If life was fair, Elvis would be alive, and all the impersonators would be dead.

Carson’s line is a darkly comic lament about cultural loss and the strange afterlife of celebrity. By contrasting Elvis Presley’s death with the continued proliferation of Elvis impersonators, the joke hinges on an inverted sense of “fairness”: the original talent is gone, while the imitators multiply. It also pokes at the entertainment industry’s tendency to commodify icons after death—turning a singular artist into a reproducible costume and routine. The humor depends on exaggeration (wishing death on impersonators) to underscore a genuine sentiment: that the world often preserves copies and caricatures more easily than it preserves the irreplaceable person.