When Saturday Night Live newcomer Jeremy Culhane debuted his Tucker Carlson on Weekend Update last month, the response was immediate. The impression — built around Carlson’s rising incredulity and a jagged, brittle laugh — quickly spread online, earning praise for its sharpness and timing.
But within hours, a second conversation took hold in comedy circles.
“All Tucker Carlson impressions are just Nick Mullen Tucker Carlson impressions,” one widely shared post read.
The comparison pointed to Mullen, the podcast comedian who has spent years developing his own exaggerated Carlson on shows like Cum Town and The Adam Friedland Show. His version leans heavily on a specific comedic rhythm: confusion that escalates toward outrage.
Culhane’s take, while not identical — he added the crazy laugh, a more recent Tucker-ism — hit enough of those same beats to spark a debate in stand-up and sketch comedy: Where is the line between observation and imitation when it comes to impressions?
There is no clear answer — at least not legally.
“You can’t own anything,” former SNL star Darrell Hammond, one of the most prolific impressionists in the show’s history, tells me from the road (he still tours much of the year as a standup). “But if you do it on TV enough, people will think it’s yours.”
That distinction between ownership and perception sits at the center of how comedy polices itself.
Unlike scripted jokes, impressions exist in an ambiguous space. They are built from real people, whose voices and mannerisms are available to anyone paying attention. But the most memorable impressions are rarely straightforward imitations. They are exaggerations, shaped by specific comedic choices. The saying Hammond has heard passed around SNL‘s hallways sums it up bluntly: “Impressions aren’t funny. Characters are funny.”
Hammond points to his own portrayal of Bill Clinton as an example. A physical tic — what he describes as the “thumb and lip thing” — became a defining feature of the impression, even though Clinton himself never actually did it. He road-tested it one night at the Comedy Cellar; the place exploded, so he brought it uptown to the SNL writers. The tic became a staple. Soon the competition noticed how well it worked.
“Then you’d see other impressionists doing it,” Hammond says. “But I had been doing it on SNL for two years. It’s pretty much mine at that point. People will think that.”
The same dynamic has played out repeatedly on SNL, where a single performer’s interpretation can effectively lock in how a public figure is caricatured. Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush and Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush became so dominant that later attempts to play those figures struggled to land.
“It became impossible for anybody to do George Bush after Will Ferrell did his version so powerfully,” Hammond says. “They wanted me to follow him. I was like, ‘I can’t do it.’”
What distinguishes those performances is not accuracy but perspective — the “take,” as comedians call it. Hammond spent a year at the Comedy Cellar trying to crack Al Gore and never got a laugh. Then, the afternoon of the live broadcast, writer Jim Downey came to his dressing room and did a line reading. Gore, Downey had decided, was an overbearing schoolteacher. Hammond suddenly had his character. It didn’t sound much like Gore, but audiences responded to it every time.
“Al Gore doesn’t really sound like that,” Hammond said. “What I was doing was [Al] Hirschfeld drawings.”
He describes the process as something closer to caricature than mimicry — and once the caricature has been solved, he says, others can reproduce it with relative ease.
“If you see a statue at the Museum of Modern Art, you could probably imitate that statue pretty easily,” he says. “But you couldn’t create a David.”
That idea that once an impression has been “solved,” it becomes easier for others to reproduce, helps explain why debates like the one surrounding Culhane and Mullen recur.
Mullen’s version of Carlson, developed over years in the podcast space, leans into long stretches of escalating confusion. For some, the tell is even more specific. It uses a repeated reliance on the phrase “what is going on?” as a kind of anchor for Carlson’s escalating bewilderment. Paul Gallant, a sports podcaster, put it bluntly on social media: “Like my terrible impression of Nick Mullen doing Tucker Carlson, this is also an impression of Nick Mullen doing Tucker Carlson. The giveaway is the reliance on ‘what is going on?’”
But in comedy, the medium is the message. While Mullen’s work circulates primarily through podcasts and online clips, SNL remains one of the most powerful amplifiers of funny. An impression that airs on the show can quickly become the default version for a broad audience, regardless of where similar ideas may have originated.
Hammond acknowledges that imbalance as part of the reality of the business.
“There used to be a comic who would steal jokes and then do them on Letterman,” he says. “Once he did that, people would go, ‘Okay, the joke’s gone. It’s his now.’”
Neither Culhane nor Mullen has publicly addressed the comparison. Representatives for both did not respond to requests for comment. Within comedy, that silence is not unusual. There is no formal system for resolving disputes over impressions, and performers often avoid escalating them publicly — Hammond among them.
“Why give them a squabble that could lead to any fucking thing, including legal conflicts,” he says. “And legal conflicts just ain’t no fun and they’re real expensive.”
Instead, the conversation tends to play out informally, among audiences and peers. And the audience, Hammond has come to understand, is ultimately the one who decides.
“It’s not that you own it,” he says. “It’s that the audience thinks you do.”
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