As Saturday Night Live struggled to figure out how to make fun of Joe Biden last year, one of its most talented alumni quietly showed them how it was done, perfectly capturing the president’s mannerisms on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
This week, Dana Carvey took the reins of Jimmy Kimmel Live! as the latest comedian to step in while that show’s host is on summer vacation. And after some quick fan service takes on George H.W. Bush and the Church Lady (“We still have no idea where she was on January 6th”), among other iconic characters, he turned to the “fist bump heard ’round the world.”
After playing the clip of Biden casually fist-bumping Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Carvey joked, “Joe got a lot of flack for this, but I think we’re looking at this the wrong way. Because if you slow it down and watch it again, I think Biden was actually trying to punch MBS.” He imagined Biden saying, “How about a knuckle sandwich? Come on!”
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“By the way, have you noticed that Biden’s gotten a little feistier lately?” the comedian continued, exploring different facets of his impressive impression. “Because when he first came out, he was like a soothing grandpa offering you a butterscotch from his coin purse.”
Imitating Biden’s tendency to repeat, “no joke” and “I’m not kidding around here,” Carvey said, “No human being in the world thinks that’s a joke. Nobody.”
Then he demonstrated the way this feistier Biden alternates between a whisper and a yell. “I think it’s a wonderful move,” Carvey said. “Don’t you love it when he’s like, ‘We know how to get natural gas…We can get it! We know how to get it! Yes we do!’”
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