There is no demographic more in need of good, solid belly laughs than airline passengers. These folks are exhausted, disoriented, oxygen-deprived, and strapped to their chairs inside giant, airborne aluminum tubes. A comedian couldn’t ask for a better audience. And it is at this point that plucky Southwest Airlines flight attendant Zach Haumesser enters the narrative. Haumesser, in addition to his stewarding duties, moonlights as a puppeteer and does impressions, too. A real cut-up, this one. Life of the party every time, guaranteed. One of Haumesser’s specialties is imitating the iconic Looney Tunes characters, including Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, and the Tasmanian Devil. Happily, Haumesser has found a way to bring his work and his passion together. A popular YouTube video called “Southwest Looney Tunes,” shot during a recent trip to Chicago and uploaded by a coworker, shows the eccentric flight attendant reading the boilerplate landing speech in the voices of various anarchic ‘toons. Let’s watch him at work.
Phew. That’s exhausting. For those keeping track, Haumesser does at least 10 different voices over the course of two and a half minutes. This includes the iconic “meep! meep!” of the Road Runner, i.e. the only character of the bunch who actually resides in the American Southwest. “Southwest Looney Tunes” has already attracted 3.6 million views, but Haumesser is being modest (or just inscrutable) about his nascent internet fame.
As cartoon fans are well aware, most of these familiar Looney Tunes voices were created by voice actor Mel Blanc, who died in 1989. Since then, Blanc’s roles have been divvied up among a number of successors. But the skillful Haumesser does the whole lot of them, including some less obvious ones like the strutting, Southern-accented Foghorn Leghorn. Perhaps the most memorable voice here, though, was not created by Blanc at all. The actor who really made Elmer Fudd his own was radio comedian Arthur Q. Bryan. Haumesser’s video can thus be seen as a sweet posthumous tribute to Bryan, who passed away in 1959, when the original Looney Tunes series was still in production.
[via Laughing Squid]