free introduction to professional voiceover

San Francisco – Wednesday September 5^th at 6:00.

If you’ve ever dreamed of a career in voiceover, now is the time to give it a try. This free introductory Professional Voiceover class is just the thing to get you going. You’ll meet teacher and voiceover guru, Sam Pond, and learn about the business, how to access your authentic voice, the right way to discover the character voices inside of you and how to befriend a microphone.

Bring every question you got. We’ll have a mic and some scripts at the ready so you can try taking direction then hear what you sound like. The whole thing is be fun, interactive and mind-opening.

Register now on our mailing list! 12 student limit. All introductory students will get a 10% discount to the following week’s “Comedy and Your Authentic Voice” course if you sign up that night!

All classes are held at our studio at 1160 Bryant Street near the corner of 10^th, SOMA.

For more information, click here.

my next class

Comedy and Your Authentic Voice

A four-week class where we discover your authentic voice and build comedy, character and story from there. Fast-paced, piles of great scripts and a minimum of lecturing. In fact, no lecturing. Directed by voice acting guru, Sam Pond. Classes held in our awesome professional recording studios. All levels welcome. Four Wednesdays, 6:30-9:30, September 12 & 19 and October 3 & 10. 

For more information, click here.

a spot i like

Here's a spot from India supporting child literacy, called "Vandana". So simple, so charming. Nice for a Sunday afternoon.

dumb people are too dumb to know it

In my comedy classes, we've been working a lot with the idea that the non-hero, the character, is funny because he lacks the skills to realize his goals and fraught with a grand misunderstanding of himself, is completely blind to his own preposterousness. Nothing can stop him. The moment the light comes on, the moment he achieves some kind of self-understanding, the character and his goals are no longer funny. This is why the end of comedies just stop being funny around the third act. The un-self-realized two-dimensional character that has us laughing learns something about himself and his goals shift, he becomes a self-realized human and not funny.

A student brought this article to my attention. It seems a psychologist at Cornell has come to the conclusion that humans find it "'intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know.' Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor ... the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average." In other words, dumb people are so dumb they don't know how dumb they are. And, more than that, actually believe they're not dumb at all. 

So now it's been quasi-scientifically proven that what makes characters funny is their own lack of self-understanding. "Incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence," causing a rollercoaster effect where they can't stop themselves. 


Which is why Basil Fawlty is the greatest comic character ever. Right up there with Lucy. 

don't clear your throat

This advice was given to me when I was a young actor standing behind my first microphone. I was an actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and I drove up to Medford and even though I’d been performing for 800 people a night, the mic scared the crap out of me. So here’s what I did...

I completely over prepared, I practically memorized the script and I sure as hell wasn’t breathing. So I got into the booth and the first thing I did was clear my throat. The engineer hit the button and said, “Don’t do that.”

I said, “What?

"Clear your throat," he said.

I said, “I’m about to perform so…”

“I don’t want you to perform,” he interrupted, “I want you to talk.”

He was absolutely right. Clearing your throat is your body telling you, “You’re about to perform and this is important so you have to be perfect and prepared.” Nobody clears their throat before they talk. They talk. And whatever throat-snotty imperfections pre-exist, they just work their way out. 

Just talk.

dealing with bad directors

Sorry to say the vast majority of voiceover directors are not experienced with directing actors. You’ll get all kinds of crazy directions. “Can you be faster and slower?” ‘Can you sound more like President Rooney in “Ferris Beuhler?” “Can you be funny?” “This time do it with a Lithuanian accent.” Or the worst, “I don’t know, something isn’t working.” They’ve either got something in their head they don’t know how to communicate or they have nothing in their head and they’re scrambling. This is a pretty scary place to be.

So your job is to help release them. Yes,  ask them questions but they may not have any answers. I love it when actors say, “Can I try something?” My answer is, “Please! I’m lost! Figure it out for me!” Then go ahead and try something insane or subtle, anything that hasn’t been tried.

Or ask really simple questions to clarify direction. For example, “When you say slower, do you mean more relaxed or just actually slower?”

Never assume anything. No shame in asking lots of questions.

so your voice isn't perfect. perfect.

I get so frustrated casting in Los Angeles sometimes. It feels like every young man between 22-32 is the same person. They’re like the Borg. Light California accents, lots of good, positive energy, very little personal point-of-view. It’s like they’ve all sat in a room, watched the same bad TV, listened to the same bad radio spots and said, “Let’s all do that!” There are some incredible exceptions. I like imperfect voices. They make me lean in. Lisps, odd rhythms, ineffable underground emotions, odd ticks, weird outbursts. We all have them. We’ve subjugated them out of fear of not being accepted. Don’t let some factory voiceover teacher smooth you out. And don't model your voice after what you hear on the media. That's the Borg speaking. I love your voice. It’s you.

a great radio spot we can all learn from

Long time ago, when I worked for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, and running the Sega account (during the days of the Sega scream), Al Kelly wrote and produced two amazing radio spots for what was a TV heavy client. This spot won all kinds of awards, including the $100,000 Radio Mercury. As his creative director on that account, I take no credit whatsoever, besides telling him I thought the script was funny. It's a perfect parody, the actor didn't broadcasting the joke, just spoke the lines with all the phony compassion and vulnerability of the worst feminine hygiene commercial. And the punchline of the little girl entering the spot, perfect.

your authentic voice

Sometimes called the hero voice but that’s stupid. Your authentic voice is what you sound like when you’ve surrendered the ego. You’re just talking. Sometimes you’ll hear, “Talk like you’re talking to your best friend.” That’s terrible advice. We put on a show for even our closest friends. Your authentic voice comes out when you stop giving a shit. When you let the words drop out of your mouth. When you don’t filter what you’re feeling in that moment. Your authentic voice is the one that speaks to your authentic self. You have no judgments or preconceptions. You speak to be heard. To reveal yourself.

You know all that chatter in your head? Those voices? Those aren’t you. That’s the ego screaming to be heard. To chastise you, to worry about the future, to beat yourself up about the past.

Greg Dean, the great comedy teacher in LA, speaks in this youtube video, he claims that the voice inside your head is the “real you.” I, and lots of other commenters, completely disagree. Those are the voices in your head. For comedy, awareness of these and speaking them out loud is extremely funny. But only if you have some kind of awareness. Otherwise you’re just a maniac.

Here are two great examples of voice actors who were entirely present in the booth, speaking from their authentic voices. You can't help but listen. Mary Gross in this spot for ooma. And the amazing Lorenzo Music in this spot for Sutter Home Wine.

Here’s an exercise I ask my students to do. The next time you’re driving in your car, listen to those voices, recognize them, then speak them out in real time. This not only makes you aware of the screaming of your ego, you disempower them. They just want to be heard. The listener is you. And when the listener speaks, that’s your authentic voice.

the more preposterous the scenario...

... the straighter you should play it.

This is a tough one to grasp but I teach this over and over. Students come in and think, “I’m going to be funny.” And they take a script, which is already absurd and preposterous, and they lay their best, funny voices on top and what you get is goulash of comic intentions.

·      A silly scenario played out with silly voices is funny to seven-year olds.

·      A dramatic scenario played out with silly voices is parody.

·      A silly scenario played with conviction and seriousness can be very, very funny.


For example, this wonderful spot by April Winchell. The script is absurdly macabre and comically direct. And the casting of Steve Morris was inspired. No winking, no coloring, just the script.  It's called Fire Ants. Won so many awards that year the rest of us were put to shame.

an award-winning exception

Earlier I noted that award shows don't love comedy dialogue, haven't since the late '80's. Here's one of the exceptions -- Badonkadonk Butt, from the agency MMB and if anyone knows who the writer is please tell me because she/she deserves be to noted. The concept is very high, the writer has created an alternate and absurd world and the performances are committed to this odd reality. No grand characters, no winking at the audience. Really good.

pixar gig

I'm really excited to tell everybody that I'll be teaching comedic voice acting at Pixar in the fall. (Yes, I did have a brief fantasy of Brad Bird poking his head into my class and thinking, "Very cool." Then he leaves. That's my fantasy so far.)

off-mic shenanigans

To me, nothing creates more comic possibilities than talking off mic. (For you beginners, off mic is simply turning your head, or your whole body, away from the mic.) This creates space and distance and suddenly the conversation is not all on the same level. Suddenly someone’s across the room. Or has said something he didn’t want the other to hear. I did a spot once where the character thought the commercial was over, took a call from his wife, then wandered around the studio talking on his phone. The wandering away from the mic made the spot. The listener couldn’t help but lean in. Suddenly the professionalism of a radio spot fell off the table. It was hilarious. But if he stayed on mic… not funny.

This one worked out pretty well. A spot I did years ago for Food.com. I had the actor playing the wife yelling at her husband from another room. For the entire spot. She had to be in another room in a bathtub otherwise she’d be able to help her hapless husband. And I needed him to fumble on his own. Plus yelling off-mic is, to me, suggests a character's futile and helpless attempt to communicate. It’s just plain funny that a person chooses to yell from another room than actually do something.

playing with the mic

I was noodling around the internet and came across this Siren Award winner from 2008. Writers, take note. Award shows love highly conceptual stuff like this. Not many awards this past decade for great and funny dialogue. There are exceptions. And I will find them.

voice actors, stop giving a shit!

Here’s a story. I was taking a class in stand-up comedy and the comic/instructor told us to “stop giving a shit.” In other words, stop trying to make the audience laugh. Stop caring so much. Stop trying to control the outcome. Just write and speak from your heart, and with the help of a few techniques, something funny might just happen. Three weeks later I was in the presence of American Zen master, Dennis Genpo Roshi. His pathway to enlightenment was to free the 10,000 voices within by allowing them be heard. The critic, the lunatic, the disempowered female, the father, the mother – all need to speak. Then he turned to one very uptight yet earnest young man and said, “I would like to be “the one who doesn't’ give a shit. And what I mean by that his the one who has stopped seeking and grasping.” My jaw dropped. “Stop giving a shit?” Now I’ve heard that same phrase from both a grouchy stand-up comedian and a peaceful Zen master in three weeks. Voice actors, take note.

Fear causes us to give way too much of a shit. How am I coming off? What will people think? Am I being funny? What if I make a mistake? So I say it to the voice actor, “Stop giving a shit.” Yes, there will always be fear in any kind of voice acting situation. So lean into it, embrace it, let your courage push through and something unique is going to happen.

And if something dopey happens, well, we used say “tape is cheap.” But bits are even cheaper.

Stop trying so hard. Let the words fall out of your mouth. 

a new chevys radio spot!

Just finished this campaign for Hub Strategy and their client, Chevys. Pretty darn funny!


"The Capitan Says Stay Away"

i’ve got no better name for this than “introduction”

This is a blog based on my years of experience (folly of) writing for and directing funny, talented people. Many of which didn’t know how funny they were. Until they stopped trying to be funny.

So to whom am I talking? Actors, yes. Writers and producers, yes. Clients, eventually. But mostly actors. I love actors and comedians. And even those brave enough to step in front of a microphone for the first time.

Then there are those who have been told for years that they have beautiful voices and should do commercials. They may be right. But I like imperfect, odd and unique voices. Not many people have told them they should be in commercials. They think, “Gosh, they’ve got a funny voice.”

Then there are the people who believe in their hearts that they are funny. These people are usually not funny at all. Think of Bruno Kirby as Lieutenant Hauk in “Good Morning, Vietnam.” “Sir, in my heart I know I’m funny.” 

teaching comedy, analyzing humor

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.

Few people are interested and the frog dies from it.”

                        - E. B. White