Tips on becoming a Voice impressionist?
All my life, I’ve wanted to be a comedian. With stress, colleges and school work however, I’ve kind of put my comedy on the back burner.
Now, I really want to get into Comedy again, and I REALLY want to learn how to do voice/celebrity impressions.
Does anyone with even slight experience have any tips to offer? How do you change your voice?
Is it something ALL impressionists train themselves or get trained for? Or is it something you’re able to do from the day you can talk?
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7 Answers
I don’t have the links but Marcel Marceau wrote a rather large body of work on the subject.
I used to do a few impressions when I was at school, i’d certainly call that “slight experience.”
Basically, each voice you do is a variation on the others, only slight adjustments are needed.
I mean, they don’t have to be “spot on” just so long as your audience knows who the hell you’re doing.
Why don’t you try to impersonate me? It’s quite easy. You just have to speak in a high pitch voice and shake your head a little. Oh, and don’t forget to NOT BE FUNNY.
I once heard from people who do this, that an important thing is to copy the person’s voice/speaking characteristics (a lisp, a hard t, a high pitched ending of a certain word, etc.).
I would work on the dialects first. The accents, the vocabulary, everything @rebbel said. Then start trying to impersonate individuals, not just generalizations. Pretty much every celebrity can be put into a category or two, so getting them down first would make it much easier.
Listen to other impersonators, and see what characteristics they found.
Robin Williams had some amusing ideas on how to do impressions. He said if you can do a John Kennedy, and make him sound old, you have Walter Brennen. If you take John Wayne, and tighten your asshole, you have George H.W. Bush.
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