H. Jon Benjamin

There is a scene in The Bob's Burgers Movie (2022) in which Bob Belcher sits alone in his restaurant after closing and counts the money he has not made. H. Jon Benjamin does nothing with it. The voice stays where it always is, low, flat and faintly aggrieved, and the new shading in the drawing does the rest. We were moved, more than a cartoon about a sandwich has any business moving us, and when we worked out why it was because Benjamin had declined to play the sadness. Bob does not know he is sad. He thinks he is doing sums.

That is the whole method, and he has used it for thirty years. He began in Boston comedy in the early 1990s, in a double act with Sam Seder and then in David Cross's troupe, and found his real work in 1995 as Ben on Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, where he met Loren Bouchard, then the editor. Bouchard has cast him in nearly everything since: Home Movies (1999), where his Coach McGuirk was the part the creators thought held the show together; Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil (2005); and Bob's Burgers from 2011, on which he also writes. For fourteen of those years he was also Sterling Archer on Archer (2009–2023), so that for more than a decade the same baritone was running two series at once.

The usual complaint is that Archer and Bob sound like the same man, and they do. Benjamin would not argue. He has said he does not consider himself good at voices, and the smaller parts he takes on Bob's Burgers, Jimmy Jr. with the lisp, Ms. Labonz, are plainly the same instrument with one setting changed. What he can do instead is hold two feelings in one line. Bob is exhausted by his family and devoted to them, and Benjamin never chooses, so the exasperation and the affection arrive together and the listener sorts them out. Archer is a flawed man played from the same place; Bob is a put-upon one. "Bob is easy to do because all I have to do is sound put-upon," he once said. That is modesty. Sounding put-upon for fifteen years without once sounding bored is the job, and few people can do it.

The limit is real. Our review of the film found it warm, funny and slight, which is also a fair description of Bob, and the voice does not change that. We would still rather have him than a performer who does twenty voices and means none of them. He has recorded a jazz album with no training and turned up in Boy Kills World (2024), and we assume he sounded exactly like himself in both. We would be faintly disappointed if he had not.