If there is such a thing as the perfect male voice, our generation’s triumphal baritone belongs to H. Jon Benjamin.
When you’re actually watching him talk—he looks a bit like a schlubby middle manager, perhaps at best a put-upon public defender—the slow, low register is unmistakable, although the creaks, which have the soft comfort of opening the gate to your grandmother’s backyard garden, become a bit more prominent, perhaps to help your brain reconcile sight and sound. For the most part, though, Benjamin’s voice is hidden by one of his cartoon alter-egos, and it’s here where it really settles into ultimate masculinity.
Benjamin got his voice-acting start on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, a cult-y mid-’90s Squigglevision production that helped carve out a niche for off-kilter late-night animated comedy. As Dr. Katz’s son Ben, the dry voice of encroaching absurdity, Benjamin spoke with a softer, almost airy quality, befitting a sort of shiftless slackerdom. More notable than his voice, though, was the way Benjamin fit into the two-breaths-between-punchlines style of comedy, his voice nailing the pregnant quality necessary to make you really lean into the silence.
A purely self-involved asshole, a lot of the humour of the character comes from his ability to switch topics in the middle of a sentence: one second he is lecturing someone on proper espionage tactics, the next he is openly praising the career of Burt Reynolds. Benjamin’s voice jumps on these shifts with pinpoint precision, first taking a soak in a stiff martini, then jumping up to giddy excitedness before dropping into pissy screaming. Benjamin has made it such that one of Archer’s catchphrases is simply to yell someone’s name in an increasingly loud, demanding yell, but his real trick is dexterity: the way he can jump, with pure conviction, from tone to tone, while holding on to the base narcissism that grounds the character is sort of dizzying to listen to, especially when you consider how sedate he generally is, both in person and performance.
Archer’s moody nimbleness is probably the kind of voice-work you could only really pull off with your own voice—which means that Jon Benjamin, with his aural gold, is probably the only person who could have ever brought him to life.
