Everyone expected Maya Rudolph to appear as Vice President Kamala Harris in the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” It was less obvious who would play Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. But when Jim Gaffigan walked onstage, face split in an open-mouthed grin like some kind of genial jack-o’-lantern, it was clear no one else should have bothered. Gaffigan’s entire comic persona is based in Walzian Big Dad Energy, even if he portrays himself as more likely to sit in his underwear eating Hot Pockets than climbing on the roof to clean out the gutters. There’s a harmony there, a vibe match.
There were other interesting matchups — Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff, James Austin Johnson and Bowen Yang as Donald J. Trump and JD Vance — but those weren’t the performers who stole that night’s show. The shocker, somehow, was an impersonation of President Biden, a performance so spot-on that for a split second I thought Lorne Michaels had just called the president and asked him to appear.
This Biden was Dana Carvey, the former cast member whose work on “S.N.L.” includes perhaps the show’s greatest presidential impression, a strange and brilliant take on George H.W. Bush. Carvey’s Biden squints and chuckles, says “folks” a lot and is given to insisting that he’s “being serious right now,” even when what he’s just said — “I’ve passed more bills than any president in history, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do” — would never be mistaken for a joke. This Biden felt less like an attempt to replicate the president and more like a guess at what he’s feeling these days.
Judging from social media discourse — and from this parade of imitations in the season premiere, each cued up for maximum applause and surprise — political impressions have never been more interesting even to those who don’t care about “S.N.L.” There’s no obvious reason for this intrigue, other than the novelty of watching one kind of celebrity play a different kind of celebrity, the same interest that powers a lot of awards-season movies in which great stars try to win awards by playing other famous people. See “The Apprentice,” in which Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan portray Roy Cohn and Trump.
In fact, the earliest stars of “S.N.L.” are now the subject of their own impersonations, in Jason Reitman’s new “Saturday Night.” Some are more successful than others. But what’s obvious from the better performances (Cory Michael Smith’s version of Chevy Chase, Dylan O’Brien’s Dan Aykroyd) is what’s also clear from Carvey’s impression of Biden: playing real people can’t just consist of perfectly imitating their exterior. And the goal can’t just be to make the audience marvel at a remarkable likeness.
The Biden conundrum is a good example of this. To a regular “Saturday Night Live” viewer like me, it’s been weird to watch the show’s many attempts to find a good Biden impersonation, a challenge so notable that in 2021, a sketch parodied the proliferation of Bidens. The list of men who have taken a crack at this apparently tricky feat is long: Kevin Nealon way back in 1991; Jason Sudeikis during the Obama years; then, during Biden’s 2020 campaign and presidency, Woody Harrelson, John Mulaney, Jim Carrey, Alex Moffat, Mikey Day and even Johnson.
They all felt a little bit correct — Sudeikis’s proto-Ted Lasso affability, Harrelson’s broadly confident but slightly confused political savant, Moffat’s smirking jokester. Even Carrey’s profoundly unsettling turn seemed like it could be some kind of alt-universe Biden.
But it was Carvey who located the soul of Biden. Talking with Al Franken, the former senator and ex-“S.N.L.” cast member, Carvey explained how he built the impression based on very close observation of the president’s evolution over his career and most recent campaign. Carvey had been watching Biden’s speech patterns; clocking shifts in his level of annoyance with the news media and the ways he addressed the nation; and sensing changes in Biden’s mood and attitude.
Carvey doesn’t mimic Biden as much as capture his energy and give something that feels like genuine insight. Writing in Slate in 2015 about Carvey’s Bush take, Jacob Rubin observed that a great impression “helps us imagine the perspective of the imitated rather than calcify him in ways already seen.” It’s as if we’re seeing his point of view. Carvey’s Biden is perpetually surprised and innocent, but right below that layer is the sense that this guy mostly enjoys his job and wants all of us to enjoy ours, too. He is the cornhole-loving family member at the reunion who can usually coax everyone else to play, the leader who’s now a bit annoyed that people have decided it’s time for him to go home.
IMPRESSIONS RELY on the audience’s familiarity with the original, which more or less presupposes mass-media saturation. That’s probably why “S.N.L.,” which premiered in 1975 as the voice of a new generation that had grown up with televised politics, immediately leaned into impressions of public figures. Chevy Chase played President Gerald R. Ford in the first season, and by the beginning of the second season, John Belushi was performing as Joe Cocker next to the musician himself.
Many able impressionists have passed through “S.N.L.,” taking different tacks in the pursuit of comic imitation. Sometimes the laughter comes from the shock of recognition: Tina Fey nailing Sarah Palin so perfectly you can barely tell them apart. Sometimes it’s from seeing weird mannerisms and peculiar turns of phrase extracted from the political arena and set down in a comedic context. I’ll never forget Darrell Hammond as Al Gore saying “lockbox” over and over in the 2000 debate sketches, just like the vice president did in the real debates. Sometimes it’s true satire, stretching foibles just far enough that it seems like something the real person might have done. (I had to Google “Did George W. Bush actually say ‘strategery’?” No, Will Ferrell did, playing him on “S.N.L.”)
The delight of seeing a great impression — and the mild amusement of seeing a pretty decent one — has generated a culture obsessed with them, to the point that every televised presidential or campaign appearance seems to instantly spawn furious internet debates over whether it will make a good “S.N.L.” sketch that weekend. But that obsession has spilled beyond comedy, too. For instance, it seemed to be a foregone conclusion that Angelina Jolie would nab an Oscar nomination for playing the opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s biopic even before the film’s August premiere in Venice. Consider that half of the 20 Oscar acting nominations earlier this year went to actors playing real people, continuing a decades-long trend.
An actor’s mediocre performance as a real person tends to depend on replicating surface-level attributes: vocal pitch, way of moving, speech patterns. This is why prosthetics are often part of the bag of tricks: the goal is to wow us by how similar the performance is to the original.
But a great performance of this kind feels more like a glimpse of the real person’s soul, transplanted suddenly into the performer’s body, so that their humanity starts radiating through someone else’s physicality. One of the most staggering and probably the best performances of this sort was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as Truman Capote in 2005. Hoffman did not really resemble Capote at all, but in “Capote,” he embodies him.
THIS IS WHERE a great impression or dramatic performance begins. The actor engages in mind-meld, a sense of deep connection that can only come from careful and deeply interested attention to the subject. I can’t help but think, though it might be a little perverse here, of the philosopher Simone Weil’s observation that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Even Johnson’s Trump — clearly meant as satirical — has the odd effect of giving us a glimpse, however tangled, of his rambling speeches’ logic. Rubin noted in Slate that the best impressions “almost always fail as satire,” because of “the very humanizing attention that makes the impression great.” It feels a little like affection.
The question of attention and imitation is fascinating when it comes to “The Apprentice,” Ali Abbasi’s drama about the young Donald Trump and his mentor, the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn. Sebastian Stan plays Trump circa the 1970s as a kind of empty vessel, an ambitious young man who’s ravenously hungry to be shown how to succeed. He’s introduced to us at the swanky members-only Le Club; we quickly realize he is there as a sponge, trying to soak up and become everything he sees around him.
If anyone is paying close attention, in other words, it is Trump, who meets Cohn (a dead-eyed and terrifying Jeremy Strong) that night. Strong plays Cohn as a man whose belligerence is a smoke screen, hiding a shriveled and petrified soul. If Stan’s Trump is hollow, ready to be filled, Strong’s Cohn is filled to the brim with anxious dread. All the rules he’s made for himself and others are a way of hanging on to control. And he’s ready to impart those lessons to his willing student.
“The Apprentice” is, essentially, a two-hander tragicomedy that’s much heavier on the tragedy. Strong’s Cohn is an on-the-money take that has instantly garnered awards chatter, but I think Stan’s performance is underrated. His version of young Trump contains all the seeds of older Trump. The now-familiar mannerisms — the emphasizing hands held vertical, as if measuring the size of something; the head tilt and middle-distance gaze before an interlocutor finishes questioning; the pronounced lip movement — are there at the start, though they grow more pronounced as the film jumps from the Ford era to the Reagan years.
But what’s fascinating to realize, and what the film handles subtly, is this: The younger Trump, aching to be taken seriously, spots in Cohn a man who represents success and power. He asks him questions and absorbs his lessons, like any good acolyte would. But he also begins developing his own Roy Cohn impression. Cohn’s speech patterns become Trump’s. The angle at which Cohn holds his mouth migrates to Trump’s face. Cohn lies in tanning beds, so Trump starts acquiring his own fake tan.
By the end, Trump the student has become the Trump version of Cohn, the movie suggests. Like any good mimic, he’s fused Cohn’s soul into his own; he’s worked hard to become and then overcome his teacher. And as with any great impression, the true, bone-chilling element of his Cohn take doesn’t come from physical similarities or turns of phrase. It comes from learning how to perfectly and automatically embody Cohn’s energy: Trump understands Cohn, in the end, better than Cohn himself ever could.
The post In a Season of Political Impressions, Why Does Dana Carvey’s Biden Stand Out? appeared first on New York Times.
