Ivan Reis yeah, most people who do accents or impressions have specific phrases that help them get into the accent/impression. A good example is when Kate McKinnon talked about it on the Ellen Show.
@@MortalConquest I grew up in fairfield county, and I feel pretty confident we speak very stereotypical american english with a lot of mumbling of words. hit up hartford or tolland though and things start sounding strange real quick.
As someone who's lived in the northwest their entire life, I was having a good chuckle and then he got to Seattle and Portland and my immediate reaction was just "oh he's talking normally now." Lunacy.
Here in the PNW. We say "You guys". But we say it to a group of all men, or a group of mix company, or a group of all women. My friends on the east coast always make fun of me when I say it. I worked in sales and had a older couple from the mid-west walk out on me because I said "Hello, how are you guys today?" The husband was very quick to point out his wife wasnt a "guy" and left. Lol!
Well there no jokes if that’s what you mean, but if this were a class I’d walk out. Every single one of his accents is way off. Henry Higgins would be disgusted.
@@liammaxcampbell I agree. Heck, even some comics make the best dramatic actors, too. I think of Robin Williams, Jackie Gleason, Billy Crystal in dramatic roles. They fully understand what their characters are going through.
@@MIKERUPTION Yep this was the exact example and people i was thinking of. I think of stand up comedians(the good ones) as intellectually intelligent as someone that has mastered any other craft, from law to astrophysics and quantum physics.
But there really is a "no-accent accent" in English speaking North America. If you want to know what a local accent sounds like you should talk to a cop, but a lot of people born and raised in a place don't talk with that local accent. I heard once that the default accent comes from Connecticut.
@@kylem1112 what I mean is that there is a national generic accent. People - especially younger, educated people - speak with it. You hear it all over the country, even in the south. That everyone has an accent is kind of my point, because the accent I'm talking about isn't really thought of as an accent at all, but is likely the local accent of Connecticut or maybe parts of California that spread through mass communication.
This is such a good "accents 101" approach. I remember learning in acting school that two of the most important tenants of doing accents is finding where the sound lives in your mouth and in your body, and finding a phrase or two that gets you to that place. Fred's doing both of these really rapidly, which is cool!
As a Seattlite, I have to say I was surprised that he got us spot on. However, my family roots are from Maine and I went to college there for 4 years, and I think his Maine accent was WAY off. Not even close. Boston and New York were spot on though.
NJ can be sliced into 8 subsections depending on proximity to NY or Philly and the long belt of pine barrens through south/central where some folks have a blue collar style drawl, and they either live in a single-wide out in the sticks or in a 7 bedroom Victorian on 6 acres of wealthy rural land, there is no in-between
It's not just crazy how many accents he has, but how effortlessly he can switch between them. I can only do a couple of accents, but switching between them feels almost impossible without taking some time to like, neurologically "flush" the previous accent. Not sure if that makes sense. This man really is a once a generation talent lol.
My issue is talking like the people I'm around, I've lived enough places across the US, I tend to slide into an accent as soon as I hear it and I have to be careful to not be offensive. That was HARD in Australia.
Matthew Alford it really does. I was watching the news a few years ago and the did piece talking about how one area of the Outer Banks literally has an English (British) accent even though they’re from the US
HE TOOK ME BY SURPRISE WITH THE CUBAN ACCENT! ON POINT!!! 😍 He’s got me screaaaaaming 😂😂😂😂😂😂 QUEENS, KeeNz, Why Nobody Told Me??? Why Didn’t You Tell Me??? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
I remember Fred trying to present this to Jimmy Fallon but Jimmy wouldn’t shut up and let him talk. Jimmy had to steal the show and demonstrate to Fred how he knows accents, too.
It's mad how, in Britain, we have this many dialects/accets in the area the size of one US state. You go 50 miles in any direction in the UK and the accent changes completely.
I want a British comedian who’s good at accents to do the same thing. It would be a total rip off of this, but I want to hear the trademark phrases to get into the dialects of each region.
I lived in Houston for 6 years. I didn't realize there was a Houston specific accent and then he did it and my ears just had this primal reaction. Like I was listening to a family member
from a south carolinian, he got it spot on, 10/10 i love linguistics and IPA so its really awesome to see one of my favorite actor and comedians nail my home state 💙
Why do I feel like this is his vocal warmup before everything he does? Queens, nobody told me, queens, brooklyn, Maine "You're on in 5 Fred." OK, thanks 5. QUEENS!
As a North Carolinian I came into this expecting to be offended, and then he got to us and I had to pause the video because I thought my dad was saying something. That was unbelievable.
easims10 I’m from rural western Washington and I still hear people pronounce cash like “caysh” and creek is “crick” and Tuesday is “tuesdee” and it’s “Hunnerd, Differnt” instead of ‘hundred and different,’ we say yknow a lot and have that sorta low, long O sound and emphasized R sound. I absolutely love it. When I go to Seattle I get people that ask me if I’m from Oklahoma of all places, which has nothing in common with my accent.
His mother is Venezuelan and he lived briefly in Brazil. Hence the perfect Spanish accents. His paternal grandpa was Korean. Loved the SoCal accent. Nailed it.
He skipped over the West Texas accent of J.R. Ewing and George W. Bush. In another video, he does an Arkansas accent that is identical to a northern Louisiana/Northeast Texas accent. He's very, very good.
@@MarioBecerraC yeah, as far as Mexican accents go, it was pretty terrible. It was more Venezuelan than Mexican. The cuban one is also close, but he missed the eating of consonants that's a major part of the accent. The tone is right, but the pronunciation could've been better.
Its true, the difference between SC and NC’s accents! My dad’s NC accent has a little more bite. More podunk. A lot of SC has more of a proper Aristocratic accent. Governor McMaster is a good example.
My aunt, my grandmother's sister, lived most of her adult life in NC, but she came back to us pretty often and we went to her once for a week when I was a kid. (Crawdads at the cookout! Can't forget that.) I can always recognize the NC accent as separate from other Southern accents and I love to hear it. He did it well. I was a bit disappointed he barely stopped on Philadelphia, mixing it with Pittsburgh. I would definitely say we share more linguistically with Baltimore than Pittsburgh, but whatever.
I used to do a version of this, 20 years ago, in my classroom. I had a lecture on regionalism that always got a huge reaction. Nice to see someone else hear the world like I do.
Chris Dawson I used to read a lot of Steven King and sometimes I’ll say something like jeezum crow and people around here have no idea what I’m saying lol
Ben Thurston I don’t know where the other guy is from but people definitely still say jeezum crow up here in northern Maine but it’s mostly from older folks
As someone who's hugged the west coast for almost three decades...SoCal, Portland, and Seattle were all spot on and now I'm going to be hella self conscious about it
haha im from la and i never thought of myself to pronounce every syllable? definitely more than some ppl in the US but i randomly remembered how my ex is from ohio and used to pronouse "uncomfortable" as "un-com-for-tuh-bull" LOL
I re-watch this bit every few days. Genius. "I was born in Miami, but I still have this accent." Exactly. They do! But why them?!? Of all people, why do they keep their accent when it makes no sense?!? Meanwhile, Wisconsin is more Chicago than Chicago. ...and they *are*!! ...but why *is* that?!? I don't claim to know. but... To paraphrase the Simpsons, Fred is the tightrope over the abyss. "Medical condition."
It’s a quote from a replacements song. Kids don’t follow specifically. They recorded the police shutting down a party they were at and started the song off with it. The cop saying it has a very district accent.
he probably has heard it before maybe a few times? i bet theres a story there too. Id guess most of these examples are from things he has heard people say in that place when working there.
I can’t believe in an interview on Conan once he said he could do every accent in the country from every state including doing one from any town in any state.
Check this out, from four years ago, on Conan (it's all a joke, a shtyck) : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Nm7U_ZZaOAc.html "Fred Armisen Can Do Any Accent In The World - CONAN on TBS"
I saw that too, and I thought he would be doing that here. But this was legit. Whereas that was a little bit joking. He can bluff about the towns... but the states he definitely has down.
@@hdpmrr wtf is a stuck. you mean schtick? Yeah he was blowing smoke up your ass a little on the Conan show, but he had an ear for it no doubt> he sat and actually developed an accurate version of that joke for his stand-up - and guess what? Fuckin A
As a Texan from Austin with relatives from Dallas and Houston, I can absolutely confirm that those accents are accurate. Not all of us, but it's definitely there.
Similar to how Tom Hanks recently did a near-perfect Australian accent on SNL... he had been spending time in Australia. Fred literally tours the entire of North America, so he's had a lot of time to absorb the various accents. Then you just need a way to recall them all... and he uses my technique of picturing how somebody from that area would say the name of where they live. Also years on SNL will make you very good.
@@GlennDavey It doesn't hurt that he speak Spanish fluently, likely German too (his father), not to mention some Korean/Japanese influence as well. He had a wide exposure to languages growing up.
Louisiana has probably one of the most distinct accents in all of America. You could have 5 southerners from 5 different southern states and the Louisiana accent would stick out like a sore thumb.
I had intentionally avoided this video because I am not a big Fred Armisen fan, but this is brilliant and skillful! He really demonstrates the gradients of accents. As an upper Midwesterner, I never realized how Chicago and Wisconsin are influenced by each other, but it makes perfect sense.
Me: Yeah, ok, sure sure. Everyone speaks a little different, but these could be exaggerations of themes in speech and I don't really notice these pinched nasal noises when I speak to people from these areas. *then jaw drops as he absolutely nails the Seattle speech pattern*
My Dad grew up in Tacoma, and I always noticed how he, along with other natives of that area, had EXACTLY the same delivery that Fred describes here. "Present their words on a plate" is PERFECT.
Fred has this wonderful quality to make every bit FEEL like it's being made up on the spot. You feel anxious that he's not going to find something funny in the situation and then rejoice with him when he lands it all. :D
the BEST American accent description and demonstration of the local state dialects in under 5 minutes ever. GREAT JOB! (Fred missed TN, but its a bit like NC and VA, but with a slight lisp, almost a bit gay sounding, lol)
lol i'm from oregon, and the way he described portland was so funny and so accurate. i'd never thought about it before but it was spot on!! we do sound a bit shy
I was a little confused on that one because I'm an upstate New Yorker and I don't pronounce the I in Florida either! Never even been further south than Indiana. Weird.
I'm disappointed that he skipped Louisiana, which has several distinct accents of its own, but this was very well done accurate. Fred Armisen is a talented comedian.
Yeah I was dying to hear his cajun accent though 😂 creole would have also been fun. it’s better that he didn’t do Louisiana. There are probably 10 accents that I can think of and half of them he would be cancelled for doing because they sound a bit like appropriation. even though we Louisianans know, it’s just the culture and it’s the way all the races in that specific parish speak
@@PaulyWally30I grew up there and never said Looziana in my life. Why is that the first reaction for so many people when the state is mentioned, to pronounce the name like all the natives are too stupid to say it right?
@@BeeWhistler It's a joke. It's not that deep. I'm Texan and we get stereotyped all the time. That's Hollywood for you. They exaggerate every state's accent and culture.
