stephen Colbert claims is the sole reason both he and Carell were hired at The Daily Show.
The seventh episode contains “Heather Morgan’s First Ladies As Dogs”, which you wouldn’t think would be funny…and yet…it kills.
The unaired eighth episode, available on the DVD, contains two of the sketches that I consider to be the crown jewels of the show. In an interest to “garner younger viewers”, ABC’s This Week With David Brinkley takes place on a roller coaster, appropriately named Satan’s Revenge. Its just plain oddness makes it genius.
And then Tom Brokaw doing pre-tapes for Gerald Ford’s death.
This sketch made it onto SNL when Dana Carvey hosted later in 1996. It’s sublime.
Perhaps unknowingly, one of the more subversive things the show did was get an advertiser to sponsor the show by paying for their name to be included in the title. Kinda like how shows were sponsored during the dawn of television. So, that first episode was called The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show. Suffice it to say, lactating Bill had Taco Bell running for the hills and the second episode was not titled The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show, but rather The Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show. . . and then The Mountain Dew Dana Carvey Show . . . and then The Diet Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show . . . and then The Pepsi Stuff Dana Carvey Show until all the national sponsors had run away and the sixth episode was sponsored by a local NYC Chinese restaurant, The Szechuan Dynasty Dana Carvey Show.
Neither the seventh nor unaired eighth episode had a sponsor.
I’m pretty sure a show like The Dana Carvey Show couldn’t exist today. One, I don’t think some of the sketches would make it past any standards person be they working for a network, cable or streaming service. Two, while there is certainly plenty of comedy talent out there, maybe folks are either looking to play it safe or searching for something that will go “viral” (whatever that means). Safety and celebrity seem to have usurped comedy.
One of the most beautiful things about The Dana Carvey Show is that there was nothing behind it, nothing under it, over it or around it. Nothing was hidden. There was no subtext. It said what it was. Skinheads From Maine is about . . . skinheads from Maine, Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food is about just that.
“We kind of did reductionist bits where we’d just get away from beginning-middle-end, where the wacky character would walk into a scene and frustrate a straight man for six minutes. Instead, we just said ‘And now, here are skinheads from Maine,’ and then we just did 10 jokes.”
— Robert Smigel
The show was initially panned by critics. Caryn James of The New York Times claimed “the debut already looked tired and old” and LA Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg initially hated the show referring to it as “an artistic Chernobyl”. Ouch. After receiving a vitriolic piece of mail from a Dana Carvey Show fan, Rosenberg watched a later episode of the show and reversed his position, which is where I think we find ourselves today.
21 years later, and thanks to Too Funny To Fail, it appears as though we are taking another well-deserved look at The Dana Carvey Show. Not every one of the sketches hits during the eight episodes. A few do seem dated, but there are far too many that just kill and ultimately shine a light on the genius of the show.
Sometimes all the stars are in alignment and creativity works flawlessly so that you can capture lightning in a bottle. The Dana Carvey Show is such a show. Without question, The Dana Carvey Show should, and will, be remembered as one of the benchmarks in American comedy.
History is proving that The Dana Carvey Show was indeed too funny to fail.