All By My Selves

by Jeff Dunham

  Peanut: Other than sounding pathetic? No reason.

  Mortimer and I were going to give an oral book report on Hansel and Gretel. I put my little buddy in his red-and-white-striped corrugated shipping box, strapped it on the book rack on the back of my bike, and off I pedaled to Northwood Hills Elementary School for our debut in Miss Bentley’s third-grade class. Today, if I’m visiting my parents, I still like to go by my old school after hours and look in the window to where I first sat in front of the class.… I can see Mortimer on my knee, and me clutching him by his shoulder and pulling the string on the back of his neck.

  Bubba J.: My elementary school teacher was a nice lady. Since I was having so much fun in the third grade, she let me repeat it three times.

  We did a two-minute presentation on the book and then launched into a ten-minute unscripted routine in which we poked fun at my classmates, our teacher, and the lunch ladies: So-and-so was pretty; so-and-so’s feet smelled. I don’t claim that Mortimer and I were terribly witty, but to third graders, it was pretty funny. Even Miss Bentley liked it. She gave me an A+.

  It’s clear to me that the dummies helped me through my early years at school. Miss Bentley didn’t give me an A because I gave a good report. She gave me that good grade because there was something more to what I was doing. The shy, almost pudgy, fairly unremarkable kid with freckles and braces had found something that he might be good at. And it was something different. Miss Bentley and my parents were the first ones to really encourage me. My friends did too. I remember standing in line ready to file outside for recess after my book report. I asked a couple of friends, “Did it really sound like Mortimer was talking?” They all said yes, and that it was funny. Funny? Really? Me?

  I was hooked. Any stage performer feeds off the emotions of his or her audience: There’s a true synergy that takes place. I learned to love the laughs and the accolades. Also, performing let me say things through a dummy that I would never say. I would have been in a world of trouble if I, as just me, made any kind of fun of our incredibly stern and feared principal, Mr. Levine. But if Mortimer did it, everyone laughed.

  I know that’s one of the main reasons people laugh at my stuff today. These little guys get away with verbal heresy. And yes, it’s the little guys, not ME! Truly. There’s some sort of unwritten rule that allows my formerly inanimate characters to say things that humans could never get away with. I always just play the nice guy.

  Today, Achmed is the best example of how far things can be pushed. Here’s a menacing little suicide-bomber terrorist, glaring out at the audience, and yelling, “I KEEL YOU!” and perfectly sane, God-fearing people laugh. Can you imagine if some other stand-up comic tried to do that? What if some guy dressed up like a terrorist and started yelling he was going to kill people? His life or at least his career would probably end quickly and dramatically.

  I never set out to offend anyone with my material, and I have a line that I draw for myself that I won’t cross, no matter where I am or what audience I’m playing for. A good portion of my act is just plain goofy. On the other hand, there are the parts that I try to keep as edgy as possible. Every good comic learns how to read an audience and feel just how far he or she can go. Another comedian of note once told me that if you’re not offending a few folks here and there, you’re not pushing the envelope enough. Experience and reading every audience is the key to figuring out how far you can go. I will admit that there’s nothing better than hearing people laugh when they know they shouldn’t, because they can’t help it. If a couple of people here and there are offended or pissed, then I know I’ve done my job.

  If characters like Peanut or Walter or Achmed say something I know they shouldn’t, then I always look surprised or disappointed and protest what they just said. That’s another reason I get away with those sorts of lines. I’m as stunned and as offended as the audience. So I end up onstage chastising myself for what I just made the characters say.

  Achmed: So when I say I am going to keel you, that is actually you saying you are going to keel yourself?

  Jeff: Well…

  Bubba J.: My brain is hurting.

  Wielding sharp-edged comedy can become an addiction. As a stage performer, you sometimes can’t help yourself, and the audience can become completely engaged in the politically incorrectness of it all (if that’s your act). However, you have to win over the crowd before you step into the controversial arenas. It’s like a guy taking a woman for dinner and a night out: He has to gain her confidence and make her feel safe before making any moves on her. In the same way, an audience needs to feel comfortable before the comic starts running the bases. NOTE TO MY THREE DAUGHTERS: PLEASE READ THE ABOVE LAST FEW SENTENCES OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND TAKE NOTES. MOST GUYS BECOME MASTERS AT GAINING A WOMAN’S CONFIDENCE FOR ULTERIOR MOTIVES. BEWARE! YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO SMACK THE HECK OUT OF ANY GUY WHO TRIES ANYTHING ON YOU. AND IF YOU DON’T, I WILL. I PROMISE.

  Walter: Seriously, how intimidating can you be to the guys your daughters are dating?

  Jeff: What?

  Walter: Sitting on your couch at home, surrounded by dolls. That’s just sad.

  On his album, Jimmy Nelson said that to become a good performer, you have to do as many shows as possible, here, there, and everywhere. After my debut with the book report, I did just that. I started by presenting more oral school reports with Mortimer. Almost immediately I noticed a shift in attention and acceptance from my fellow students as well as the teachers. After a couple of school talent shows and Cub Scout banquets, I realized that people outside my homeroom liked what I did as well. A good portion of the school would applaud and hoot when I was introduced. But then I began to wonder if the only way I could be accepted was with my dummies. I knew I wasn’t cool, and I certainly wasn’t one of the popular kids. Was the dummy some sort of personality crutch? But then again, was being accepted for being funny any different than being accepted for being good at something normal, like sports?

  The summer after third grade, my mother signed me up for a week at a summer camp. It was a place called Sky Ranch, and was a nondenominational Christian camp near Denton, Texas. I figured that this would provide the perfect opportunity to see if I could make friends without using a dummy. I now had a little plastic Danny O’Day, and I took him to camp, but kept him hidden in my suitcase… for about a day and a half. When I learned there was going to be a talent show, I couldn’t resist signing up. And even with a new crowd, I made ’em laugh.

  When I got home from camp and started fourth grade, I looked for every opportunity to do shows and build my act. In the early years, when I was very young, my father would bring home store-bought magic tricks for me to try. My first one was the little red magic vase. It had a blue ball in it that any aspiring prestidigitator could make disappear and then reappear at will. AMAZING! My next trick had me demonstrate my mind-reading ability with a blue magic cube and box. Inside a small blue box was a cube with a different colored circle on each of the six sides. The magician would hand the box to the volunteer, and ask him or her to choose a color, and then put it face up in the box and put the lid back on, hiding the color choice from the magician. The box would be handed back to the magician, some hocus pocus words and motions would ensue, and then the magician would tell the dumbfounded patron what color had been chosen! FANTASTIC ! I was good at this stuff! So, I added some magic into my vent act and thought maybe I could make some spending money.

  I handwrote an ad for my new business on the top third of a sheet of typing paper. My dad then took me to his office, where I copied piles of these announcements:

  NEED SOME ENTERTAINMENT?

  VENTRILOQUISM AND MAGIC OR BOTH!

  JEFF DUNHAM AND HIS FAMILY OF DUMMIES!

  CALL 214-239-••••

  FEE: $5.00

  (I would have put the actual digits, but even forty years later, it’s still my parents’ phone number!)

  Back at home, I took off on my purple bike and stuffed my flyer into as many mail
boxes as I could pedal to. Then I waited. First day: No phone calls. Second day: No phone calls. Third: Same. Fourth: Nada.

  What the heck? Didn’t people want some ventriloquism? Or magic? Or both?

  No one bit. Not one phone call. But by the fifth grade, after a few more Cub Scout banquets, church gigs, and talent shows, I started to get requests to entertain at younger kids’ birthday parties… and get paid for them!

  I can’t recall much of what my act was back then, but most of the dialogue came from Jimmy Nelson’s albums, with routines that he invited students to copy and perform. His bits were surefire, and perfect for a young entertainer.

  Along with performing, I was now fascinated by every aspect of my craft: everything from the history of ventriloquism to all the different types of figures used. (Figure is the politically correct term for a dummy in the ventriloquist world.) I visited every library possible, and read everything I could find associated with vent. I kept coming across the name Edgar Bergen.

  As I began to find from my research, Bergen, along with his characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, had a hugely popular radio program from 1937 to 1956. My parents would tell me stories of many Sunday nights, sitting down with the rest of their families in front of the radio and listening to the hour-long broadcasts. Bergen was huge in his time. With a number one radio program, numerous films, and merchandise featuring his characters, Bergen made Charlie and Mortimer American icons. Edgar Bergen and Walt Disney were contemporaries as well as friends, and both were among the first in Hollywood to successfully and commercially exploit their fictitious characters, producing all sorts of merchandise. Like Disney memorabilia, Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd items are highly collectible and sought-after even today.

  Much of my act was and still is heavily influenced by Bergen. This is most obviously seen in Bubba J., who could easily be a distant cousin of Mortimer Snerd. More importantly, as a young performer, I was in awe of Bergen’s success as a ventriloquist and thus by example tried to create characters of my own that were equally defined. I know I wouldn’t be where I am today had I not been inspired by his genius.

  Bubba J.: You know what?

  Jeff: What?

  Bubba J.: I wouldn’t be here today if I was still at home.

  Jeff: That’s good thinking, Bubba J.

  Bubba J.: I know.

  Bergen took a tired old vaudevillian sideshow amusement and turned it into a legitimate form of welcomed entertainment. I spent many hours listening to his old radio shows, starting and stopping the cassette tape player, and writing out his dialogues word for word. I wanted to know exactly what was making his audiences laugh.

  Bergen didn’t simply tell jokes like most ventriloquists did and still do today. This wasn’t setup followed by a punch line. This was verbal situational comedy driven by characters and circumstances, much like any good sitcom. The banter between Bergen and the characters and with other guest stars were short sketches, but believable, and most importantly, funny.

  Charlie McCarthy was a precocious, girl-crazy, wise cracking boy, with top hat, monocle, tux and tails. Someone once described him as “a child about town.” His exchanges on the show with Bergen and guests like Al Jolson, Orson Welles, W. C. Fields, and Mae West had a real edge. It was sometimes salacious, sometimes political. Mae West was banned from the airwaves after a “steamy” exchange with Charlie. She appeared in two separate sketches on The Chase & Sanborn Hour with Bergen and McCarthy, which was the number-one-rated radio show at that time. Mae played herself, flirting very heavily with Charlie, utilizing her usual brand of wit and risqué sexual references. By today’s standards it’s very innocent, but it was naughty stuff back then:

  Mae: So, good-time Charlie’s gonna play hard to get? Well, yuh can’t kid me. You’re afraid of women. Your Casanova stuff is just a front, a false front.

  Charlie: Not so loud, Mae, not so loud! All my girlfriends are listening.

  Mae: Oh, yeah! You’re all wood and a yard long.…

  Charlie: Yeah.

  Mae: Yuh weren’t so nervous and backward when yuh came up to see me at my apartment. In fact, yuh didn’t need any encouragement to kiss me.

  Charlie: Did I do that?

  Mae: Why, yuh certainly did. I got marks to prove it.

  An’ splinters, too.…

  Pushing the limits even further, later in the broadcast in an Adam and Eve sketch with show emcee Don Ameche, Mae ad-libbed the line, “Get me a big one… I feel like doin’ a big apple!”

  In the following days, The New York Sun wrote: “On any other day of the week the skit would have justified the severest criticism from the standpoint of good taste, but on Sunday such a broadcast represents the all-time low in radio. The most charitable explanation is that the producers were mesmerized by the reputed glamour of the entertainer.” NBC received letters calling the show “immoral” and “obscene.” The FCC later called the broadcast “vulgar and indecent” and “far below even the minimum standard which should control in the selection and production of broadcast programs.”

  Six days after the broadcast, the general manager of the NBC station group banned any mention of Mae West’s name and of the incident on the network. In effect, Mae West was gone, and wouldn’t grace the airwaves again for twelve years.

  Walter: This has been my favorite part of the book so far.

  Also, fictitious feuds between shows and stars were a big ratings ploy in the heyday of radio. W. C. Fields and Charlie McCarthy had one of the most notorious ones, with exchanges like:

  W. C. Fields: Well, if it isn’t Charlie McCarthy, the woodpecker’s pinup boy!

  Charlie: Well, if it isn’t W. C. Fields, the man who keeps Seagram’s in business!

  My favorite was:

  W. C. Fields: Your father was a bootlegger’s table!

  Charlie: Yeah, well your father was under it!

  Mortimer Snerd, on the other hand, was somewhat the opposite of Charlie. He was simpleminded, and a true country bumpkin. Bergen used to say, though, that “Mortimer is stupid, but he knows that he is stupid, so that almost makes him smart!” Here’s a great example of Mortimer’s special type of intellect:

  Bergen: I understand you had a cake at your birthday party?

  Mortimer: Duh, uh, yeah! Had cake, yup.

  Bergen: So, do you prefer vanilla or chocolate?

  Mortimer: Uh… chocolate. Yup. Chocolate.

  Bergen: Why is that?

  Mortimer: It don’t show the dirt.

  Both Charlie and Mortimer were alive in the consciousness of the American public. Because the material was so well written, and because Bergen was incredibly skilled with voices and characterization, many listeners didn’t think it really was Bergen doing all the talking. Charlie would actually get more fan mail than Bergen, and purportedly, much of the radio audience actually believed he was a boy actor simply playing the role of a ventriloquist dummy.

  In those days, the only forms of “instant” mass communication were the newspaper and radio. If you didn’t make the news, you had to invent the news. And Bergen was also brilliant at PR. He went so far as to giving Charlie his own room in his Beverly Hills home with a bed, a closet full of monogrammed clothes, a desk, a West Point cadet’s hat, a feathered Indian headdress, and a Dorothy Lamour pinup. In her autobiography Knock Wood, Bergen’s daughter, actress Candice Bergen, talks about the bedroom and how her father made her sit on his left knee and talk with her “brother,” Charlie, who sat to the right. There are charming, albeit creepy, pictures of the Bergen family with Charlie and Mortimer posing as well. Was Bergen crazy, or simply creative with photo opportunities and press manipulation? I think he was simply greatly talented, and a sharp businessman.

  Walter: I’m going with “crazy.” And that goes for you, too.

  Jeff: I’m not nuts.

  Walter: Ha, ha, ha… you are such a kidder.

  What kept Bergen unparalleled by any other vent of his era was his ability to creat
e well-defined and beloved characters. It took me many years to understand that this was Bergen’s true talent. Sure, he and Charlie and Mortimer starred in a few movies in the thirties and forties, and he also made many guest television appearances up until his death in 1978.… But first and foremost Bergen was a radio star. Hang on… A ventriloquist became a star on the radio. That’s ridiculous.

  At first consideration, I think most people would regard vent as a visual medium. No one says that you listen to a ventriloquist. Rather, you watch a ventriloquist. But is that the most important sense utilized when being entertained by a vent? As I got older and began to better understand why Bergen’s studio audiences were laughing, I began to realize the significance of radio and the spoken word in his climb to superstardom. I actually don’t think he would have been as successful if he had come along later, during the television era. Because his radio audience couldn’t see him, they couldn’t watch to see if he moved his lips. So, throw out of the equation the first thing people usually focus on when a ventriloquist is performing. The listening audience could only pay attention to what they could hear. His characters and material were so strong that Bergen became a huge star and famous ventriloquist solely by the spoken word, and the most important thing he did was make people laugh. This began to sink in to me very early on.