How to Do Impressions (And Why You Should Lean Into Your Weirdness)
How to Do Impressions—and Why I’m Finally Leaning Into My Weirdness
I’ve been doing weird voices for as long as I can remember.
As a kid, I would make faces in the mirror, talk to myself, and imitate whatever I had just watched on TV. I remember seeing Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Batman and realizing I could sort of make the same face he made. Later there was Jim Carrey doing the Grinch, Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live, Chris Farley, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler—all these ridiculous characters and voices that I would immediately start trying to copy.
For a long time, I assumed everybody did this...
Eventually I realized, no. lol
Apparently walking around your house having conversations with yourself in six different voices is not a universal childhood experience.
I’m just a little weird. (Somethings never change.)
The funny thing is, even after I started performing comedy, I didn’t really lean into impressions that much. Part of that was probably some comedian insecurity. There can be this attitude that impressions are kind of hacky, like you should be writing brilliant original jokes instead of just sounding like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Although I’ve noticed that opinion tends to be especially popular with comedians who can’t do impressions. Just saying.
But the bigger reason was probably perfectionism. If I was going to do an impression onstage, I wanted it to be right. Doing something for a video is one thing. You can record it twelve times, choose the best version, and pretend you nailed it immediately. Doing it live, back-to-back with other voices, is different. Some are going to be better than others.
For years, that bothered me enough that I mostly avoided doing them. Then I finally started putting more impressions into my stand-up, and something annoying happened.
People loved them.
I could do twenty minutes of jokes, spend two minutes doing voices, and afterward somebody would come up and say, “Oh my God, the impressions!”
Apparently the thing I had decided wasn’t sophisticated enough was also one of the things people remembered most about me.
That has forced me to reconsider a few things.
The first is that audiences don’t really care if an impression is technically perfect. They care if they’re having fun.
And when I stop obsessing over getting every sound exactly right and just commit to being stupid for a minute, everybody relaxes a little. Me included. If the impression is great, they laugh. If it goes a little sideways, sometimes we laugh at that too.
Either way, we’re having a moment together.
That’s much closer to how I approached this stuff when I was a kid. I wasn’t standing in front of the mirror wondering whether my Dana Carvey impression had the correct vocal placement. I just thought it was funny.
Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we get very good at making ourselves less weird.
That’s probably the bigger reason I wanted to make this episode.
Of course, I also genuinely love nerding out about how voices work.
For me, most impressions start with one little thing that unlocks the person.
Sometimes it’s a word. Sometimes it’s a phrase. Sometimes it’s a facial expression, a rhythm, or some ridiculous thing I’m doing with the back of my throat.
Seth Rogen, for example, starts with the laugh. Once I can get into that very specific, slightly breathless Seth Rogen laugh, I can usually find the rest of the voice. He also always sounds a little confused to me, so starting with something like, “I… I don’t know…” helps get me there.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is almost the opposite. I used to do the exaggerated, higher-pitched Arnold impression everybody does, probably because I grew up watching Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon doing Hans and Franz. But watching Arnold more recently, I realized his voice is much deeper now.
So I go way down into my register and close off the back of my throat a little.
This is where my highly scientific voice-training terminology comes in.
I call those Kermit the Frog voices.
If you can find Kermit in the back of your throat, apparently you are halfway to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This is the kind of important educational material we cover on Laugh or Death...
Matthew McConaughey has been a newer one for me. Everybody starts with “all right, all right, all right,” which works, but there’s more going on. He has this smooth Texas S sound, and he somehow manages to make almost anything sound philosophical.
So with McConaughey, I’m not only thinking about the voice. I’m thinking, How can I make this sentence sound like it contains the secret to the universe even though it makes absolutely no sense?
“Are you doing impressions… or are you just impressionable?” That means nothing.
But say it slowly enough in a Texas accent while staring into the distance and suddenly it feels like something you should put on a T-shirt.
Then there are impressions where the physical mechanics get even stranger.
Chewbacca involves moving my tongue around the back of my mouth and basically combining a cat purr with the sound of a cow who is deeply unhappy with its circumstances.
Jennifer Coolidge, I eventually realized, has a little Kermit hiding in there too.
Adam Sandler is part frightened child, part angry child, and then you sing nonsense.
Blink-182 is basically a teenager yelling at his mom, except every vowel lasts for eleven seconds.
I could keep doing this forever, which is probably evidence that I have spent too much of my life thinking about it.
But I also think there’s something useful in noticing how you learn a weird little skill like this.
I don’t usually hear an entire voice and suddenly know how to reproduce it. I find one thing I can grab onto. A phrase. A posture. A vowel. A cadence.
Then I play with it.
And I’m not always good at it immediately.
There are impressions I can do for thirty seconds but not five minutes. There are some I’m still working on. There are some that probably sound better in my head than they do to anyone listening.
That used to make me want to hide them until they were perfect.
Now I’m trying to get better at letting people see the work in progress.
Because the older I get, the more I wonder how many interesting parts of ourselves we edit out because we’re trying to appear normal.
Kids are terrible at that.
Kids will sing badly, make up characters, obsess over dinosaurs, wear the same superhero costume for nine consecutive days, and tell you an eight-minute story with no ending because they just enjoy telling it.
Then we grow up and start asking whether everything we do is useful, productive, impressive, marketable, or appropriate.
And slowly we can sand off some of the things that made us interesting in the first place.
Doing voices happens to be one of those things for me.
It was something I did before I had any reason to believe it would be useful. I did it because it made me laugh. Then I spent years downplaying it because I thought maybe I should be doing something more legitimate.
Now it’s one of the things people remember most about my comedy.
That’s not lost on me.
Maybe there’s something in your life like that too.
A strange hobby. A useless talent. Something you’re obsessed with that your friends don’t understand. A part of your personality you’ve spent years trying to tone down because you secretly worry people will think you’re weird.
Obviously there are limits here. If your weird thing is collecting human teeth, maybe keep evaluating that one.
But for the rest of us, maybe we don’t need to remove every unusual part of ourselves.
Maybe the weirdness isn’t a bug.
Maybe it’s a feature.
So that’s really what this episode is about.
Yes, I’m going to teach you why Seth Rogen sounds confused, how Kermit the Frog can help you become Arnold Schwarzenegger, what your tongue has to do with Chewbacca, and more information about the mechanics of my mouth than anyone reasonably requested.
But underneath all of that is a question I’m trying to ask myself more often too:
What’s something about you that you secretly worry is weird, but that other people might actually love about you?
Whatever it is, maybe let a little more of it out.
In this episode:
How I started doing impressions as a kid
Why I avoided doing voices onstage for years
The word or phrase trick I use to unlock an impression
How I approach voices like Seth Rogen and Arnold Schwarzenegger
Why Matthew McConaughey is more than “all right, all right, all right”
How your tongue, throat, breath, and face change a voice
Chewbacca, Adam Sandler, Tracy Morgan, Jennifer Coolidge, Blink-182 and more
Why an impression doesn't have to be perfect to be funny
How perfectionism can make you hide your best material
Why the weird thing about you might actually be your advantage
The older I get, the more I think we should stop removing the interesting parts of ourselves just to appear more normal.
Maybe your weirdness isn't a bug. Maybe it's a feature.
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00:00 – Why I’ve Been Doing Weird Voices My Whole Life
02:20 – Stop Hiding the Weird Parts of Yourself
03:30 – The Impressions I Grew Up Doing
06:25 – How I Actually Learn an Impression
07:00 – How to Do Seth Rogen
08:10 – Arnold Schwarzenegger Starts With Kermit the Frog
09:55 – How I Get Into a Donald Trump Impression
11:40 – Breaking Down Barack Obama’s Voice & Cadence
12:50 – How to Do Matthew McConaughey
14:35 – Chewbacca, Shaggy & Using Your Tongue for Voices
16:20 – Tracy Morgan + the Hardest Impression to Breathe Through
18:10 – How to Do Adam Sandler
19:20 – Breaking Down Bernie Sanders
21:05 – Jennifer Coolidge = Kermit + Something Else 😂
22:15 – The Easiest Blink-182 Impression
22:50 – Your Weirdness Might Be Your Best Feature
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