TVSquad

Being an impressionist is one of the toughest careers to maintain in the world of comedy. Instead of being able to do new material, audiences want you to do certain voices all the time. And at a certain point, your impressions become so outdated no one wants to hear them anymore (I'm sure Fred Travalena isn't getting requests for his Jimmy Carter impression, for instance).

Which is why I'm proposing this request to MadTV's Frank Caliendo: get a job as an analyst in an NFL booth. Now.

For those who've never seen Caliendo, he does some pretty good impressions: Al Pacino, Terry Bradshaw, Robin Williams, even President Bush; all of them are pitch-perfect (he does one of the most true-to-life Dubya impressions out there). But his signature impression is of soon-to-be-NBC football analyst John Madden. It's amazing how good it is; close your eyes and you'll swear that you're hearing the man himself. What Caliendo adds to the impression, though, is a sense that the cheese has slipped off Madden's cracker a bit, as he repeats himself, talks in circles, and states the obvious.

Sounds a little over the top, right? Not if you were listening to Madden talk during yesterday's Super Bowl. Granted, he wasn't as loopy as Caliendo's version, but the gap between the impressionist and the impressionee isn't as big as you might think. Every time I heard Madden run his words together in one of his signature rambles, I thought ABC had brought Caliendo in to give the old boy a rest (Madden's turning 70 in a few months).

Anyway, if I were Caliendo, I'd get a job with one of the other networks and do the Madden impression during games. He doesn't even need to do any real analysis; if you stick him on a game between, say, Arizona and New Orleans, no one is really going to be watching, anyway. Then, when Madden is set to retire, Caliendo can slide right into the booth without missing a beat. It's career security that no impressionist -- even Darrell Hammond -- has ever been able to secure. Beats trying to do Al Pacino impressions for the next thirty years.