& Anthony Atamanuik: Trump Vs. Bernie: Live From Brooklyn

Most political impressions reduce politicians to a funny voice and a catchphrase, but Anthony Atamanuik and James Adomian spent the 2016 campaign season treating Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as unrestrained id and Brooklyn-accented indignation. When Adomian’s Sanders turns a question on climate change into an apocalyptic vision of polar bears drinking Coca-Cola and plunging into the melting ocean, Atamanuik’s Trump brushes off the premise entirely because the weather outside feels comfortable. The dynamic works because neither comic is doing a superficial impersonation; they treat the fictional debate like a pro-wrestling match fought with rhetorical derailments.

To keep things nominally tethered to reality, they recruited Huffington Post political reporter Howard Fineman to moderate.

Recorded during a tour stop in Brooklyn and released by Comedy Dynamics in July 2016, the performance captured the peak of the pair’s 40-city national tour. The project had started months earlier as an unscripted late-night sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre before rapidly spinning off into specials for Fusion and Comedy Central. Between the interruptions and rambling policy tangents on gun control and economic inequality, Atamanuik captured Trump’s grievance-fueled cadence months before mainstream sketch shows caught up, while Adomian pushed Sanders’s righteous sputtering into musical absurdity. The recording debuted at number five on the Billboard comedy chart.