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Tom Kenny (SpongeBob) Reviews Impressions of His Voices | Vanity Fair

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Tom Kenny spends an afternoon grading the internet’s attempts to sound like him.

For two decades, Tom Kenny has been the voice coming out of a pineapple under the sea, and for this Vanity Fair sit-down, the tables turn: fans and amateur impressionists take their shot at SpongeBob, and Kenny grades the results. He watches clip after clip pulled from YouTube, breaking down what works, what’s off, and how he actually built each voice in the first place. The timing isn’t random — Nickelodeon is mid-celebration of SpongeBob SquarePants’ 20th anniversary, with the one-hour special SpongeBob’s Big Birthday Blowout set to premiere July 12.

• Kenny reacts to fan impressions of four characters: SpongeBob SquarePants, Ice King from Adventure Time, The Mayor from The Powerpuff Girls, and Heffer Wolfe from Rocko’s Modern Life.
• He walks through the physical techniques he uses to sustain each voice, including how he protects his voice doing SpongeBob’s laugh across two decades of recording sessions.
• The video arrives as Nickelodeon builds toward SpongeBob’s Big Birthday Blowout, airing Friday, July 12, marking 20 years since the show debuted in May 1999.

Grading the Fan Impressions

Kenny doesn’t just laugh along — he critiques pitch, breath control, and comic timing the way a vocal coach would. Some impressionists nail SpongeBob’s manic, squeaky enthusiasm; others get the pitch close but miss the rhythm of the laugh, which Kenny notes is less a giggle than a specific, repeatable pattern he’s refined take after take. When impressionists attempt Ice King’s cracked, wheezing register, he points out the difference between doing a raspy voice and doing a raspy voice that can survive an entire recording session without shredding the throat.

The Mayor of Townsville gets similar scrutiny — Kenny explains the nasal placement that gives the character his fussy, bureaucratic tone, a voice built to sound perpetually mildly annoyed. Heffer Wolfe, the loudmouthed steer from Rocko’s Modern Life, is treated almost like a museum piece; Kenny hasn’t performed the voice in years, and reviving it on camera doubles as a nostalgia hit for anyone who grew up on the 1990s Nickelodeon lineup.

The Craft Behind the Characters

What separates this video from a simple reaction reel is how much technique Kenny actually reveals. He talks through how SpongeBob’s voice originated from real observation — a talkative fry cook he crossed paths with years earlier — and how that specific human cadence became the backbone of an entire animated identity. He also explains how he keeps multiple distinct voices ready to switch between during a single recording session without them bleeding into one another, crediting his background in improv and music for the muscle memory involved.

SpongeBob’s laugh isn’t just an ad-lib — it’s a technique Kenny has had to protect and repeat, take after take, for two decades.

That kind of behind-the-scenes detail is what makes the video worth watching beyond the novelty of hearing a voice actor mock amateur mimics. It’s a masterclass in how a cartoon voice actually gets constructed, sustained, and reproduced on demand — the same discipline that separates a one-off celebrity impression bit, like the kind seen in viral celebrity interview moments, from a voice that has to hold up across hundreds of episodes.

Timed to SpongeBob’s 20th Birthday

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Nickelodeon built out an entire anniversary campaign around SpongeBob SquarePants turning 20, with the centerpiece being SpongeBob’s Big Birthday Blowout, an hour-long special that premiered Friday, July 12, 1999 debut. Kenny reviewing fan impressions functions as promotional counterprogramming — a lighter, more personal way to mark two decades of Bikini Bottom than a straight retrospective, and it fits the kind of animation-adjacent content that regularly turns up in TV Trends coverage this time of year.

Kenny’s willingness to dig up Heffer and Dog from CatDog for the segment says something too — these aren’t voices he’s asked to perform often anymore, and pulling them out for a YouTube reaction video is its own small treat for longtime Nickelodeon viewers who remember the network’s earlier animated block.

By the time the video wraps, Kenny hasn’t just judged strangers’ SpongeBob laughs — he’s given away the actual mechanics of how a cartoon voice gets built to last twenty years. SpongeBob’s Big Birthday Blowout airs two days later, on July 12, and after watching Kenny break down his own laugh in slow motion, it’s hard not to listen for the technique the next time SpongeBob cracks up on screen.