Latest news with #impressions
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rory Bremner review – slick satirist cosies up to Trump, Rees-Mogg and the king
Topical comedy meets a trip down memory lane at Rory Bremner's touring show, where gags about – and impersonations of – Trump, Starmer et al rub shoulders with little parps from the far-flung past. Russell Grant, Keith Floyd and Robin Cook – remember them? Bremner does, and remembers the jokes he once told about them too. Prompted by onstage interlocutor Fred MacAulay, he summons them back to life here, in An Evening With … format that includes standup and sketch alongside chat-show banter and questions from the crowd. It's perfectly entertaining, especially for those of us who were there first time around. (MacAulay makes a running joke of the confused 17-year-old in the front row.) Bremner is nothing if not a slick raconteur. Too slick, arguably: I sometimes wished he'd answer a question from the heart rather than from his mental Rolodex of well-buffed anecdotes. He does that once, when prompted to discuss his ADHD, and his commitment to destigmatising the condition. Elsewhere, it's smooth repartee about schmoozing the king, struggling with Noel Edmonds' voice, and prank calls he once made in character as Nelson Mandela. There are treats for the locals in his native city: a cameo from Gavin Hastings and a Trump gag about the Fife village of Lower Largo that would bewilder audiences elsewhere. With little new to say about the US president, there's too much Trump in the standup portion of Bremner's show. It's not the only instance of our host treading familiar ground (on Rees-Mogg: 'he's like something out of a previous century', as if that's not been frequently observed). But there are choice moments, too: a fine quip about the names of the ex-Member for North East Somerset's kids; another about concussion protocols and the high recent turnover of British PMs. You end with an impression of a satirist with little fire left in his belly, his anecdotes suggesting cosy camaraderie with the public figures he lampoons onstage. But he remains witty, well-informed (see the set piece in which voice-of-horseracing Peter O'Sullevan commentates on modern politics) and able with a twist of those vocal chords to spring the innocent, distant past irresistibly back to life. At Gala Durham, 3 June; then touring.
CBC
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Neema Nazeri wants you to know he's 'a real comedian'
Neema Nazeri has been doing impressions for as long as he can remember. Long before the Toronto-based comedian ever hit a professional stage, or posted his first video, he was making people laugh with his impersonations. "When I was a kid my friends would always be like, hey 'Can you do an impression of this teacher? Can you do an impression of this guy?'" he says. "And then I do it, and then they would laugh and I'm like 'Oh shit, I'm actually good at this.' Every family gathering we had, my parents would always be like 'All right Neema, it's end of the night. Go up and make us laugh'" When he got older, Nazeri made a brief attempt at doing something other than comedy for a living. After starting a degree in kinesiology, he quickly realized that if he didn't pursue his dream of performing, he was going to be miserable. He quit kinesiology, enrolled in Humber College's Comedy Writing and Performance program, and got very serious about being funny. "I didn't miss a class," he says. "I was never late. I wanted to really learn the ins and outs of my craft from the very start because I was like 'I'm 100 per cent in… I'd rather sleep on the streets than go to another lecture hall and learn about biophysics or whatever the hell it is.'" Nowadays, Nazeri's impersonation repertoire includes a weird grab bag of celebrities, including Joe Rogan, Gordon Ramsey, David Goggins, Gary Vaynerchuk and Bad Bunny. It also includes a lot of accents. As the child of immigrants from Iran growing up in Toronto's multicultural suburbs, Nazeri was fascinated by accents from an early age. When his parents would have him perform at family parties as a kid, one of his go-to bits was impersonating his heavily accented mother at a drive-through and trying to communicate with the worker on the other side, who also had a very thick accent. When George Carlin did his famous accent-based bit "New York Voices" in the early 1970s, it was considered a bit risky. Carlin starts the bit by saying "You can do your own group… but crossing over, it's not so good." In 2025, an Iranian-Canadian doing sketches in a Nigerian or Filipino accent seems not just risky, but deeply ill-advised. But Nazeri has been doing exactly that, both on TikTok and live, for years, with nary a complaint. The trick, he says, is two things: firstly, don't be mean-spirited. "I'm not here trying to be purposely offensive or to go for shock value," he says. "I'm never trying to do that. I'm genuinely just doing stuff I do when the cameras are off, in front of my friends, in front of my family, and I'm just showcasing it for the world to see." The second thing is you have to know what you're talking about and understand what's funny about cultural differences. These aren't surface-level jokes about people talking funny. Nazeri does his research and is able to go deep on different communities' peccadillos. "I genuinely try to learn the ins and outs of every accent, the mannerisms, the inflections," he says. "The way I grew up in Toronto, I grew up around the United Nations… So it's like I'm an extension of the people I grew up around. That's the way I see it… I don't see it as getting away with it. I just see it as this is just who I am." In addition to appearing in his own content, Nazeri is starring in his first feature film. Please, After You is about Ali, an Iranian immigrant whose carefully laid plans for achieving the Canadian Dream get turned upside down when his good-natured but chronically bumbling cousin Omid — played by Nazeri — suddenly arrives from Tehran. Nazeri says that a co-leading role in a film felt like a massive coup for him, particularly as he only had two previous professional acting gigs. "One was an RBC commercial and another was on The Boys as a Syrian terrorist," he says. "The way I actually got the role was the producers saw my stuff online, they thought it was funny, and they thought it would be perfect for the role. So they got me to audition, and it was exactly what they wanted. And they booked me right away." Nazeri started doing stand-up, content creation and acting at the same time, around 2015, but really blew up on TikTok and Instagram during the pandemic. When he did his first stand-up tour after COVID restrictions were lifted, he says it felt like his profile eclipsed his actual talent on stage. "It was very on the nose," he says. "Here's this accent, here's why I can do this accent, blah blah blah." He is currently back on the road again, and this time, things are different. He describes his material this time around as "light years" ahead of where it was on his last tour. It's more coherent, more story-driven, and truer to himself. "It's much better, but it's also more in line with who I am and what my online content is," he says. "You still have the elements of traditional stand-up, but mixed in with my brand and things that people see online." Nazeri credits his improvement on stage, in part, to the fact that he relocated to Australia for much of 2024. He wanted to see if his material would translate to an audience in another country. While he was down there, he logged an almost unbelievable amount of stage time, doing roughly 600 sets in 10 months. "You can't cheat the reps," he says, adding that that was more sets than he'd done in the previous three or four years. "A lot of the sets were 20 minutes long," he says. "Twenty-five, 30, I had some 40s, so it's like, you learn way faster when you get that much stage time. That was the biggest takeaway for me was just getting the reps in, because you just can't fake it. If you look at the difference from the set I did the previous tour, I was way more performing the jokes. Now I'm just being my funny self on stage, and it's more natural. It's more me." He adds that even his fans, the people who pay to see him, are caught off guard by how good he is on stage now. "The most common thing I hear after my stand-up shows now is… 'I didn't think it was going to be as good as it was,' or 'This was way better than I expected'" he says. "There's so many comments like that, and I don't blame the people because they don't really know me for my stand up yet… I just want people to know that, like I am a stand-up after all. This is how I started. I'm not just an online, internet comedian. I'm a real comedian."
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Overcompensating review – an exquisite frat bro orgy of shirt-ripping, chest-thumping … and self-love
In the pandemic, Benito Skinner became internet famous for his camply unhinged impressions of celebrities, reality stars and LA types: his roster includes a devil-worshipping Kris Jenner, Billie Eilish at the beach and a twitching, gurgling Timothée Chalamet. By then, the comedian had been uploading videos for years. A clip from 2019 titled Live Footage of Me in the Closet sees Skinner comb his fringe forward, don an Abercrombie tee and travel back to the late 00s to resurrect his teenage self, a boy denying his love for Gossip Girl while repeatedly insisting he's 'not gay' until the screen erupts into a manic collage of Lady Gaga dance routines, Google results for 'daniel radcliffe equus naked' and the iTunes page for Glee: The Music, Volume 1. Six years on, Skinner is reprising the role. Overcompensating, an eight-part Prime Video comedy drama, begins with a similarly unconvincing claim. 'Hey, what's up everybody. I'm Benny, I love pussy,' our hero tells his reflection, an assertion undermined by flashbacks of furtive childhood rewinds of George of the Jungle, plus more recent footage of him leaning back in disgust from his beautiful prom date. The show goes on to fictionalise Skinner's first year at university, a time spent desperately trying to convince himself and others that he was totally not gay. There is, however, one big difference between Skinner's social media oeuvre and his first proper TV project. Online, the 31-year-old is the sole comedic engine: trussed-up, gurning, a master of mischievous parody. Here, however, he plays it almost entirely straight – in both senses. Benny was a popular football player in high school, plus homecoming king and valedictorian, as his new bestie, the unconventionally cool Carmen (Wally Baram), guesses. He is wholesome, absurdly handsome and incredibly nice; an instant campus heart-throb. His secret desires mean he is also meticulously repressed: the only glimpse of the madcap streak that sent Skinner viral comes during a cringeworthy dorm party scene. Faced with a trio of dudes singing along to Like a G6, a drunken Benny decides to showcase his own rapping talents with an energetic rendition of Nicki Minaj's Super Bass (Overcompensating is not a period piece – Instagram Stories exists – but the music choices are very nostalgic). Luckily, there are others able to take up the comic mantle. The first is Carmen's breathlessly problematic but strangely lovable roomie Hailee, a walking TMI who mimes sex acts between bouts of hysteria. She is played flawlessly by the actor who goes mononymously by Holmes (best known for playing the Daisy May Cooper character in the US adaptation of This Country). Then there's Peter, the high-status boyfriend of Benny's sister and fellow student Grace (Mary Beth Barone), who is determined to take 'Bento' under his wing. The White Lotus's Adam DiMarco does an exceptional job of infusing this heinous wannabe alpha with humanity while squeezing every drop of hilarity from his ludicrous vernacular of 'yee's and 'nah's. At one point, Peter and his pals get so high off their own virility that they explode into an orgy of roaring, chest-thumping and shirt-ripping – a pastiche of frat bro masculinity that is quite exquisite. Overcompensating is also expert at the incidental joke: Benny's perennially nude roommate sleeping soundly in his bed while pre-drinks rage around him, the pal of Peter's who announces that he needs the toilet seconds into any social encounter, the film class where everyone loves The Godfather. Less entertaining is the subplot involving a pre-Brat Charli xcx concert (she and Skinner are close friends; the pop star's music also plays throughout). Yet despite such japes, the show's dominant tone ends up being one of heartfelt sincerity. Benny's attempts at personal growth – ditching the laddy social life of his youth, trying to wriggle out of the business degree his dad (Kyle MacLachlan) pushed him into and meeting new friends – are spiked with knockabout humour, but at its core this is a very earnest and, at points, schmaltzily American show about embracing your true self. The combination of Benny's sexuality-based struggles and Carmen's attempts to grapple with grief (her elder brother died the year before) means the ratio of laughs to sentimental musings occasionally feel out of whack – but there is still much to enjoy. Just don't come to Overcompensating expecting wall-to-wall comedy; this is a thoroughly charming show with a very sensitive soul. Overcompensating is on Prime Video now
Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Rory Bremner: ‘I should have learnt to shut the f*** up'
The Edinburgh-born comedian and writer Rory Bremner is touring a new live show, Making an Impression. Which impressions have you found the hardest? We did Deal or No Deal on Bremner, Bird and Fortune one week and I struggled with Noel Edmonds. Eventually I worked out there was a little catch in his laugh, a little croaky wobble. Sometimes you suddenly find the key to a character and go: 'Yes, that's it!' What's your earliest memory? I remember going on a Sunday school picnic to Gullane. I think I was kicking sand off the top of the cliffs and it was coming down like a waterfall on to the picnic tables where they were serving sandwiches. I was a little show-off. I have a
Geek Vibes Nation
08-05-2025
- Business
- Geek Vibes Nation
Interpreting Impression Metrics To Improve Content Strategy
Here's an astonishing fact: Instagram gets around 95 million videos and photos each day. That is an enormous amount of stuff. To be fair, how much of it is genuinely noticeable? For artists and businesses, just clicking the 'post' button and hoping for the best is no longer sufficient. To thrive online, you need to understand what works, what doesn't, and why. Here's where impression metrics come into play. They may seem to be simple figures at first glance, but if you know how to assess them, they may reveal a lot about the performance of your content. What Exactly Are Impressions? You can determine the frequency of views on your material by looking at impressions. Let us say you post a photo on Instagram. If it appears on someone's feed, it counts as one impression. If they scroll past it and then see it again in Explore or Stories, their perception will be different. Thus, impressions have nothing to do with clicks or engagement. They relate to visibility. It is a measure of the number of individuals who are seeing your content and whether or not they are really interacting with it. Why Should You Care? Because impressions provide information about the circulation of your item, if your impressions are high, it means that your content is receiving attention. This might be due to great timing, powerful hashtags, consistent involvement, or just a high-performing piece of content. It is one of the first signs that the algorithm is catching up with what you are releasing. However, impressions have no relevance without involvement. If a post gets 10,000 impressions but few likes, comments, or saves, something is wrong. The substance is visible, but it does not join. That is a clue. On the other hand, if you get positive impressions and a lot of contact, it is a good sign. It indicates that people are reacting to the information rather than just seeing it. What You Can Learn From Impressions Key questions include: Do my posts reach new audiences or my followers? Impression analytics may be used to address these questions. Which content types carousels, pictures, or videos receive the most views? Did my posting schedule or use of hashtags affect how visible I was? Do more people share or store my material than use it? By looking at impressions alongside other metrics like reach, saves, shares, and profile visits, you can start to get a sense of the whole picture. You will begin to discover the most effective ways to reach your audience. That is when your content strategy starts to improve. Tips to Use Impressions to Your Advantage Try a range of multimedia formats, including reels, stories, static photographs, and carousels. Keep track of which posts got the most impressions. Change the times you publish. Try posting in the morning rather than in the evening. Weekends against weekdays. Examine your most popular content. What traits do they share? Include interaction data as well; do not only focus on visibility. Take notice of how others react as well. Final Thoughts Impressions provide important indications and are more than simply numbers. They let you know whether your content is being seen and how far it has spread. When used properly, impressions may have a big impact on your content strategy. They show what your target market is looking at, what is getting attention, and where your brand is growing in visibility. Thus, rejoice in your accomplishment. Make use of it. Take anything away from it. Because the first step in remembering is seeing.
