by Jeff Dunham
The favorite dummy I used in my elementary school years was the toy Danny O’Day, but I very much wanted to get a “real” ventriloquist dummy. These more expensive and serious versions didn’t simply have a string in the back of the neck to move the mouth. Rather, the more advanced characters had hollow bodies and a “head stick” that was attached to the bottom of the head, and was thus inside the body of the dummy. Controls on the stick were accessed by reaching through a slit in the costume on the back of the figure, and into the body cavity. Mounted on the stick were levers that controlled various mechanisms on the dummy’s face, such as the mouth and usually side-to-side moving eyes, raising eyebrows, et cetera. I had no idea where to find a figure maker or craftsman who made this type of figure, and none of the local toy or hobby stores I phoned in Dallas could help me either.
Halfway through the sixth grade, I found a book in the large branch of the Dallas Public Library called Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit by the famous ventriloquist and voice actor Paul Winchell (whose most popular dummy was Jerry Mahoney). This book offered step-by-step instructions on how to build your own professional ventriloquist dummy from a block of wood or papier-mâché. I figured if no one else could build it for me, I’d have to do it myself.
My parents helped out by purchasing a few basic tools from the local hardware store, including a drill motor and bits, some sandpaper, and an electric jigsaw. With a set of X-Acto knives and some big blocks of glued-together balsa wood, I whittled out a guy whom my dad and I named Filbert S. Nutt. Dad also helped here and there with the woodwork, but even he would agree that he is clueless when it comes to tools. Our father-son projects in Cub Scouts and Indian Guides left a bit to be desired.…
When I was in the second grade, my father and I signed up for Indian Guides. Sponsored by the YMCA, fathers and their sons joined the local “tribes” and gave themselves Native American names—back then we used the term Indian. Dad and I were Big Fire Ball and Little Fire Ball. Our friends Emil and Scott Pohli had pretty creative names as well. Scott was my age and a good athlete. His father, Emil, had contracted polio as a young man, and was confined to a wheelchair. I was always impressed by Mr. Pohli’s strength, determination, and optimism, and his sense of humor. Their names were Little Running Feet and Big Rolling Seat.
During one of our monthly Indian Guides meetings, large rectangular blocks of pine were given to each father-son team. These blocks were about half the size of a mailbox, with a one-inch hole drilled in one end and a matching-sized dowel sticking out the other. These blocks were taken home and finished by each father-son team, and then at our meeting we assembled them one on top of the other to make our tribe’s totem pole.
Anyway, at this early age, I hadn’t yet figured out that not all dads know how to fix or build things. Our totem pole was our first real father-son construction project. We got the block of wood home and I couldn’t wait to get started! By the time dad had gotten home from work the next day, I had already gathered every hand tool I could find from around the house and garage. All the tools Dad owned fit on three small shelves in our utility room, but I also found a big handsaw in the garage. The wooden handle was cracked and loose, but years ago my father had keenly fixed that problem with some masking tape.
Mom said dinner wouldn’t be ready for a while, so after he changed out of his business suit, I pulled Dad out to the garage to get to work. He hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and looked suspiciously at the wood and tools. He slowly picked up the wood and the saw, and carried them to the backyard, where there was a two-foot-high brick wall surrounding our back porch. He put the block on the wall as a sort of workbench. I couldn’t wait! Dad was gonna make the best totem pole head of everyone!
He turned the block around, looking at it from every angle possible. I knew he was devising ways to cut and sculpt and make something fantastic. He turned the block sideways, put the saw at an angle on one of the corners, and pushed and pulled the saw back and forth. There were a few slips and grumbles and a lot of sweat as the saw got stuck in the wood now and then, but that’s how sawing works. And all saws are rusty, right? It never occurred to me that Dad’s tools were rusted because he hadn’t used them in two decades.
Eventually, the first cut was finished. He had sawed off the front top edge of one of the sides. He then proceeded to do the same thing on the lower portion of that side. “There,” he said. “That makes the forehead and the bottom is the chin.” Then he took one of the two triangular scraps and sawed it into three almost-equal smaller triangular pieces. Placing one on the front of the block and holding the other two on either side, he said, “This is the nose and these two are the ears. You can glue those on. There you go.”
“Uh… that’s it?” I asked.
“Sure,” he responded.
“But… well… what about painting it?” I asked.
“I think we have a little can of something in the garage.”
“DAAAAD.”
He went inside. I’m not going to say I was devastated, but I certainly wasn’t overjoyed. I got some Elmers glue and did the best I could to put the pieces on the face. No sanding. No sculpting of wood. No true woodworking of any kind. I found the can of orange paint and an old dried-up brush. After slathering the whole thing, I dug around in my room and found some tiny jars of model paint to put on the details of eyes and war paint markings. Horrible.
At the next Indian Guides meeting, Scott Fuller showed up with an eagle head complete with wings and a high-gloss, multicolor finish. It looked like something you’d buy at a store. Most of the other heads were at least close to being that good. At every meeting from then on, my head of the totem pole always ended up on the very bottom.
Despite that sad story and a couple more like it, including the time my mother MADE my father dump an entire bucket of water on my unlaunched Estes rocket because she was convinced that it was going to explode and kill us all, I must thank both my parents. I am eternally grateful for those very few times in my childhood that I was disappointed or disheartened. Mainly because of Dad’s lack of skills with building things or with any kind of tool, I learned self-reliance. As an only child, there was never anyone to discourage my conquests or divert a chosen course. I was left to a world of exploration and my own imagination and dreams. My parents gave me the gift of encouragement and never discouragement or disparagement. While Dad didn’t know how to use hand tools much beyond the very basics, he always encouraged my efforts. My parents would compliment even my saddest attempts and then make suggestions on how to improve. If there were times when I was doing something they didn’t understand, they would question and make observations but give me the room to fail. They gave me tools… both literally and figuratively. They did this in everything from oil paintings my mother helped me with in grade school, to terrible science projects where I never won a thing. In college, when I had secretively started building my own full-sized helicopter and taking flight lessons to get my pilot’s license, they were scared to death when they found out. But, later, when I’d finished the long project and after a great deal of prayer, they both rode through the sky as passengers in my homebuilt helicopter, trusting their kid not to kill them.
When I was young, if my father had taken over and done all the work on school or Scout projects, building the best whatzit of any of the other kids, I never would have learned a thing, and I’m pretty sure Walter and Achmed wouldn’t exist today. As for that first dummy I carved during my sixth-grade year, Filbert and I performed together for only a few months. He was nearly as big as I was and looked almost as sad as our totem pole head. Filbert is still in storage in Dallas, and I shudder whenever I open that trunk. He’s just too scary-looking. Building ventriloquist dummies is a skill I learned over many years, but I know I never would have had the fortitude or patience to learn if Dad had simply created a Disney-quality totem pole by himself.
Peanut: You’re crafting skills have really gotten better. I mean, I was blown away when
I saw how ugly you made Achmed.
Achmed: Hey! I’m right here!
Peanut: Yeah, I know.
Also during my sixth-grade year, the Richardson Daily News ran an article on my ventriloquial pursuits. When the reporter called to request an interview, I thought, “This is show business! This is the big time!”
Well… I’ll never forget watching outside our dining room window and seeing this guy drive up in a complete beater. I was stunned. I thought: Shouldn’t a reporter arrive in a limousine? This was, after all, showbiz!
Ironically, on the same day that article was printed, the Dallas Morning News ran a story about another local ventriloquist named Keith Singleton. He was just a few years older than I was, but as I read in the article and saw from his picture, he had a professional ventriloquist dummy.
My father did a little detective work, found Keith’s phone number, had a quick conversation, and Keith graciously invited us over to have a look at Marty. I couldn’t have been more excited to see the dummy. I had never seen a real ventriloquist figure in person—it had a head stick and everything!—and even better, Marty had been custom-built by a real figure maker.
Keith let me operate the controls on Marty, and he told me about Finis Robinson, the creator of this twenty-five-pound masterpiece. Finis was older than dirt and lived in Waterloo, Iowa. He had been building dummies since the days of vaudeville, and his business slogan was the ever-rosy “The End of Gloom.” I sent away for Finis’s catalog, which featured a sampling of his creations over the decades.
Finis customized his dummies to meet his clients’ demands. At least, that’s what the catalog said. In the packet was an order form that you could fill out to specify exactly what you wanted. What color eyes? What type of hair? Color of skin? Texture of paint? Did you want him painted for stage or television? Did you want clothes too? And then of course, you had to choose the movements. Besides a moving mouth, did you want raising eyebrows and a stick-out tongue? How about cross-eye movement? Cool!
Sometime in the 1970s, Finis and his wife of a lifetime, Annamay, moved to Zephyrhills, Florida, where he continued to build figures until he passed away on July 4, 2001, at the age of ninety-three.
I still have that catalog, which I still sometimes look at today and smile. It reminds me that Finis must have been a bit nuts. On one page, he has a “walking figure.” These types of dummies were an interesting oddity in the early part of the twentieth century. Vents would stroll onto stage, “walking” a life-size dummy while at the same time making it sing or talk. To make these almost-robotic monstrosities move forward, the vent would simply hold the dummy by one arm, tilting the character slightly left and right. The foot that was off the ground would swing forward thanks to springs and clock-like mechanics, thus taking another “step.” The performer could then maneuver the figure around the stage. For about $600 in the 1970s, Finis claimed in his catalog that you could order a walking figure and it would show up just like any other dummy, in a big, well-packed, cardboard crate. The trouble was, the picture of the walking figure looked suspiciously like his thirty-something-year-old daughter, Mayann, posing, standing as stiffly as possible in “dummy pose.” If you looked closely, you could see where someone had drawn in pen the vent dummy “slot jaw” lines on her chin as well as “joints” on her exposed elbows and knees. In later years, I always joked with fellow vents that we should pool together some money and order the dummy just to see if Mayann showed up in a crate.
Anyway, on my particular order form, I decided I wanted a 1970s variation of the Charlie McCarthy type. Since Bergen, almost every ventriloquist used something akin to the Charlie icon. It made sense for me too, because most of my material was inspired by Bergen and was written for just that type of character
After sending Finis $327.56 of hard-earned lawn-mowing money, my first professional vent figure—complete with moving mouth, side-to-side eyes, raising eyebrows, and winkers—showed up in a big box. I named him Monty Ballew in honor of two people. Monty Moncrief, who was the program director at Sky Ranch, and Peggy Ballew, who was also a counselor at Sky Ranch for a few summers and was incredibly hot. She was in high school, and I was almost in seventh grade when I met her. She was my first major crush. I have no idea whatever happened to Peggy, but maybe she’ll read this and realize that naming a dummy after her was my twelve-year-old way of hitting on an older woman.
Getting Monty Ballew was a major stepping-stone. I remember very well working on new material for him. Monty arrived the summer Richard Nixon resigned, and even at that early age I was trying my best to craft political jokes about Tricky Dick and Watergate. Soon the audiences were getting bigger, and I was getting bolder. A few months into my seventh-grade year, in the fall of 1975, I found myself in front of seventy businessmen, making fun of one of my childhood heroes: a real-life, pro-football Captain America.
CHAPTER TWO
How to Get a Job
While Still a Minor
Monty and I didn’t exactly follow the Golden Rule. We didn’t do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. Instead, when we finished our regular material, we then poked good-natured fun at people and our surroundings. Even at a young age, I figured making an entire audience laugh at one or two people’s expense was some sort of universal trade-off. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was developing my own little superpower: I could get away with making fun of people and things with a dummy on my knee.
In my seventh- and eighth-grade years, the board of directors at Sky Ranch put me to work to help raise money for their new camp. Because I had performed every week at the old facility during the previous few summers, the suits at Sky Ranch knew who I was, and I guess they figured my act was a good way to lighten up the mood before they asked the guests to pull out their checkbooks. They put me in front of big-dollar Dallas businessmen during Kiwanis Club lunch meetings, or any kind of business gathering where corporate donations could be found. I didn’t pitch anything; I just did my show. In twenty minutes I did my regular act, plus a goofily twisted Bible story or two, and then I’d do the thing that I was quickly learning was the best way to get big laughs: Pick on the big shots.
I don’t exactly know where or when I came up with this formula, but when I’d get to the gig, I would talk to someone who knew a lot about the gathering and the audience. I’d get five or six names of the most notable guys there, whether they were liked or not, plus a few facts about them that were either well-known or embarrassing tidbits that only a handful of folks would know. What was the guy’s exact job title? Was he horrible at golf? Had he made any stupid business decisions? Who was the token bald guy?
While dessert was being served, I’d be introduced. Once behind the microphone, Monty and I would do the expected part of the routine, then we’d start down my list. It was a great gig: a thirteen-year-old kid with a dummy and a microphone and a handful of names of rich guys to pick on. The laughs could get really big when business competitors were in the same room getting needled by a wooden doll in the hands of a kid barely into puberty.
One of the greatest times for me was when one of my childhood heroes, Dallas Cowboys’ star quarterback Roger Staubach, also known as Captain America, was in the crowd. As a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1964, Staubach won the Heisman Trophy, but before joining the National Football League, he spent five years in military service, with some of that time in Vietnam. He made the roster of the Cowboys in 1969, and eventually led the team to four Super Bowl appearances and two victories. To this day, I honestly don’t know what pushed me, but somehow I knew I needed to make fun of him. At the time of the show, the Cowboys were in the middle of an incredible run. Staubach was a superstar, revered in Dallas as royalty, and here I was at thirteen years old, making jokes about bad plays he made the Sunday before. How I got away with all that still leaves me dumbfounded. But of course, it was the dummy talking, not the thirteen-year-old.
Jeff: Monty, we have a very special guest here this afternoon: Cowboys
quarterback Roger Staubach!
Monty: The Roger Staubach?
Jeff: Yes, do you know him?
Monty: Not as well as the Steelers defense knows him.…
Peanut: I talked to Monty the other day.
Jeff: You did?
Peanut: Yeah. He keeps asking when you’re going to use him again.… Awkward!
I had great respect for Staubach as well as some of my other prominent targets, but somewhere along the way I learned where that oh-so-important line was, and when not to cross it. Of course, I angered a few victims or their spouses here and there, but the laughs were much more important to me. Even back then, I figured that if 98 percent of the room was laughing, I was doing something right.
Still today I try and do localized and personalized humor, and it always gets big laughs. Before a show at Whatever Stage, I’ll find out who the local celebrities are or if there’s a notable event taking place in that particular city, or if the town is known for something or if they have a sports team that’s good or horrible… and we poke fun at it all. Those are usually the more memorable pieces of the shows for both the audience and me. It changes the performance from night to night, and the crowd recognizes that it’s special just for them. It makes the live experience become just that much more live.
I’ll tell some of my favorite ad-lib stories later in the book, but there’s one from my early years that stands out.
Until I left for college in 1980, I grew up attending Highland Park Presbyterian Church. Just like school and anywhere else, I would do as many shows at church as possible. Sometimes I’d perform in Sunday school classes; sometimes on youth retreats; sometimes at Wednesday night dinners. I was always trying to get onstage.