James Austin Johnson
Appearances
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Oh, I think about this all the time. I think about it all the time because I've always noticed that impressions people, I feel like we all tend to have kind of odd. I'm sorry, did you hear that? My wife's text tone is Chewbacca going, hmm.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Did you hear that? Wait, do your Chewbacca.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I can't, I can't really, I don't know what little vibrating glottal thing that is. Yeah, that's tough.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Chewbacca is a melancholy figure. Uh, I was saying that, um, that voices people and impressions people, comedians, I find that we tend to have pretty odd resting voices. I don't know what it is about needing to be limber or needing command of all the different little glottises and cords in our throats that allow us to do these contortions.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I don't know what it is, but if you notice, it's like me, Melissa Villasenor, Maria Bamford, We all tend to have kind of honking, I don't know what it is, like a goose, there's some sort of goose-like resting vocal position that I hate the way that I sound. Do you? tone of voice. Like I love, um, newscaster diction.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
So I'm always pitching newscaster stuff at SNL because this is just a, this is a little bit more comfortable, this sort of voice. And coming up, we're going to be looking at a few different, isn't there something that's so, it's just like laying down in a, in a bed of Heather.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Heather's comfortable. I, I think about that a lot. And, um, so Mary's question, you know, how do you know what something sounds like? Well, um, The voice memo technology that we all have on our phones now, that's really opened things wide open.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Some of them just like arrive fully materialized and there's no process at all. I mean, that's something that I particularly love about working at this show is a writer will come to me and be like, hey, you are Jim Nance. in this sketch, and I don't know a thing about sports in any way.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I'm learning about sports now at 35 to relate to other men because I'm just feeling like I'm left out of a major national conversation. And then with someone like Paul Giamatti or Adam Driver, those take years. Donald Trump took years to...
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Yeah, I'm shocked sometimes when people will sometimes make a comment. You should never look at comments, by the way, but I do sometimes. And I'm shocked when people are like, oh, he used to be so much better at it. Because, you know, I go and look back at my Trump in 2018 or 19 and I think it doesn't sound like him at all. You know, uh, it's more of the broad strokes, um, caricature, um, that,
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
it's the trump that i think everyone was doing you know like these people are really awful you know just like the same thing everybody does uh-huh and then i think he's just true i think he's just more tired these days i think he's a little older and a little bit more uh exhausted so most of what i do is trump is is i just try to slow him down a little bit more and
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
There's the little burst of energy that he gets, but it comes back down to this exhaustion and wanting to lay down. I'm tired. I'm so tired.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I try to raspify it a little bit more. I think that the pitch, I don't know if the pitch gets higher. I'm not really sure what's happening. I really try not to think about it too, too much. And I don't go seek it out because it just it's going to find me, you know, the new Trump. video will find me. I don't need to go sit down and tinker with it.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Oh, man, all the time. I would say that that is 95% of what I bring to the table at the show is stuff that we have zero use for. I mean, I've really done it too many times at the table, but I really love the Rolling Stone writer, David Frick. I personally think that he is just a really... sweet and funny rock guy. I like rock music and I love watching rock docs and he's in every rock doc.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
You know, he is at the beginning of every rock doc laying it out for everybody.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
I'm Paul McCartney. I'm fresh out of the Beatles. You know, I have a number of Moog synthesizers. My wife and I were making music in the studio. What music are we making? We're making the first Wings album. That's David Frick doing Paul McCartney?
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
David Frick talking about Paul McCartney. I've pitched it from a few different ways, and I just don't think I can get the hot young people I work with to think it's funny. I got lucky that Bob Dylan is in the Zeitgeist in a big way, thanks to Timothee Chalamet.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
So I was able to get my Bob Dylan on, and it was important to me because the Bob Dylan impression, the stock one that everybody does, you know, the... I had grown really tired of hearing people do that, and as a Bob Dylan fan, I was like, I want to hear theme time radio Bob Dylan. I want to hear the show that he did for a couple years on SiriusXM. Well, it's wedding season.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
It's time to start picking out your flowers. Maybe you're going to ask one of your nieces and nephews to hold the ring and walk down the aisle. Maybe you're going to have a golden retriever do it. Here's Muddy Waters. I love that guy. I go see him live still.
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HTDE: Heckling, Yawning, and Imitating, with James Austin Johnson and Patton Oswalt
Mary, at the end of the day, living in your own head, you're in a professional recording studio. And what everyone else hears is a crappy little car radio that we're just going to sound thin and crappy. even though we sound beautiful in our own heads. I wish it was different, but that's acoustics.