Here it is. 6 and a half of my favorite TV minutes ever.
On the other side of the pond, Rory Bremner has made a career out of impressions for decades now, and I find him aggressively unfunny and annoying.
Doctor, could you give your impression of William Stryker to the court?
I’m sorry, I’m a psychiatrist, I don’t do impressions.
Everybody’s forgotten Tina Fey’s sendup of Sarah Palin so soon?
Bill Hader of SNL does a spot on Alan Alda.
The thing with impressionists is that it’s only as funny as a the writing. The impression is just a fraction of the humor. Loads of kids can do a perfect Eric Cartman or Christopher Walken, but none of them have anything funny to say.
Kevin Pollak does do some non-standard impressions. My favorite is his Harry Caray. Caray had this way of changing his pitch and timing around in a distinctive way. Pollak captures that perfectly. (Most Caray impressions are really awful and miss this and other nuances.)
I can’t help in such a thread to mention Dave Thomas who, among other feats, does the best Bob Hope I’ve ever heard. A notoriously difficult one. Even Rich Little despaired of doing Hope well.
Impressionists have a handicap. They need to do the miming well and have a funny routine to go with it. Regular comics only need the routine.
What makes it most astonishing is that it’s an impression of Audrey Hepburn impersonating Katherine Hepburn. 
I feel that they are obsolete, because they are incompatible with post-modernism.
Here in the UK there was a latter-day heyday in the 1980s along with the improv comedy boom. There’s a chap called Rory Bremner who built a career on impersonating politicians and sportsmen and the like, and another chap called Phil Cool who was a kind of low-rent Rory Bremner with a more athletic face.
A more athletic face. But Bremner eventually moved away from impressions to straightforward political satire, and nowadays he’s more of a general-purpose comedian, like Stephen Fry but without any personal charisma. If he was a Soviet army formation he would be a motor rifle brigade.
In the modern era I can think of Bo Selecta, which horrifyingly is over ten years old(!), but that poked fun at impressions rather than embracing them. To be honest I’m still not sure… how to parse Bo Selecta. It existed in the middle ground between tossy student comedy and something close to a transcendent nightmare.
My opinion is that impressions no longer work. They require a distinctive subject who has an air of high seriousness and who is unaware of the joke. Politicians and sportsmen are obvious choices. The problem is that in a post-modern age no-one has an air of high seriousness any more, and the environment that produces distinctive subjects has, for the most part, evaporated. The kind of oblivious self-importance that used to exist has been replaced with a very serious self-importance, and in any case how can you mock the typical reality TV celebrity? What is there to say, that isn’t already evident? Modern celebrities are already mockeries. Bo Selecta (and Vic Reeves) tried to get around this by exaggerating, mutating the impressions into wild grotesques, but you can only do that once before the hat is out of the bag. In the ring. Before the ring is in the hat.
The bag. The bag is in the ring. In the cat.
Dave Thomas as Bob Hope and Rick Moranis as Woody Allen:
And an even better sketch from SCTV - What if Woody Allen had been cast as Travis Bickle?:
Impressions can be great as long as they’re really, really vicious. SCTV and Spitting Image were masters at it.
We recently watched the six-part BBC series The Trip, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Coogan’s fair at impressions, but Brydon is really, really good, although his Woody Allen could use a little more work.
Hulu’s impression of the People’s Republic of China:
In practice it’s hard to do well, because I think impressionists (and ventriloquists) are prone to forgetting that you also have to be funny. There’s not a lot of mileage you can get out of “listen, I sound just like X” unless you’re Andy Kaufman. In that vein, Pablo Francisco is a comic who does impressions, and is funny,
File not found?
“Not found just like an end to the slaughter out there.” ::Groucho eyebrow waggle::
The Comedy Bang Bang podcast is full of impressions. They’ll have on, say Ice-T and Jesse Ventura, only they’re being played by Paul F. Tompkins and James Adomian. It’s absolutely hilarious because the characters improv and interact with each other as opposed to just one guy on stage doing a voice.
“I have an identical twin brother. Other people can tell us apart, but I can’t. One day at school he pretended to be me and I got really confused.”
WTF? It was a link to Hulu - the only place online that had it. HAXXORS!
Twenty seconds into the video on this webpage is a little bit of Bill Hader’s impression of Alan Alda:
At forty-one seconds into this video is what appears to be more of this sketch (although it appears, bizarrely, that he’s wearing a different color of clothes):
