‘SNL’ Alum Dana Carvey Nails Hilarious Impression of President Joe Biden

Saturday Night Live alum Dana Carvey has debuted his hilarious impression of President Joe Biden and the iconic comedian absolutely nailed it. On Tuesday, Carvey appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and delivered his take on Biden as “the gentle father to the country [who] looks like the alien who came off the spaceship in Close Encounters.” You can check out the incredible impression below.

Carvey’s impression of the current U.S. Commander-in-Chief has had his peers cheering on social media, with fellow former SNL star — and current SNL announcer — Darrell Hammond tweeting, “Really enjoyed my pal [Dana Carvey’s] killer Biden impression!” Stand-up comedian Paula Poundstone added, “Dana Carvey’s impressions are the best. He gets to the essence so fast. He doesn’t even need actual words.” Finally, comedian, and star of the new Tom & Jerry movie, Rob Delaney wrote, “Dana Carvey’s Biden is A+. He’s so cool.”

Carvey has a long history of great political impressions and is often most well-known for portraying late President George H.W. Bush on Saturday Night Live in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Following Bush’s death in 2018, Carvey wrote about the experience for the NY Times and revealed that early on he and SNL writer/star Al Franken — who would later go on to have a political career — could not figure out how to crack the impression. “There was nothing to do an impression of — no hook. My take on him, in the early sketches, was actually kind of terrible and not particularly funny.”

Eventually, however, the light switch flipped and he figured out the best version of the impression. “Then one late Friday night on the 17th floor of Rockefeller Center, as Franken and I sat in his office racking our brains, something unexpected happened,” he recalled. “Lorne Michaels…had asked for a Bush cold open, and in comedy terms, ‘we had nothing.’ I was playing around, trying to make Al laugh.”

He continued, “At one point, I raised my right arm and began rotating my hand lazily with index finger pointed — as if the hand were reaching for some thought. And then it came out — my voice flattening in a lazy syntax — ‘those people out there … doing that thing … doing that thing in that whole area over there.’” Carvey had it, and he knew it. “Al was laughing his ass off, and we both knew we had a hook,” he said. “At that moment, President Bush became a character.”