Tom Kenny

Tom Kenny is an actor, born 1962.

Tom Kenny came to cartoons out of stand-up and sketch comedy, which is why his voices sound improvised rather than engineered. He hosted Friday Night Videos in 1983, turned up in The Edge and then in Mr. Show with Bob and David, where he met Jill Talley, later his wife and a frequent co-star.

SpongeBob SquarePants began in 1999 and has not stopped, and the performance is far more physically demanding than it sounds: a laugh built out of pure air, a voice pitched at the top of his range for twenty-five years, plus Gary, the French narrator and the live-action pirate. It has won him Daytime Emmys and Annie Awards, and it made him one of the few voice actors whose name ordinary viewers actually know.

The reason to take him seriously is Adventure Time. The Ice King begins as a comic villain and slowly becomes something much sadder, and Kenny handles the shift without ever softening the silly voice he started with. It is the best argument anyone has made for how much a cartoon performance can carry.

Beyond those two he is simply everywhere: the Narrator and the Mayor in The Powerpuff Girls, Heffer in Rocko's Modern Life, Dog in CatDog, Starscream, the Penguin, Spyro in the games. Two hundred and fifty credits deep, he still sounds like a man having a good time at work.

Movies (111)

Where to start with Tom Kenny

SpongeBob SquarePants is unavoidable, and the early seasons, roughly the first three, are where the writing matches the voice. It is well constructed comedy and Kenny's timing is the engine driving it.

Adventure Time shows what he can do beyond funny. Take the Ice King episodes on their own terms and you get real pathos out of a character designed as a joke. The Powerpuff Girls is his other signature, two distinct voices in every episode. For live-action, Battle of the Sexes and God Bless America put him on screen. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is the prestige credit, and Rick and Morty proves he can vanish completely into background parts.

SpongeBob, and the laugh that defined a generation

A sound that should be unbearable and instead reads as uncomplicated joy, sustained across twenty-five years and three films. The series is the home of it, and the films are where the crew got to be genuinely strange with the format.

The Ice King, and Kenny doing sadness

Adventure Time starts him as comic relief and slowly reveals a man who has lost himself, and the performance has to carry both readings at once without changing much. It is the best argument that the sponge is a technical choice rather than his only register.

The comedy bench, where he is everywhere

Stand-up and sketch training left him improvising, which is why he turns up across so many ensembles. Rick and Morty, Futurama and Hotel Transylvania all use him in short bursts, and Hoodwinked hands him something bigger.

Genres Tom Kenny works in

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