I listen to a lot of podcasts, the kind with a lot of recurring guests. For the most part I do not know what these people look like, but I get an idea in my head about what they *would *look like. When I look them up, I’m always way wrong, but I still have them in my head as some other person.
For example, on the Adam Carolla podcast they frequently have Matt Atchity from Rotten Tomatoes on, and for some reason I’ve always pictured him as Matt Paxton from Hoarders.
Who are people you know only by voice and who do you picture them looking like? (pictures encouraged so we don’t have to look it up ourselves)
Well, before the existence of the internet this used to be a real issue. Growing up I found that my image of someone based on their voice would never match what they turned out to really look like. A few examples I can remember:
[ul]
[li]When I first listened to Howard Stern I had no idea that Robin Quivers was black.[/li][li]Although it’s hard to imagine now I didn’t originally picture Rush Limbaugh as being short and kind of dumpy.[/li][li]I didn’t expect Bart Simpson to be a 40-ish year old woman[/li][/ul]
Nowadays for anyone in the media their image is just a Google search away (Cecil not included). Funny you mentioned Adam Carolla’s podcast. When I first started to listen to that a couple years ago I wondered what Alison Rosen looked like. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to look her up for a couple months, but when I did I was surprised to see that for the first time someone looked almost exactly how I pictured her (Cute, girl-next-door pretty, long dark hair, kinda yenta-ish)…
I usually try not to look people up if I’ve been listening to them on the radio for a while, I’m usually disappointed
Anyways, the last person I looked up was Michael Feldman from Whaddya Know. I’m not much of an NPR guy, but I listen to Car Talk and tend to be back in my car around 11:30 on Saturday so I usually listen to part of that as well. He sounds like he’s about 65 years old, white hair, skinny, still pretty spry and quick witted.
Actually, now that I check wiki he is 65, but he looks much younger.
I like how Walter Matthau spoofed this phenomenon in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three when he met Inspector Daniels for the first time. They had been speaking through radio for most of the hijacking of the subway train until the two finally met in person later in the film. Daniels is sitting in a squad car as Matthau walks up to him to introduce himself. Daniels is a black man. Matthau tells him, “Oh, you’re Daniels? I thought you were . . . a shorter guy. I don’t know *what * I thought.”
I gotta say, I’ve been wanting to start this thread myself for years but I was always too lazy. I often have celebrity faces/voices/characters in my mental picture of the podcast voice I’m listening to. So here are some examples:
Adam Davidson is Troy McClure (not Phil Hartman. I specifically see him as the character Troy McClure).
TAL:
My image of Ira Glass doesn’t match a specific person but I do have a clear mental picture of someone completely bald (as if undergoing chemo) for some reason. No idea why.
