I don’t find standard impressions remotely funny or
impressive, and am totally baffled by the effect they have on audiences. For
starters, 99% of impressionists are just doing impressions of other
impressionists. All those hacks you saw doing Shatner impressions in the 80s?
They were just aping Kevin Pollack’s impression. They saw he got famous with
it, so they added Pollack’s exact version of Shatner to their toolkit. They brought
nothing new to the party.
But even if they had added a new wrinkle to the standard
Shatner impression, who cares? Being able to sort of sound like someone isn’t
that impressive. You know who else can mimic people? P-A-R-R-O-T-S. I’ll take a
cross-species impression over some comedy dinosaur doing a bad Pacino at a
Holiday Inn.
The only time I find an impression funny is when the person
doing the impression perfectly encapsulates what that person would say and do
in a particular scenario. Example: George W. Bush at a taco stand.
Most hack impressionists would just have Bush ordering “nuke-u-ler
hot sauce,” and then stand back as the crowd laughed like laughter was a new
fuel that was going to make us energy independent. But Bush saying nuke-u-ler hot
sauce isn’t funny. Anyone can memorize and repeat someone’s stock phrases. That
isn’t a talent, and it certainly doesn’t conjure up the person being
impersonated.
A funny impressionist (a breed that is probably in the
single digits) would instead simulate the kinds of words George W. Bush would
say and the kinds of behaviors he would exhibit while talking to a woman at a
taco stand, and would do it so that you could envision the man you know from seeing him
talk to heads of state suddenly shooting the breeze with Tina Tamale.
When I say capturing someone’s essence, I don’t mean: “Picture
Robert De Niro as a farmer. You balkin’
at me? You balkin’ at me?” Stuffing a line from someone’s film career into
an absurd situation isn’t an impression. That’s the kind of garbage they do on SNL, which is packed with sketches where
cast members just fill time sort of sounding like celebrities. They never
capture the person (half the time they just pick a cast member who kind of looks like him). To see it done well, check out Mr. Show; a sketch show with idea-driven sketches that sometimes features
impressions; all of which place less emphasis on mimicking a guy’s facial tics
and more time copying his character.
Howard Stern is an underrated impressionist. Stern doesn’t
do the voices so much as he skillfully pinpoints how the person he is
impersonating would respond to whatever situation he is inventing for him. When
he would do the news, he would so seamlessly distill the celebrity in the
newsstory that it didn’t matter that he didn’t always sound like him. You still
knew you were listening to Madonna.
Another master of recreating someone’s essence is Norm
MacDonald; not shocking then that he was fired from SNL. Of course, Norm is the funniest person in the English-speaking
world and everything he says is gold, which sort of skews the data.
Probably the worst offender in the impressionist lexicon is
the “Man of a 110 Impressions.” If you ever see that on a flyer at your local
comedy club, go bowling that night. Nevermind that 109 of his impressions sound
exactly alike; the mere fact that he says “Here’s Moe from the Three Stooges”
is supposed to distract you from the fact that his Moe sounds exactly like his
Tom Brokaw. Quantity over quality does not work with impressions. Impressions
aren’t Wal-Mart.
Remember: a funny impression, a real satire of a person isn’t about forcing a line from Taxi Driver into a De Niro impression;
it is about what De Niro would
say in a specific situation. De Niro might be a bad example actually…that pretentious cadaver
can barely talk.
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