We’ve got Robert Smigel to thank for countless classic comedy bits on Saturday Night Live going back to the late eighties, but it turns out his fingerprints are also on one of the current season’s most successful comedy gambits: casting Mike Myers as the show’s Elon Musk.
Appearing on the podcast We Might Be Drunk, Smigel recounted suggesting the impression to Myers during the SNL50 weekend, approaching him during a private Saturday night event at the Rainbow Room that toasted creator Lorne Michaels.
“Mike was there,” Smigel told host Mark Normand and Sam Morril. “I just looked at him and I said, ‘Have you ever thought that you could play Elon Musk on the show?’”
Smigel noted that Carvey had already played Musk on SNL—a part he apparently took “reluctantly.”
“I can’t do Elon Musk very well,” Carvey later said on his podcast Fly on the Wall.” Carvey’s impression came on SNL’s post-election episode, continuing a guest-starring run that he had been contracted for to play President Joe Biden during the 2024 election season.
“Mike’s was much more broad, and Mike looks much more like him,” Smigel says of Myers’ impression, which riffs on Musk’s self-belief in his comedic abilities and features periodic glitches.
Smigel noted that he’s not sure if his suggestion is what led to Myers’ taking on the Musk impression, “but there it was like a week later.”
Indeed, Myers’ debut as Elon Musk came on the show’s first regular episode back after the SNL50 special. Myers appeared in the cold open of the March 1st episode (hosted by Shane Gillis) that depicted the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Myers returned in the role a week later for the Lady Gaga show, lampooning the rumored rift between Musk and Marco Rubio. He made his third appearance this past weekend, donning a cheese hat (just like the real Musk did in Wisconsin) in a cold open that addressed Trump’s controversial new tariffs.
Elon Musk (aka Mike Myers) returns to SNL to hype his latest innovation: a self-vandalizing Tesla. pic.twitter.com/K8UH5x1Bec
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) April 6, 2025
