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The impersonation of a character’s voice is a canonical resource in comedic parody, allowing comedians to impersonate characters and establish a plurality of perspectives with varying degrees of alignment to the audience’s collective values. Although phenomena such as mimicry and ventriloquism are often mentioned anecdotally, this area remains underexplored within phonology, despite being occasionally addressed in studies of impersonation from other disciplines. This study presents a social semiotic analysis of how features of a comedian’s vocal sound semiotics including phonology and voice quality intersect with impersonation and humour in a stand-up comedy text. Employing a systemic functional linguistics-based paralanguage framework, we characterize impersonation as a mechanism realized by the convergence of particular features across semiotic modes, with phonology playing a central role renovated Tenor model is then applied to describe how meanings realized by the comedian are negotiated with the audience to create humour. The findings indicate that vocal sound semiotics plays a crucial role in nuancing the negotiation of meanings with stand-up comedy audiences, affording the comedian a rich resource for creating humour. Specifically, the comedian alternates between a “harsher” voice quality, associated with an impersonated persona, for building humorous tension, and a “warmer” voice quality associated with a more “authentic” authorial persona so as to diffuse this tension; they thus calibrate tension to remain humorous and sustain solidarity and rapport with the audience.

War(n/m)ing the room: the role of vocal sound semiotics in nuancing comedian-audience relations