James Bates, known online as The Real Spark, is an American comedian famous for his parody news interview videos. Based in Lafayette, Louisiana, and a psychology graduate, he works as an Uber driver alongside full-time video production, earning a YouTube Silver Creator Award in 2020. He went viral in 2021 with a parody interview portraying fictional flight attendant Alfredo Rivera, a skit inspired by a real Frontier Airlines incident. The parody was so convincing that journalist Piers Morgan and Good Morning America mistook it for real news, prompting AFP Fact Check to clarify on August 10, 2021, that the "social media sensation" was actually a comedian. The video was later praised as "sidesplitting" by Mother Jones in December 2021, and Bates followed up with another parody in 2022 about an indecent exposure charge.