Ask a Japanese person who Hiroshi Takigawa is and you're likely to get a blank face. Give them his stage name, Croket, and you're bound to get a smile.
In the late 1970s, Takigawa was ubiquitous on prime time TV as Croket (pronounced "korokke") thanks to his particular talent for monomane (impersonations) that involved exaggerated facial contortions.
"The thing about facial impersonations is that you can't see yourself doing them," the 58-year-old comedian tells The Japan Times. "I had no idea whether I was funny or good at it. I was doing it on TV, though, so the audience would likely have been eating dinner or doing homework and then they'd just have to look up for a split second to see me pulling a strange face. Then my face would change back and they would have returned to whatever they were doing.