Bob's Burgers star H. Jon Benjamin’s voice is not inherently soothing. It doesn’t have the purry-whisper quality of Marianne Williamson’s, or the commanding baritone of Morgan Freeman’s. It’s not particularly even-keeled: It can move between its usual sticky, low-and-slow pace to a kind of squawky bombast and back again within a single sentence. It isn’t objectively relaxing, but Benjamin’s voice has been lulling me to sleep with Pavlovian regularity for the past half-decade. It’s warm and heavy, like a weighted blanket.
Fortunately, there are roughly 106 hours of that voice available to anyone with a credit card and a Hulu subscription. H. Jon Benjamin, who goes by Jon (the “H” stands for Harry) has voiced the main characters on two beloved and long-running animated shows: Fox’s Bob’s Burgers and FX’s Archer for ten seasons each now. In the former, he voices Bob Belcher, a sardonic-yet-big-hearted underdog chef who runs a burger joint with his family; in the latter, he’s Sterling Archer, a vain, semi-bumbling spy with crippling mommy issues and ensuing misogyny. If you’re not an adult cartoon person, you may also know him and his voice from... Arby’s commercials.
“My first date I ever had was at an Arby's in Massachusetts,” Benjamin tells me in September, ahead of the premiere of Bob’s Burgers’ tenth season. “I borrowed money to go buy a girl a roast beef sandwich. I feel like we biked there.” Benjamin, 53, now lives in Brooklyn, where he’s been beginning to teach his son to drive. “I don't remember learning to drive. I know I took driver's ed, but I don't know how he's going to fare in New York. It's a nightmare.”
Materially, the two shows Benjamin stars in couldn’t be more disparate. Bob’s storylines explore the tribulations of a working-class family running their own restaurant and the tedium of being married and raising kids. But Bob and his wife Linda relish the mundane, evidenced by her ongoing soap opera about the raccoons behind their house. Archer, on the other hand, parodies different spy tropes, with the characters traveling to frozen tundras, distant galaxies, and exotic islands. On one such remote locale, Archer is taken hostage by pirates, only to accidentally become the Pirate King, and eventually dragging half the team into his mess. Truly, Archer and Bob—and the shows themselves—are perfect foils. There is parity in the way they’ve both inherited their parents’ work, but the only other major through-line is Benjamin.
In Bob’s Burgers, Bob is just one of many characters with a Benjamin voice credit, but he can’t immediately recall how many he’s done. “Hmm, I don’t know, like a handful.” I tell him the number is actually close to 30. “Really? No.” Yeah, really. The Internet counted. “I mean, like half of them sound like this,” he says, ratcheting his voice up several octaves until he sounds like a nervous young boy who makes a lot of trips to the nurse’s office. “So, I would say out of those 30, there's like 11 of the exact same voice but just different characters.”
He loves voicing Jimmy Pesto Jr., Bob’s teenage daughter’s lisping, spasmodic love interest. He thinks for a second. “I probably have the most fun with Ms. LaBonz, who's like a heavy-set, very jaded teacher who smokes.” Ms. LaBonz is inspired by former NPR host Diane Rehm, who’s notorious for her incredibly drawn-out questioning style.
“I'm always unhappy when Loren [Bouchard, creator of Bob’s Burgers] casts me in a role. I don't consider myself very good at doing voices,” says Benjamin. (He has been in every show Bouchard has made.) “There are some really good impressionists and really good character voices, like Larry Murphy [Teddy] and Dave Herman [Mr. Frond]. I just come up with some kind of easy way to change the nature of my voice.”
When Benjamin began practicing comedy in the early ’90s, he wasn’t fulfilling a lifelong dream. His roommate at the time, Sam Seder, was doing stand-up in and around Boston, but it wasn’t going well. So in the spirit of Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones, they banded together and formed a duo act.
“I was kind of like what do you call those... a lamprey,” says Benjamin—a clingy eel with teeth. “I just sort of latched onto his passion, and it worked out pretty well because the duo act was better than his stand-up.”
From there, Benjamin and Seder got involved with David Cross’s comedy team, the aptly-named Cross Comedy, which eventually led to an opportunity to audition for a part in an animated show Bouchard was producing, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. Jon auditioned for the role of Dr. Katz’s son, along with his girlfriend at the time, actress Laura Silverman, who auditioned to be the doctor’s receptionist. They both got their respective parts. “It was a ‘no brainer’ audition,” Bouchard recalls. “They were both perfect. That they were boyfriend and girlfriend at the time was both adorable and also irrelevant—they ‘had chemistry,’ but I bet they probably would have if they met for the first time on the audition.”
Even then, Benjamin didn’t have a clear sense of where he wanted his now-ubiquitous voice to take him. After Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Bouchard had the opportunity to create his own show, Home Movies. Jon acted in that, too.
“Jon is my muse,” Bouchard says. “Once you know you have a muse it’s very simple: work with them.”
For a lot of people, myself included, Bob’s Burgers has become a security blanket. “When we do fan events,” Jon says, “it's the most common thing people say.”
Comfort TV is not a new phenomenon. But particularly in an era of streaming, where there’s overwhelming choice, there’s an efficiency in defaulting to something reliable, rather than spending 20 minutes searching for something new. But reverence for Bob seems to be spurred by something different, and deeper, than simple familiarity.
“I think it's primarily because it tries very hard to not go cynical, and even sometimes when pitfalls occur within the family, there's always sort of a positive outcome, because the people in the family support each other in that way,” Benjamin posits. “So I think it's hopefully reflective of a lot of families, [and] for families who don't have that, it's probably a nice thing to watch.”
Bob’s Burgers shares a canon with The Simpsons and King of the Hill, animated shows with zany storylines (and in Bob’s case, raucous musical ensembles) that manage to still feel like authentic family sitcoms because they get the details right.
Bob Belcher, surrounded by his chaotic family, often plays the straight man. He delivers zingers about how poor they are, or rags on his wife Linda’s overly needy sister Gail, while still managing to be a devoted, good-natured dad. “[Jon] is uniquely able to express disdain and affection at the exact same time,” says Bouchard. “He does it as Bob when he talks to his family, and he does it in life when he talks to his family. And when he talks to me. It’s his gift and his curse.”
Improbably, Benjamin brings that same warmth to his other leading man character, Archer, and the quasi-family-coworker assembly that surrounds him. Where Bob’s Burgers is unflinchingly earnest and optimistic, Archer is raunchy and cynical. Pam Poovey, a calamitous HR director-turned-field agent, has had sex with every other team member and spends the majority of one season ingesting cocaine via a horse’s feed bag. Meanwhile Cheryl, the ditzy receptionist, becomes audibly aroused at any mention of violence. But in spite of all that, Benjamin still considers Archer a family show of sorts.
“If you go back to the pilot,” Benjamin says, “Archer was a show about a kid and his mom who have a very difficult relationship, a lot of secrets, and no father. So the show sprung out of that core philosophy. I always saw Archer a little bit like The Sopranos in a way, in that it delved deep on a bunch of really dysfunctional people, and that's where it started, so it always had that as its rudder.”
When Benjamin was cast in Archer, Bob’s Burgers was still in development, and Bouchard did harbor some concerns about how the audience would differentiate between the two, with the same distinct voice at the helm of both. “These things are fragile,” he told AV Club back in a 2011 interview. “You try to cast a spell a little bit … You don’t want somebody to be distracted by the fact that the voice sounds like another cartoon.” Ultimately, though, he trusted viewers to push past it. (Each show is ten seasons in—it seems to be working just fine.)
For Benjamin, juggling the roles requires some strategy. “Bob I wear an apron; Archer a turtleneck,” he jokes. Then he gets serious. “Bob is easy to do because all I have to do is sound put-upon.” Bob’s voice also more closely resembles Benjamin’s speaking voice, whereas, he says, “Archer is just this aggressive asshole all the time, with some moments of vulnerability that are quickly dismissed or sublimated.”
“He's like Bob on steroids.” He reconsiders. “On meth.”
“I'm certainly a lot more like Bob now,” he reflects, “I'm probably closer to Bob's age. I'm just tired." Plus, he says, he can’t sustain alcoholism the way Archer does. (No human should attempt to.)
“But I do like that I have these alter egos going on. I hope it keeps going.”
