The Real Reason Why We Don't Hear About Dana Carvey Anymore

Throughout the '80s and '90s, Dana Carvey was a towering presence in comedy, and he
was the unequalled star of Saturday Night Live during his 1986 to 1993 tenure.
"Well isn't that special?"
From the Church Lady to Garth to his unhinged impressions of politicians like George H.W.
Bush, Carvey was king.
That's great — but what has he been up to recently?
Heart problems
In the '90s, Carvey reported suffering terrible chest pain.
Doctors discovered that it was related to blood not flowing properly to his heart.
"Come here, Come here..
Look at this x-ray, your heart looks like a pig's a------, look at that thing!"
Still, the terrible chest pains continued, even after multiple angioplasties and a double
bypass.
Further tests revealed that his doctor had made a terrible mistake: he'd bypassed the
wrong artery.
"Oh no!
That's not good!
I'm not happy!"
Carvey had no choice but to repeat the painful and elaborate double bypass surgery…but
with a different doctor.
Carvey sued the original heart surgeon for $7.5 million and settled out of court in 2000.
Being the victim of a botched surgery understandably sidelined Carvey for a while.
Family man
After he left SNL in 1993, Carvey starred in a string of what he calls "awful movies",
including Trapped in Paradise and The Master of Disguise.
At the time, he realized that he didn't want to be away from his two very young sons, Dex
and Tom.
He told The A.V.
Club that he even ended up bringing his kids to the sets of his movies, saying,
"It felt weird and awkward to hand the kid to a nanny, so that kind of went out the window.
One son had a lot of ear infections, and the other one got the flu."
During the filming of Wayne's World 2, one of his sons became upset with his long, blond
Garth Algar wig and started sobbing.
Carvey took those incidents as cues to focus on his family full-time and moved his wife
and kids to a "a small town with trees" in northern California.
Carvey didn't tend to his career for two full years.
Dex and Tom Carvey are now both in their 20s, and are both pursuing careers in comedy, just
like their dad.
Near misses
He could've been a player on late night TV.
In the early '90s, Late Night host David Letterman jumped over to CBS to go head-to-head with
The Tonight Show, so NBC tasked SNL creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels with
finding a host.
He looked to his SNL cast.
Carvey, amiable, versatile, and one of the most popular cast members in years, was offered
the job.
NBC thought it was such a lock that they gave him $1 million, and a Beatles album signed
by all four Beatles worth $400,000, just to consider the offer.
Carvey even landed on the cover of TV Guide as Letterman's heir apparent.
It took a year for Carvey to decide not to do Late Night, because he didn't want to commit
to a nightly show.
It wasn't the first time he passed on a job, either.
The 1995 action movie Bad Boys was first offered to Carvey and his SNL co-star Jon Lovitz.
At the time, it was titled Bulletproof Hearts, and it could've been a huge hit for Carvey
at the peak of his fame.
But then director Michael Bay, at the time best known for making music videos, joined
the project, and convinced producers to make it a youth-oriented action flick.
Carvey and Lovitz did a screen test, which Carvey felt was so inappropriate for him that
he left the movie.
Carvey even tried to fall back on one of his popular recurring SNL sketches: European bodybuilders
Hans and Franz.
"I am Hans…"
"Und I am Franz."
"And we want to … pump… you up."
SNL writer Robert Smigel worked on the screenplay for a big-screen adventure with Carvey, Kevin
Nealon, and Conan O'Brien.
Oh, and it was also a musical.
'And then their muscles were going to dance like 'boom boom, boom boom'… then they're
going to flex and g------ it was gonna be funny."
A substantial role was written for Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing himself as well as
an Austrian grandmother, but he dropped out of Hans and Franz: The Girly-Man Dilemma after
the failure of the similarly self-effacing Last Action Hero.
After that, the project collapsed.
These weren't even Carvey's earliest or worst brushes with the fickle world of Hollywood.
Solo sketches
Just two years after leaving the comedy confines of SNL in 1994, Carvey returned to TV with
The Dana Carvey Show.
While it was critically acclaimed and became a cult hit among comedy nerds, it was a commercial
disaster.
ABC scheduled it to air immediately after its family-friendly mega-hit Home Improvement.
What they got was wild, weird, and just a little dark — everything Home Improvement
wasn't.
"The days are rushing by children, it'll be over before you know it…"
The show honed the talents of a lot of the most important comedy writers and performers
of the last 20 years, including writer Charlie Kaufman, The Office co-creator Greg Daniels,
Community writer Dino Stamatopoulos, and head writer Louis C.K.
And then there were these guys.
Ratings dropped after the first episode, and The Dana Carvey Show was canceled after seven
weeks.
It took nearly 15 years for Carvey to attempt sketch comedy again.
In 2010, he and Dana Carvey Show writer Spike Feresten created a series for Fox called Spoof,
which was completely pre-taped and didn't feature any in-studio pieces or a live audience.
Fox paid for a pilot, but opted not to order it to a full series.
Again, it was very, very weird.
Finally, in 2016, Carvey starred on a game show befitting his talents.
USA's First Impressions with Dana Carvey was a competition show that sought out America's
most skilled amateur voice impressionist, with a cash prize of $100,000.
Carvey served as the show's "Expert in Residence," and both he and Freddie Prinze Jr. judged
and coached the contestants.
Unfortunately, the show was not a huge hit, and wasn't renewed for a second season.
At least he could still team up with Mike Myers again, right?
"WRONG!"
The Evil feud
Mike Myers brought the character of metal-head TV host Wayne Campbell to Saturday Night Live
when he joined the cast in 1989, and his chemistry with Dana Carvey seemed natural.
But Carvey had a different take on the relationship, saying,
"We were never meant to be a comedy team.
Mike just invited me into the sketch.
I'm grateful that he did."
After Wayne and Garth spawned a movie in 1992, and a sequel in 1993, Myers and Carvey left
SNL, and everything was fine… until Myers wrote and starred in Austin Powers: International
Man of Mystery in 1997.
The character of Dr. Evil, played by Myers, was a parody of various James Bond villains,
but his mannerisms closely reflected those of SNL creator Lorne Michaels.
Or, according to Carvey, they more specifically mirrored Carvey's impression of Michaels,
which he'd do around the offices of SNL.
Carvey was so miffed at the comedic plagiarism that he didn't talk to Myers for about a decade.
But they've since made up, appearing together at multiple Wayne's World anniversary screenings.
Dr. Evil said it best:
"It's just so pathetic to see you guys fight over a silly comedy.
It's like watching two bald men fight over a comb.
Who cares…?"
He's doing stand-up again
Carvey is mainly known as a sketch comedy performer and actor in movies of varying success,
but when he first got into show business in the early 1980s, it was as a stand-up comedian.
After leaving SNL, he did stand-up here and there, taping a few specials.
But he took a pretty long break before starring in his first new special in nearly a decade,
Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60.
Along with Jon Lovitz, he's a comic-in-residence at The Foundry in Las Vegas, where over the
course of 2017 he'll perform 20 shows of stand-up, comedy sketches, and musical numbers.
So, if you don't see him in movies or on TV, you know where to find him.
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The Real Reason Why We Don't Hear About Dana Carvey Anymore

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