A Canadian bird with a sexy whisper
Ryan Reynolds, according to the comedian who signs off as the Mimic Man, is a giant Canadian bird talking in a sexy whisper. You take Jim Carrey’s voice, lower it, add a little breath, and there he is. No band, no props beyond his own face and throat. He shifts his jaw, adjusts his pitch, and suddenly you’re watching the Deadpool star say, “Hi there, judges. I have some voices for you.”
That’s the engine of this 33-minute set. One performer cycling through more than 100 celebrity impressions in a single unbroken run. He doesn’t pause for applause. He doesn’t reset. One voice bleeds into the next, and the transitions are the joke as much as the impressions themselves.
The system behind the speed
He lays out his method mid-set, almost as a dare. “I do over 200 impressions, but I gotta keep them all in there,” he tells the room. Then he breaks down the mechanics. Mark Wahlberg is “just park your car” repeated with a specific cadence. Seth Rogen is Santa Claus’s laugh, except Santa eats a different kind of cookie. Harrison Ford is a plane ride. Liam Neeson is Harrison Ford with an Irish ship captain’s accent layered on top. Each impression is a small equation, and he solves them in sequence without letting the audience catch its breath.
The speed is the point. He moves from Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (“Yo, mister White, we’ve got to cook”) to Gordon Ramsay (“I couldn’t give up”) to Yoda (“a very good song he is”) to Ziggy Stardust in under 70 seconds. The transitions are rough, sometimes deliberately so. He’s showing you the gears, and the roughness is the point.
Nursery rhymes, rappers, and a misbecuited creature
The set opens with Goldfinger, then pivots to a nursery rhyme rap. “Itsy bitsy spider went up the water spout” becomes a hip-hop verse, and “Patty cake, baker’s man” gets a “roll it up and mark it with a V” that sounds like a drill lyric. He calls in “a couple rappers you might know” and delivers the whole thing with the confidence of a man who has done this a hundred times.
Then there’s the “misbecuited creature.” He introduces it with a grunt, a “scooby snatch,” and a “here we go, go” that sounds like a man about to throw a football. It’s three seconds of performance, but it lands because everything around it moves so fast that you don’t have time to decide if it’s a bit or a throwaway. That ambiguity is the whole show.
The A-Z and the Trump address
The centerpiece is an A-to-Z of impressions delivered in a single breath. A is for Alan Carr, “camp but concise.” B is for Bruce, “nice to see you, to see you.” D is David Attenborough “spying on creatures again.” He ratchets through the alphabet, hitting Kevin Bridges, Joe Pesci, Ian McKellen (“thou shalt not pass”), Kevin Spacey (“an actor who looks tired”), Andy Murray (“I’ve just lost to Federer”), Stephen Fry, Shaggy, John Bishop, Walter White, Gordon Ramsay, Yoda, and Ziggy Stardust. Each one gets two or three seconds. The joke is the compression. You can’t fully land in any single impression before he’s already gone.
Then he does Donald Trump addressing the United Kingdom. “I, Donald J. Trump, proposed some changes to the way you’re doing things in your beautiful country.” His first proposal: Professor Brian Cox should educate every child. He delivers “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” in a flat, slightly confused baritone, then adds, “Well, actually, we do know what you are.” His second: Nigel Farage should run the NHS. The third: Russell Brand should fix housing. “I can’t live in a street, can you?” he says in Brand’s voice, then catches himself, drops the accent, and adds, “Not like me, though. I live in a nice big house. I love you. Bye bye.” He signs off as Trump with “If you don’t like them, you’re fake news. Good night. God bless you, and God bless America.”
The Jeremy Clarkson review
Near the end, he does a car review in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson. “We can witness a whole plethora of strange and fascinating creatures,” he says, then pivots to the car. “I love the sexy curves, the exquisite contours, but most importantly, the two big airbags.” He explains the technique to the audience: start low, go up, pause, go back down. “So once you’ve got your Jeremy, it’s very easy to slip into God. It’s all about working it, working it, and looking good.” Then he’s Gordon Ramsay, jumping up and down “as if you’re absolutely busting for the toilet.” Then Declan Donnelly, who “always looks like you’re on the verge of laughing out loud while sharing a cheeky little in-joke with members of the crew, Gary on camera two. He gets it.”
The final impression is Boris Johnson. “If Declan decided to go into politics, what you’d have to do is send him to Eaton, lower his voice, and then you would have this jab.” He shifts into Boris: talk at different speeds, look like you’ve been “up all night downing tequila in a bush.” He delivers the line, holds the face for a beat, and says, “Good night. Thank you.”
Why it works
The set works as a stress test. The comedian is proving that 100 impressions in 30 minutes is possible if you treat each one as a three-second equation rather than a full sketch. The range is the surprise. He goes from Morgan Freeman (“I gotta say I should still be president of the United States”) to a Barbara Walters interview with Natalie Portman (who names her baby Oscar, “but that’s silly because that’s my cat’s name”) to a Big Brother housemate asking “Or can I call you daddy?” to a woman who “organized the church, the honeymoon, and the divorce lawyer.” The tonal whiplash is the comedy. You never get comfortable in one voice long enough to stop paying attention.
He closes by calling himself “the mimic man” and thanking the “ladies and gentlemen of the United Kingdom.” The set ends the way it started: fast, unpolished, and slightly too long. You watched 33 minutes of one man’s throat doing the work of a 200-person cast, and the last thing you remember is the specific, ridiculous detail. The Canadian bird. The two big airbags. The divorce lawyer. The tequila in the bush. That’s what 100 impressions in 30 minutes actually does. It gives you a hundred small, specific, unforgettable three-second moments, and you can’t pick just one to keep. The full set is 33 minutes long. It goes by faster than any of the individual impressions.