Dana Carvey’s son inspired Fred Armisen’s Saturday Night Live sketch “The Californians”

Fred Armisen has a few all-time classic Saturday Night Live sketches, including the much beloved “Californians” sketch. The inspiration behind the premise of that recurring bit is pretty straightforward (Californians do be talking about their highways), but Armisen has now revealed a deeper SNL connection on Dana Carvey’s podcast, Fly on the Wall with Dana Carvey and David Spade (via Entertainment Weekly).

“I had seen Dana—I was with him and we did a stand-up show in San Francisco—and Dana was telling me about his son,” the comedian explains. “And he’s just like, ‘It’s hard to be mad at him,’ because, I think he got pulled over or something. He does this impression of his son and he goes, ‘No, but, no, Dad, no, you don’t,’ you know? And, from that, as we were trying to do a California accent, as we’re writing the sketch, that kind of came up.”

“The way that he talks is based on Dana’s impression of his son,” says Armisen, who kindly gave Carvey a heads up before the sketch debuted: “So I sent him an email before it aired, I was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, we’re gonna do this sketch called ‘The Californians’ and it comes from your impression of your son.’”

While the young Carvey’s accent was the secret ingredient, the sketch had been gestating for a while at that point. “It was a bit also we would do at the table. You know that moment before you’re actually reading the sketches?” he explains, referencing the breaks in the performers’ schedules when they’d work on other projects. “When we came back, we would just start talking like, ‘Where were you?’ ‘Oh, I was in L.A.’ ‘Did you go up Barham? Did you make a left on…’ and then that sort of built up.”

Armisen “never would’ve thought” to put those characters into a soap opera setting, something he attributes to “the magic of working with writers.” He shares, “I worked with this writer, James Anderson, and I was like, ‘What do we do with this ‘Californians’? What can we do with these directions?’ And he was simply like, ‘why don’t we just make it a soap opera?’” The rest, as they say, is history.