When Ross Perot was running for president an age ago, I became addicted to Dana Carvey’s imitations of him on Saturday Night Live. Concentrating all the staccato zaniness of the billionaire candidate into the short time-span of a sketch, the imitations seemed much more like Perot than Perot himself. Whole minutes of a genuine Perot speech would roll by without the candidate’s saying anything particularly characteristic; but almost every sentence uttered by Carvey was a howlingly funny Perotism. Perot himself was Perot with soda water; Carvey was Perot neat. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

Carvey’s sketches were a dramatic …