Saturday Night Live fans and historians would be hard pressed to name a cast member who hit the ground running faster in their first show than Dana Carvey. The comic actor joined the show at the beginning of its twelfth season and in that debut episode appeared in three now classic sketches – “Quiz Masters,” in which he plays a psychic contestant on a game show handily beating his opponent, another cast newcomer Jan Hooks; the very first “Church Chat,” introducing the world to his now iconic Church Lady character; and “Comeback,” in which his washed-up rock star Derek Stevens is desperate for a new hit and winds up writing a song about chopping broccoli, repurposing a piece from his stand-up and his audition for the show. It was the start of a memorable and impressive seven year run on the show that would see him playing a number of political personages, celebrities and original characters.
Of course, Carvey was a bit more experienced than his fellow freshmen that season. Where the show like to pick new talent from stage comedy institutions like Second City or the Groundlings, Carvey already started amassing credits in films like This Is Spinal Tap and Tough Guys and on TV series like Blue Thunder and the short-lived sitcom One Of The Boys opposite Mickey Rooney. He had the on-camera confidence and the material and talent to back it up.
Carvey left SNL in the spring of 1993, but he would return to sketch comedy just a few years later with The Dana Carvey Show. Not many people saw the series when aired, and fewer remember it today. But for comedy nerds it is one of those unsung classics that would serve as the launching pad for a number of comedy luminaries.
With an eight episode order from ABC as a mid-season replacement series, Carvey and his oft times SNL collaborator Robert Smigel set about building a crew of upcoming and coming writer-performers to staff the show. For the job of head writer they picked stand-up turned Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Late Show with David Letterman writer Louis C.K. C.K. had only been professionally writing for just three years, so his hiring didn’t express a recklessness over his relative lack of TV experience as it did a desire on the part of Smigel and Carvey to want to bring a fresh attitude for the show. Bob Odenkirk and Dino Stamatopoulos were hired in part off of their work on the short-lived The Ben Stiller Show sketch series. Carvey and Smigel also brought in first-timers to television, going to improv groups around the country to discover Heather Morgan, Bill Chott and most importantly Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell.
When The Dana Carvey Show premiered on March 12, 1996, it charged out of the box and onto America’s airways with a lead off sketch featuring Carvey as President Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies. It was a proclamation that the show wasn’t necessarily going to feature all of the fan favorite Carvet characters from SNL but instead was going to follow wherever its weird comedy muse would take its cast and writers each week. In addition to its Clinton cold open, the show featured Steve Carell as Republican Presidential candidate hopeful Pat Buchanan eating the still-beating heart of an illegal immigrant, a parody of the recently aired Beatles Anthology documentary miniseries and Carvey and Carell as shouting “Germans who say nice things.” The one classic Carvey character to appear, the Church Lady, only showed up to deliver a Top Ten list of new names for Princess Diana which included entries like “Her Royal Whoreness” and “The Princess Of Wails And Moans.”
Needless to say, this is probably not what the network was really hoping for, and it certainly seemed out of place on ABC’s schedule following such a family-friendly show like Home Improvement. Critics certainly did not take to the show and savaged it in their initial reviews. ABC execs suggested toning things down and used minute-by-minute viewership data to show how viewers were quickly tuning out of that premier episode.
But Carvey and crew were undaunted. They continued marching forward with the particular oddball comedy they were forging. In that process, they brought to the airwaves things like the animated cartoon “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” “Gentle News” in which PBS painting instructor Bob Ross reports on the Melendez Brothers murder trial, a sketch in which Carvey and writer Bill Chott struggle to not describe what a glass of sponsor Mountain Dew’s soda really looks like, “Skinheads in Maine,” Colbert and Carell as waiters who are nauseated by food and more. Carvey even called in some favors from former SNL castmates Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks for cameo appearances. The critics would come around, at least the ones that gave the show a second watch. The audience, though, never did and ABC ultimately decided not to renew the series for a second season.
But even though only eight episodes of the show were produced, The Dana Carvey Show served as an incubator for a number of comedy talents who have become significant influencers on American comedy. On the strength of “Waiters Who Are Nauseated By Food,” Stephen Colbert would go on to get hired by The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and would encourage the hiring of Steve Carell soon after. The two would become foundational pillars of the early-aughts Stewart era. Colbert would spin his arch conservative character off to its own successful show, The Colbert Report, that would air immediately after The Daily Show before handily stepping into David Letterman’s shoes as host of CBS’s The Late Show. Carell would go on to star in the hit US version of The Office before expanding his career to films. Charlie Kaufman would go on to become an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director. Robert Smiegel would return to Saturday Night Live, taking with him “The Ambiguously Gay Duo” which would launch the show’s twelve year run of its “TV Funhouse” cartoon interludes. Dino Stamatopoulos would go on to write for Late Show With David Letterman, MadTV, Saturday Night Live and the influential Mr. Show With Bob And Dave and the classic series Community before joining that show’s creator Dan Harmon in founding the animation studio Starburns Industries. Writer Robert Carlock would also move on to Saturday Night Live where he would create a number of iconic sketches, including the series of “NPR’s Delicious Dish” sketches before joining with SNL alum Tina Fey to create 30 Rock and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Not a bad legacy for a show that barely lasted two months in prime time.
