- Hi, I'm Yeardley Smith.
I do the voice of Lisa Simpson
on that fabulous show, "The Simpsons."
And today we are gonna look
at some impressions of Lisa Simpson,
and I'm going to critique them.
Let's do this.
[jazz music]
- Um, just realized that I could do Lisa's laugh
from "The Simpsons." [giggling]
- Oh, that's pretty good.
Now, Lisa's laugh, it's multifaceted.
There are many notes in Lisa's laugh.
That's the giggle, that sort of [Yeardley giggles]
It was very, very good.
But then there's the guffaw, like the balls out, oh my god,
we're watching Itchy and Scratchy and that sounds like this.
[Yeardley guffaws enthusiastically]
Never gets old, also, really good ab workout.
- Babe. - Huh?
- [Speaker] Impression Challenge, Simpsons edition.
- Okay. - Lisa.
- Bye. [Yeardley laughs]
- That was it?
I can't, you know, that might not be quite enough to go on.
- Lisa Simpson accuses you of cheating at Monopoly.
- If this was the behavior of a man, I would understand.
But for a woman to cheat
at the game of capitalism is despicable.
We should be joining together, the shoe, the hat, the car,
to come together as a community
to strive for a better future.
[Yeardley laughs]
- That's actually pretty good.
It starts off really good,
and then I feel like it sort of morphs into
if Lisa Simpson were an alien or a smurf,
but pretty impressive, if we stopped
after like the first couple of sentences.
For me, it's not hard to voice Lisa Simpson at all.
This is me, this is Lisa Simpson.
We're not that far apart.
But I have been told by my colleagues,
on the rare occasion that I'm too sick to go to work
'cause I don't sound like Lisa Simpson
and one of them has to fill in for me,
they're like, "You're the hardest one to do."
I'm told it's something to do
with my voice is placed very far forward
and it's really nasally.
And they're like, "I got nothing, I can't.
Please come back to work."
So there's a little job security there.
- I had a cat named Snowball.
She died, she died.
Mom said she was sleeping.
She lied, she lied.
- I love it. I love it.
She is reciting half of a really famous Lisa Simpson poem
about the cat named Snowball.
I had a cat named Snowball.
She died, she died.
Mom said she was sleeping.
She lied, she lied.
Why oh why is my cat dead?
Couldn't that car have hit me instead?
It's very dark. It's very, very dark.
I think one of the things about voicing Lisa Simpson,
you know, in your head she just sounds really high,
she sounds sort of nasally, but it turns out it's really,
it's a tricky sound to truly replicate.
So again, I'm just grasping at my job security.
So far, so good.
- Uh Bart! I had a cat named Snowball.
She died, she died.
- So first of all, I love the hair, Tori.
That is some fantastic hair.
This year's Treehouse of Horror, we did an anime section,
it's a trilogy usually,
and Lisa Simpson's hair looks like that.
The impression, I would say maybe slow down a little,
attitudinally, I would say sneaking up to Lisa Simpson,
vocally, she's just a little too deep.
You nailed the hair, and I like everything else.
I really do. It's good.
- If you don't stop smiling, you're gonna get a kiss.
They call her the cat lady.
People say she's crazy
just because she has a few dozen cats.
- I love the commitment, also talking into the hairbrush
like we all used to do when we were kids
and trying to be a rockstar, yes.
Yes all day to that.
If we were sitting together at the bar
and I was coaching her on how to replace me as Lisa Simpson,
channel your inner eight year old,
I think she sounds a little aged up, a little older.
So you gotta sound a little younger.
The interesting thing about Lisa Simpson
when she gets older is she sounds exactly the same.
The other interesting thing about Lisa Simpson
is she's eight years old,
and every time she has a birthday she turns eight,
and we just don't talk about that.
However, there is one episode in the last couple of seasons
where she turned nine.
- Dear Log at midnight, I turned nine, halfway to adulthood.
- But then by the next week she was eight again.
So that's just the magic of television.
That's why we love television.
And it is, I believe, one of the reasons The Simpsons
is so successful is that we remain frozen in time
and it kind of gives us this constancy
and a platform from which to comment
on everything else that's going on in the world.
So Lisa Simpson at 30
often sounds like Lisa Simpson at eight.
- Mom, just buy it.
You don't have to rationalize everything.
- There are so many things that make Lisa Simpson
the fantastic little character that she is.
And it's not just the sound, right?
Obviously, the brilliant animation,
it's the brilliant writing.
And then there's that amorphous quality,
that unnameable, indescribable kind of,
that secret ingredient, which I obviously I can't.
I mean, what is it?
I mean, I don't, I don't even know what I'm doing
when I do Lisa Simpson.
I'm not really gonna be any help.
[Yeardley laughs]
The key to good voiceover, as with any performance,
is you have to throw your heart and soul into it.
You gotta be all in.
There's this idea that doing a voiceover is somehow
less of an acting job than, say, being on camera.
And I 100% categorically disagree.
I love everything about Lisa Simpson.
I honestly, truly love that girl
like she is a living, breathing, red-blooded,
4' 2", 'cause there's an episode named that, little girl,
dressed in a little red dress wearing pearls.
I love her. I love her so much.
This idea that it just happens from the neck up is crap.
It's crap. [Yeardley chuckles]
This is a family show, I'm trying to keep it clean.
Creatively, my advice would be really do your own thing.
Oprah says it best.
When people say like,
"Oprah, I wanna grow up and be just like you,"
she's like, "No you don't,
you wanna grow up and be just like you."
And I think that is what's key.
And you cannot reverse engineer
or fake that kind of authenticity.
Whatever the dream, whatever you're going toward,
do it the way you would do it,
don't do it the way you think I would do it,
or Lisa Simpson would do it.
Nobody does it better than you.
Thank you, Vanity Fair, for inviting me over
to critique compressions of the one and only Lisa Simpson.
It was an absolute joy.
You're much too kind.
This was so much fun.
Let's do it again.
[jazz music]