Steve Carell. Stephen Colbert. Louis C.K. Charlie Kaufman. Robert Smigel. Some of comedy’s greatest minds got one of their biggest breaks on the short-lived but much-loved “The Dana Carvey Show.” Fifteen years later, in this exclusive oral history, the players recount the brief but fertile life of a truly unusual show.

Jon Hamm, Live-Action “Ace,” “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”: I’m such a nerd about that stuff. I remember being super-psyched for it. Dana had just come off of SNL and I remember thinking, Oh, this is going to be awesome. Then the 2011 version of me goes, No it isn’t, it’s on ABC in primetime, and there’s no way it’s going to find an audience. It’s way too funny and specific and kind of obtuse for a mass audience to get.

One of the lasting influences of The Dana Carvey Show today is the perseverance of an animated superhero short voiced by Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell called “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.”

Carvey: Smigel brought in the sketches for “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.” That was another moment when I said, “Wow, this is brilliant. ‘The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” are you kidding me? “Let’s order six of those.” That was another one that later broke on SNL.

“The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” about a team comprised of two superheroes named Ace and Gary, who seem quite fond of each other, was last seen on Saturday Night Live in 2007. That was, until this past May, when Robert Smigel, using a treatment for a film he had written about the duo, filmed a live action version for starring Jon Hamm as Ace and Jimmy Fallon as Gary.

Smigel: Jon Hamm was the only person now that I was at all interested in for the part of Ace, and if he hadn’t been interested, I wouldn’t have bothered. Obviously he’s a big comedy fan—a big comedy nerd himself—and he was way into it.

Jon Hamm: Lorne had said, actually, “We’re trying to do this thing. Maybe you would be interested.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, totally.” Having been such a fan, of not only “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” but all of the TV Fun House stuff. And then I sat down with Robert at a diner on the Upper West Side and he was like, “Do you want to do this? If we can do it, would you be game?”

Jimmy Fallon, Live-Action “Gary,” “The Ambiguously Gay Duo”: I remember after watching it I thought in my head that it could be a funny movie. I was thinking like Justin Timberlake and me. And then, years later, Smigel is doing this huge budgeted short for Saturday Night Live. He sent me an email: “We’re doing the show, would you like to play Gary?” And I was like, “Oh my God, this is an honor.” I’ve always wanted to play a superhero, let alone one of “The Ambiguously Gay Duo.”

Smigel: Jesus Christ, Steve Carell flew across the country to do three lines in “Live-Action Ace and Gary.” He only did that out of the goodness of his heart.

Colbert: I knew I’d lose my part to someone with shoulders. It was really enjoyable playing Dr. Braino because I invented Braino—so it was a character that I invented. And I worked on all of Robert’s “Ambiguously Gay” [sketches] over the years and loved playing Ace and haven’t a jealous bone in my body to whoever wants to put on a cod piece.

Hamm: I can only respond to that with that I’m very happy to stand on Stephen Colbert’s non-existent shoulders.

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Source: GQ

I added 7 more photos!

I added the photoshoot from Jon’s feature in Los Angeles Times. Jon is simply stunning in this shoot!

Peggy Olson in dolphin shorts? Why, the fifth season of Mad Men must take the biggest time jump yet!

We kid. Below is a first-look shot from the Mad Men set as Jon Hamm takes on his new role as director of the show’s highly anticipated season premiere. Also in this rehearsal shot: Elisabeth Moss, co-producer Marcy Patterson, photography director Christopher Manley and executive producer Matthew Weiner. The series, which resumes production in Los Angeles and returns next year, landed the outstanding drama award at the TV critics press club awards on Saturday, with Hamm earning individual achievement in a drama series.

Edit: Said Hamm: “I don’t remember if we were discussing a scene or Albert Pujols’s impending free agency, but suffice to say ‘directing’ is fun!”

Source: Entertainment Weekly

I added 33 photos of Jon, Jennifer and Cora in Los Feliz yesterday.

Congratulations to Jon Hamm who won TCA Awards for individual achievement in drama and to “Mad Men” for winning for outstanding drama for the third consecutive year!

Update – More from the evening:

“Jon Hamm – who would later share the unofficial Last Star Standing prize with Elisabeth Moss and his girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt, for staying longest at the after-party (he wanted to talk about “Louie” and “Game of Thrones”) – showed up sporting the full Draper, and in his speech for Individual Achievement in Drama thanked Matt Weiner for “giving me a career” and Westfeldt (who was taking a break from editing her directorial debut, “Friends with Kids”), “who has had to endure the ridiculousness of the last 4 or 5 years.”

Source: Hitfix Thank you Joy for the tip!

Anyone up for board games with Paul Rudd and Jon Hamm? In the new issue of Nylon, Rudd recounts that when he was 18, he played a very crucial game of Trivial Pursuit in order to impress a girl he had a crush on, but he was no match for high school senior Hamm, who happened to be a friend of the family and was “super handsome, really smart, and very good at sports — all of these things that I most certainly was not,” remembers Rudd. “Every question that came up, I had no idea what the fucking answer was. Jon, my arch nemesis, rolled the dice, and the question was, ‘What’s the biggest lake in Africa?’ and he just goes ‘Victoria.’ And I remember feeling so totally emasculated that the next year when I went away to acting school I thought back to that Trivial Pursuit moment and I just felt, Holy shit, now that I’m in acting school I’m never going to learn what the biggest lake in Africa is.” Paul Rudd, still bemoaning his lost pie wedges.

Source: NY Mag

Reporting from New York City— — Don Draper is losing his voice.

Well, not Don Draper, Jon Hamm, who plays the beleaguered, enigmatic adman on AMC’s “Mad Men.” And he’s not precisely losing his voice; he’s just raspy after several hours of voice-overs for Mercedes-Benz commercials this morning. But as the now four-time Emmy nominee relaxes against the leather-esque couches of the SoHo Grand Hotel’s Club Room, cadging extra water and fidgeting with the buttons on his slate-gray dress shirt, there’s definitely a catch in his authoritative, familiar tone.

“I’ve literally been talking for the last five hours,” he says.

Still, it’s easier to imagine Jon — or even Don — with a hitch in his voice than doing what costar Elisabeth Moss calls “a mean Valley Girl accent.” She’s heard it: While filming the episode both have submitted to TV academy voters (Moss has a nomination this year as well), “The Suitcase,” the pair broke a lot of pent-up tension by firing off SoCal accents.

“I’m crying and she’s going through craziness and we’re screaming at each other,” recalls Hamm. “Then cameras would stop rolling and we’d launch into this ridiculous spoiled Valley Girl routine. It was funny to us — probably not as funny to the crew members who were forced to listen.”

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