Happiness Quote by Dana Carvey

Carvey’s line is a comedian’s inside memo about how an impression mutates once it goes viral. The joke isn’t really Al Gore; it’s the feedback loop of Gore. “More people started doing him” points to that late-90s/early-2000s moment when political impressions became a shared national hobby, traded on SNL, in dorm rooms, on morning radio. Each new mimic amplifies a few odd frequencies - pacing, earnestness, that careful, overly thoughtful cadence - until the original person starts to feel like the copy of the copy.

Calling Gore “more exotic” is the slyest move here. Gore was famously bland in the popular imagination, the buttoned-up wonk next to Clinton’s charisma. Carvey flips that: repetition doesn’t normalize Gore, it makes him stranger. “Exotic” also hints at how American comedy treats any deviation from the default political alpha voice as an accent, a species. The subtext is sharp but not cruel: the culture doesn’t just lampoon politicians; it manufactures characters out of them, then acts surprised when the character overtakes the human.

“I don’t know why” is classic Carvey misdirection - faux bafflement masking craft. He’s describing the irrational chemistry of a good impression: some faces and rhythms are simply built for comedy because they telegraph internal conflict. Gore’s seriousness, filtered through exaggeration, reads as accidental absurdity. Carvey’s laugh is less at Gore’s politics than at the country’s need to turn leadership into a recurring bit.