Emmy-winning comedy legend Dana Carvey returns to the stage with a routine that blends pitch-perfect impressions of big personalities with so-true-it-hurts stories about being a dad of millennials, the joys of aging, and pharmaceuticals.

You'd be watching a movie, and before the movie, they'd come on, they'd be like, "News out of 1945 in the Pacific Theater. Ladies and gentlemen, as the Empire of Japan has officially refused to surrender, America says, 'No go, Tokyo.' Say hello ...

Dana Carvey is a very ordinary Straight White Male, 60 in his Netflix ...

Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 starts out with the comic introducing his Donald Trump, to a few hoots and boos from the crowd at Boston's packed Wilbur Theatre. The thing is, Carvey is ...

Comedy legend Dana Carvey returns to the stage with a host of new impressions and a few familiar voices, covering the joys of aging, pharmaceuticals, millenn...

Emmy-winning comedian Dana Carvey blends pitch-perfect tales on big personalities with so-true-it-hurts stories from his life as a dad of millennials. ... Carvey is a straight white male, 60, and his comedy shows that with few real flashes of inspiration from someone who cut his teeth on SNL before a brief movie career which only really had two ...

Emmy-winning comedian Dana Carvey blends pitch-perfect tales on big personalities with so-true-it-hurts stories from his life as a dad of millennials. Marcus Raboy. Director. Dana Carvey. Writer.

Dana Carvey’s infamously short-lived sketch show is rightly lauded as both a launching pad for a shocking number of original comedy minds and an ahead-of-its-time conceptual comedy machine. It’s really not surprising that the show’s daring blend of absurdity and outrageousness wasn’t embraced by either its network or audience. What’s most surprising in retrospect (and part of why viewers and advertisers felt like victims of a bait and switch) is that it was built around Carvey himself, one of the most amiable comics in Saturday Night Live’s history.

With his enthusiastic impressions and affection for big, broad types, Carvey was always a people-pleaser on SNL. In that respect, he’s the model for later Saturday Night Live alum Jimmy Fallon (though Carvey’s hammy adorableness came yoked with a lot more performing discipline and professionalism). On The Tonight Show, Fallon found the perfect vehicle for his ingratiating energy, one that’s vaulted him to post-SNL superstardom. And it’s not hard to imagine Carvey having ended up in a similar situation had he followed his natural inclination toward crowd-pleasing versatility to where a more receptive audience was waiting for the Church Lady, Garth, and his discursive, stammering George Bush.

All those characters (plus Carvey standbys like Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Tony Montana, George W. Bush, Bernie Sanders, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, and more) make appearances throughout Carvey’s new stand-up special. Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 starts out with the comic introducing his Donald Trump, to a few hoots and boos from the crowd at Boston’s packed Wilbur Theatre. The thing is, Carvey is about as interested in being a political comedian as Fallon is, his Trump skating even more lightly over the surface of the divisive Republican candidate’s policies than SNL at its laziest. “An impression can be anything, in my mind,” explains Carvey at one point, and, as an impressionist, Carvey’s an observer of behavior, plucking out minutiae—a gesture, a quirk of speech—and enlarging it until it becomes the person in toto. That’s not a criticism, really—his George Bush didn’t come to life on SNL until he found the hook to hang it on. When he hit on Bush’s often inelegant digressions and repetitions, it caught the public’s imagination to the extent that Carvey’s impression has been incorporated into our recollections of the man.

That’s another way of saying that Carvey’s impressions, as enthusiastic and amusing as they are, have never been very good. He’s not a technician like Darrell Hammond or Jay Pharoah, but a harvester of tics and audience appreciation. Leading off his special with impressions of political figures like Trump, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama seems like a statement of purpose. And it is. But Carvey’s purpose is to get the audience to recognize and applaud, something the wildly appreciative crowd at the the Wilbur does, unceasingly. He imagines Bill feeding a strident Hillary tips on being laid-back, notes Trump’s blustering cadence and arm gestures, and does a bit about Obama’s pause-heavy oratory lending gravitas to nursery rhymes, and it’s all as amusing as it is disposable.