Making an impressionist From childhood mimicry to comedy fame, Mario Rosenstock, BA (1993) chats to fellow graduate Luke Sheehan, BA (2005) W hat makes a comedic genius go one way or another, turning them into a joke writer, a humourist, a sitcom creator – or an improv stand up? What makes a comic actor, who does their best when animating others’ work? The protean chatter of Mario Rosenstock, who insists that he is ‘not a writer,’ brings some of those questions to the fore. As per his online bio, he is certainly an ‘actor, comedian and impressionist,’ but it’s the last one that sings. To talk to Rosenstock for an hour is to tumble through scenarios that he makes electric by quickly becoming someone or something else. It started early on - out of a pure impulse: to hypnotise his Mum and Dad as they bickered. ‘You are small and your folks are arguing… I started doing an impression of my father, and my mother and he stopped and went, “look at this.”’ He found he was able to ‘stop people in their tracks.’ To draw attention to himself, but also redirect their energy with a ‘magic trick’ of mimicry. The grá for imitation came from a grá for watching people… which in turn had sprouted from growing up on a farm, with ample time for watching, and ruminating. He could, in a short time, do impressions of all the family. The thrill for the adult relatives that were his first audience, he knows now, was to encounter aspects of themselves that they might not want to acknowledge. Like those medieval Irish bards with their lyrical mockery, little Mario had found himself a powerful tool. Targeted by a bully in school, he watched the bigger boy stalk down the classroom to the back, where Mario was, to give him a ‘belt.’ Super Mario jumped up, and mimicked the lumbering tormentor. The class started laughing. The bully ‘crumpled like the witch in The Wizard of Oz .’ He would not forget the revelation, but it would add to a sense of the tool as dual-edged. It could be a ‘dangerous weapon because there’s nothing that human beings fear more than being humiliated.’
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