Dana Carvey is not done milking Elon Musk for laughs.
The former Saturday Night Live star appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday night and, true to form, immediately unleashed a storm of impressions on the highly amused host. Carvey kicked off the impersonation parade with his reenactment of an Oval Office presser with Musk and Donald Trump.
“So Trump’s there, and he’s got the tie, and Elon is up there talking,” said Carvey, setting the scene for the audience. As he began to launch into his Musk impression, he did issue a laugh-filled warning about his Musk portrayal: “I don’t really do it yet, but I’m working on it.”
“We’ve got to go to Mars,” was the main gist of Carvey’s Musk—coupled with a handful of indecipherable noises that may or may not have been attempts at making words.
Next up was Trump, whose initial response to Musk’s Mars talk was simply: “What he said.” Carvey also poked fun at Trump’s tendency to take a single word and run with it by having him describe Musk as “a smart cookie. He’s a tough cookie. He’s a Cookie Monster, this one. He’s smart—everybody talks about it. He’s like a Chips Ahoy!”
Carvey broke character but kept the Trump impersonation going when he observed that “Nobody works a word like Trump. ‘He’s a smart, tough cookie. He’s a Cookie Monster. He’s a Lorna Doone.’”
“This is why hosts feel so superfluous while you are on,” Maher remarked after not being able to get a word in for a good two minutes of the show that bears his name. Carvey offered to talk about more serious things, but Maher wanted nothing to do with that—so the Wayne’s World star jumped right into an impression of RFK Jr., declaring that “he always sounds like he just took a hit of pot.”
“I think he’s really smart,” Carvey said of the freshly appointed Health and Human Services Secretary. “He just needs a JFK AI to interpret.” (Which easily transitioned into a JFK impression.) Johnny Carson being pulled over for driving drunk followed.
“This is why you are just such a genius at impersonating,” said Maher. “You get at the essence of somebody. Nobody could quite get Biden; you got at the essence of him.”
That was the only encouragement Carvey needed to morph into the Biden role he played so well on SNL in the lead-up to the election—complete with catchphrase (“I’m being serious right now, come on”).
Musk was yet another impression Carvey whipped out earlier this season on SNL, though it wasn’t one of his best impersonations. Mostly it involved a lot of jumping up and down on the stage.
The Tesla CEO himself took time on X to criticize the comedian’s ability to capture his essence. “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey,” Musk wrote.
Only time will tell if Musk feels strongly enough to comment on Carvey’s new, improved impersonation. In the meantime, it’s another former SNL icon, Mike Myers, who has taken over the job of lampooning the DOGE director on Saturday Night Live.
