James Adomian

Impressionists tend to get stuck doing party tricks, and Adomian is the rare one who turned the trick into character acting. He built his name doing George W. Bush on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, kept that impression running until 2009, and then got to play the same president on film in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), which is a strange sort of graduation. Last Comic Standing put him in front of a wider audience; Comedy Bang! Bang! and Chapo Trap House gave him rooms where a bit could run as long as it needed to.

The Bernie Sanders act is the one that made the case for him. Touring it through 2016 as Trump vs. Bernie meant playing a living politician nightly in front of audiences with strong feelings about the man, which is a harder job than doing a dead president, and it is still the work he is best known for outside animation.

Animation is now the day job, and there is a lot of it: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, The Venture Bros., Amphibia, Close Enough, Duncanville, Looney Tunes Cartoons, Velma, Inside Job, Human Resources, Sausage Party: Foodtopia. The most-used version of him is Bane on Harley Quinn, where the joke is an enormous voice attached to very small grievances, and Talking Ben in Talking Tom and Friends, aimed squarely at an audience with no idea who he is. He also plays Mike Lindell on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which is the impression habit refusing to die.