If you have been in a show where everyone else came out on stage doing a great accent and you’re there thinking “oh boy, I can’t do that” this episode is for you. So how useful are accents and impressions in improv and how can we use them respectfully?

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This episode features:

Tai Campbell:
Check out his work here - 
https://www.facebook.com/taicampbellworld 

John Hardy:
https://www.facebook.com/epicimprov 

Cooper Shaw:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CooperShawArtist
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecoopershaw/ 
Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawflewthecoop
Cooper’s filmmaking (writer/director) debut is currently hitting the festival circuit-- "Not Suitable". Here's the instagram: https://www.instagram.com/notsuitablethefilm/
And if you want to take a dialect class, you might want to click here: https://www.secondcity.com/classes/chicago/dialects-character-voices-levels-1-2-2020/ 

Episode transcript:

This…. Is the Improv Chronicle Podcast, I’m Lloydie

You may have been in a show where everyone else came out on stage doing a great American accent and you’re there thinking “oh boy, I can’t do that” or maybe someone just endowed you as being a famous figure during your scene. What do you do? It can be a high pressure situation for a lot of improvisers. 

So how useful are accents and impressions in improv and how can we use them respectfully.

During the height of the covid pandemic, one of the things I watched online was a series of impressions videos called Celebrity Advice made by UK celebrity impressionist, actor, director and improviser Tai Campbell. 

What made him want to do impressions on stage?

Tai: I think I've always done like funny voices even when I was little but I think it was when I'd be doing a show, and anytime somebody will play like a pre-existing celebrity in that group it would usually end up being me, and then I started to feel like okay this is actually quite good and I’d be getting quite a good response from the audience, also I do remember one particular time when it was a scene I was in the White House so I was like cool okay I’ll play Obama, and then yeah it just went off and people really enjoyed it, so I thought maybe I’ll put some more time into this and I thought maybe I’ll put some more time into other characters too and then yeah it turns out it’s a thing. 

Lloydie: How useful do you find doing these impressions in improv scenes? 

Tai: It always depends on the same really because it kind of has to be organic it can't be forced and I think in a regular scene if that person just happens to come up great but otherwise you know can’t just shoe-horn it in. I actually do an improvised impression show so that is all based on impressions so I get to really stretch my legs that way 

Lloydie: How does that show work? 

Tai: It’s quite fun. It’s fun and weird. Basically how it works is a random member of the audience gets to volunteer and get a list of 30 impressions - 30 celebrities or fictional characters that I can do and then they stand on the side of the stage and then the audience gets to pick the location usually cafe, the beach but places people can hang out basically and then I will place a scene, or a number scenes where I will play between one and four characters simultaneously but I don't know who's going to who I'm gonna be playing next 

Lloydie: So if you’re me, you can’t do impressions or accents, how do you go about doing a celeb?

Tai: Okay well first of all my first rule in impressions is that you're not doing that person you're doing your version of that person so it's not it's not wrong it doesn't matter what you do it’s not wrong because it's your interpretation of somebody so if you want to do Madonna as you know a cockney with a deep voice that's Madonna. 

Lloydie: Now that is a fun workaround but Tai is really good impressions and he puts a lot of work into them. 

Tai: I can spend anywhere between a day to a month to try to figure out a character before I would perform them in front of an actual audience. What I do with that is I look at say one video - I might look at a range but I’ll find this one video and I don't change the video say say one video of Denzel Washington in an interview, and then what I do is I don't do the person as they are because turns out it's not as fun and the audiences don't love it as much. So instead I find one characteristic, one small element and then I stretch it out and then I make that the character and then that kind of helps to build them - because they’re not just an impression, they’re a character and a very specific point of view. So for me when I play George Bush, I play him as a child and that people find it funny you know he's not allowed to have like a knife because no it's not responsible enough to cut his own meat which is funny as president. I play Obama like a like a parent and sometimes they play against type like I might have Gandalf's talking about rap or and Darth Vader trying to give father son advice. 

Lloydie: Talking to Tai made me realise part of the work of doing a good impression is doing the work but I was also really interested in his idea of playing the celebrity how you want to play them. That seemed liberating and played into the whole idea of there not being wrong choices in improv. Shortly after talking to Tai I spoke to a Nottingham-based improviser I know called John Hardy. John co-runs a team called Epic who do an improvised movie and has a duo called honey badger and he's just been on an accents course which he was raving about so we grabbed a coffee.

Now you’re taking a course in accents why did you feel like you wanted to introduce accent work in what you do? 

John: There was two reasons to look at accents work, so there’s my comedy. I wanted to start doing characters when I was on stage and I find a different accent puts me in a different character. But also I wants to stop being so lazy with my voice and so lazy with my words and I knew that having someone listen to every word and pull me up on every letter would be very good for everything I did in presenting not just accents. 

Lloydie: You say you find an accentputs you into a character - how does that work exactly can you break down how that happens for you?

John: Yes an accent will move me into an area of the country that will remind me of something that's happened to me before. So it’s not necessarily the accent itself. I know that some people struggle with an accent like who would give some regional stereotypes but that's not what it does for me. It reminds me of an incident. So if I'm in Birmingham I worked in a gym I met lots of students I remember the students and the personalities and then that might be something I can hook into for a character and build from. If I stay in  my own accent I'm always the guy from Mansfield, and then my humour will be the same, my reference points will be the same so I find an accent really useful to take me to a different place. When I'm a character, if I can remember somebody or circumstance then that creates a want or a need and then that helps me that and bring it into the scene.

Lloydie: That sounds incredibly useful. There are probably some accents that are more problematic in context than others. How do you navigate that?

John:  For starters, I’m lucky that I can't do any controversial accents so I'm really lucky that I can swerve that. I don't think an accent doing accents is necessarily bad in acting where there’s a script and a requirement but I think when you're on stage you’re a writer  so, I know you're improvising but if you choose to write in an accent then really you should have done some research about the place you’re speaking about and the people and I'm really I think especially in today's climate it's not necessarily the going to be the best choice. My get-out is nearly always “I’ve lived here for a while but I come from…” and then I can choose my accent for wherever my scene partners trying to put me 

Lloydie: And that's that's really good because that means you can be a sensitive in in terms of culture but you're also able to make sense in terms of the scene

John: I can only play from what I know so whenever I’ve done an improv course it's always ‘go from your own experience’. I've always been like a white Midlands bloke so I find it really hard to then be able to impose that into another character and it's not I wouldn't play another character, necessarily but I'd be reluctant to build, especially when I thought I don't have the right or the expertise or the background or the knowledge to do this. So I've seen scenes where people play a character from an area and don’t change their voice or change their accent and that that works really well. It almost feels respectful but they just said well I'll just handle where I'm playing but I want to make an effort to try and hit a stereotype so you know. I kind of like that approach 

Lloydie: Like any tool using it responsibly is crucial. Tai Campbell again 

Tai: Not everyone understands the difference between an accident that seems to be more acceptable like doing a Scottish one or ones that say can make audiences or other players feel a bit more uncomfortable and I think the easiest way to kind of understand that is, in this scenario in this like actual world who's oppressed who because if there's a group that has been oppressed by another and then is it seems like they're being mocked by them by having their accent re-created on stage but also there is a difference between a character and a character who is supposed to be funny. So obviously there are many performers of colour in improv and so doing a show where for example I would put on a Jamaican accent some people might think “Oh they’re doing a Jamaican accent, that's not something I see usually see, that must be funny that's the funny thing” and it's like no no no that just me doing one of my grandparents. So it’s kind of trying to create the distance between the accent and the thing that's supposed to be funny. I have talked to before about like the people who we're replicating on stage, especially if it's like somebody that people already know. Like I actually did see a group, an all white group, play the members of Destiny's Child but what was actually surprising how they did it was they didn't try to change their accents or try and sass or anything they just kept their own English accents which meant, so I think the characters just came up so it was easiest way for them to kind of work through it so it was good to see people kind of being more sensible I guess or having that kind of sensibility of how to kind of approach that 

Lloydie: So after hearing John rave about the accents course he'd been on I asked him if he’d put me in touch with his teacher Cooper Shaw. Cooper’s an actor, writer, filmmaker and dialect coach. She specialises in teaching dialects and character voices for improvisers. So I asked here, if we using accents well what did they give improvisers and improvised scenes?

Cooper: So, many things. I find that it can be helpful just in giving you another element to step even further outside of yourself and just be another character and a lot of them a lot of actors find it - and improvisers. I sort of use the term actor and improviser interchangeably a lot of time - so a lot of actors find it a little bit more at I guess less anxiety inducing to have another layer of a persona to put on so they feel even less like this is just me up on stage but now I'm changing my physicality as well as my voice so it can just kind of help to make things feel a little bit more creative and less steeped in their own reality.

Lloydie: How much of this, I think of it as a kind of voice thing, and an auditory thing, but how much of this is a physical process?

Cooper: It's a huge physical process because a lot of changing the quality of the sound roots itself in what are you changing physically in order to get the sounds to behave that way. And then it's a difference between well do I want to change the sounds to be able to jump in and do an improv scene or do I want to change the sound to be able to maintain it for the duration of a TV series, and then then I would coach people differently and you know, recommend if you really want it to feel natural I recommend talking in that accent for twenty four hours a day as much as you possibly can until it's like part of your DNA. For me and I know I know a lot of people who work differently but I know for me once I am creating a character I need to find a different voice for that character that feels less like myself otherwise I feel too much like, especially in improv, I feel too much like I'm getting on stage and improvising as myself and then it's like I don't feel as much freedom to let the story go where it wants to go unless I have that extra layer and so I feel the accent is really a lot to do with character. So this is a side bar of a story and I feel really a little hesitant to tell the story but I'm going to. Okay so I was asked to do a podcast, a storytelling podcast which shall remain nameless. The whole concept of the storytelling podcast was they did not want any of the actors to do accents but yet I had the script where I had to do several different characters but I wasn't allowed to do accents for any of them and I know other actors who have worked for this podcast who do that quite effectively. I can't do it unless I can do an accent, like there's only so many times that I can like make a voice slightly more nasally or make it a little deeper or make it a little higher pitched but like if I remove that extra tool for my tool box I sort of I feel like I end up sounding the same no matter what I do like how do I be a different character if I don't have a different accent to do. I had so much anxiety when I was asked to do this thing I was I can't I can't I can't it's going to be awful anyway 

Lloydie: I’m sure it was fine 

Cooper: They never asked me back again but you know it's like a lesson learned. For me, my strength is doing the different like full-on doing different accents not just the voices. 

Lloydie: For those of us who improvise and looking to get better at accents, what can we do immediately to get better 

Cooper: I always recommend that people just watch and listen to as much content as they can that has has that accent and just listen and repeat listen and repeat and also because it makes it makes the quote unquote homework fun because you’re like ‘wait a  minute, I’m  trying to teach myself something and at the same time I get to watch Ozark on Netflix at home you know or My Cousin Vinny or you know any of those things - just consume content and listen and repeat and make it fun for yourself! 

Next time - on The Improv Chronicle Podcast

Status - some schools of thought talk about status in improv a lot - but what do we mean when we ask someone to play high or low status and how much do we need it to build characters and on stage dynamics?

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