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Aries Spears

Aries Spears has built a career around stand-up, sketch comedy, acting and voice work, with impressions serving as one of his sharpest calling cards. Born in Chicago on April 3, 1975, he moved to New York at two and later to New Jersey at eleven. Spears has said that his first stand-up experience came at roughly fourteen, when he performed impressions of James Brown and Jack Nicholson at Harlem’s Uptown Comedy Cafe. Spears cites Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam as his first major break. He appeared on the show in 1992, at sixteen, and returned in 1997. He also performed on It’s Showtime at the Apollo before moving to Los Angeles in 1992. Television work followed, including a recurring role on A Different World and a starring role opposite Glenn Frey in South of Sunset. His film appearances during the 1990s included Out-of-Sync, The Pest and Jerry Maguire, where he played Teepee, the brother of Rod Tidwell. But Spears became most closely associated with sketch television after joining MADtv in 1997. Across eight seasons, he developed original characters and took on an extensive roster of celebrity impressions, ranging from James Brown, Eddie Murphy and Al Pacino to Mike Tyson, Shaquille O’Neal, Jay-Z and Denzel Washington. That mix of character work, mimicry and stand-up timing gave him plenty of room to shift between broad comedy and pointed parody. After leaving MADtv in 2005, Spears continued working across live comedy, television and film. He appeared in Hood of Horror, performed on The Underground and played Shaquille O’Neal in two episodes of Frank TV. His voice work includes Wizard Kelly in the animated series The Proud Family. In 2011, he released the comedy special Aries Spears: Hollywood, Look I’m Smiling, another showcase for the performance style that has shaped his career from its earliest days.