All By My Selves

by Jeff Dunham

  During most of the years I was at Highland Park, Dr. Clayton Bell was our pastor. Another family that attended the church was the William Herbert Hunts. He and his brother, former billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, in the late 70s had tried but failed to corner the world silver market, and most of our church’s congregation was familiar with the Hunts and their business dealings. A dinner event was planned in honor of Dr. Bell and his wife, who were celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary of being with our church. It was just about Christmastime.

  During my act, I had Monty say that we were happy that we were there as part of the entertainment that night, but apparently we were second choice. He said that Herbert Hunt had wanted to get up onstage, and in honor of the pastor and his wife and their anniversary and the holidays, he had wanted to sing for them, “Silver Bells… Silver Bells …” Get it? The Hunts and the silver market? The twenty-fifth anniversary is the silver anniversary; the Clayton BELLS; and it was Christmastime? That wasn’t a double entendre, it was a quintuple entendre. It wasn’t the greatest joke in the world, but as people put the five things together in their heads, the low level laugh started, then built, and went on and on as folks got it all, then explained it to each other. Like I said, not a huge laugh, but having come up with it as a teenager, I’m still kind of proud of myself for that one, and my dad still brings it up every once in a while.

  Jeff: Walter, how did you celebrate your twenty-fifth anniversary?

  Walter: “Celebrate”? You’re assuming way too much.

  Let’s get back to junior high. At age thirteen, I met another ventriloquist, who was about to make a pretty big name for himself in the television world. A few years after I met him, Jay Johnson moved to Los Angeles and became famous as the slightly crazy ventriloquist from the 1970s sitcom Soap, in which he played Chuck and Bob Campbell throughout the show’s entire run. Ironically, Jay and I both graduated from Richardson High School in Richardson, Texas. He was Class of 1968, and I was Class of 1980. In early 1975, my parents took me to see him at a venue in Fort Worth called Charlie’s Place. I don’t remember much about the show, except that it was a variety-type dinner show, and Jay was in it and he was great. His was the first live ventriloquist show I had ever seen.

  At that time Jay worked with a dummy named Squeaky, a talking Mickey Mouse watch, and a talking houseplant named Phil O’Dendron. Obviously Jay did some really unique vent bits, coupled with perfect technique and a great imagination. What stuck with me most after meeting him was that he was a genuinely nice guy. Here I was, some goofy kid, and he took the time to talk with me after the show and even responded to my letters later. He gave me the addresses of a couple other ventriloquists, plus information about a national ventriloquists’ organization that published a bimonthly newsletter.

  Jay hooked me up with Maher Ventriloquist Studios in Little-ton, Colorado. Run by Clinton and Adelia Detweiler, if you needed anything ventriloquist related, they had it. They also published a newsletter, “Newsy Vents,” which was chock-full of news and pictures of ventriloquists from all over the world. Up until that point, I had NO idea there were so many vents. In fact, some part of me considered that there might not be any others. Even from the beginning, I knew this ventriloquist thing was peculiar.

  Timing is everything, and it just so happened that the very first issue of “Newsy Vents” that I read had a big ad in it announcing the First Annual Vent Haven Ventriloquist Convention. From July 10-12, 1975, vents from all over the globe were scheduled to gather at the Rowntowner Motor Inn, in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. (The Rowntowner would later become the Drawbridge Inn.) And yes, I know how disconcerting that sounds—a convention of ventriloquists? Oh, and it was in Kentucky. I’ll explain that in a minute.…

  Bubba J.: Kentucky is one of my favorite towns.

  Jeff: It’s a state.

  Bubba J.: Finally!

  I was now thirteen years old and I planned trying to beg my parents into taking me to the convention. But it turned out I didn’t have to. I remember mentioning wanting to go just a couple of times, and showing them the ad in “Newsy Vents.” As always, my parents were supportive in every way, and they simply made our trip to Kentucky that year’s family vacation. Being an only child has its good and bad points, and travel was always easy when it was just the three of us.

  As for the convention, I don’t think I had ever been more excited to go anywhere. My two idols, Edgar Bergen AND Jimmy Nelson, were both scheduled to be there, plus there were going to be contests to find the best junior and senior vents. Whoa. I couldn’t stand the wait.

  Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, might sound like the oddest, most random of choices to hold an international convention for anything, but that little town just a few miles across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio, is the world’s Mecca for all ventriloquists. In Fort Mitchell is the Vent Haven Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection of ventriloquial memorabilia. It was the brainchild of the late Cincinnati businessman William Shakespeare Berger, a collector and advocate for ventriloquists. For many years he was the president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, an organization that folded only when his health began to fail in December of 1960. The museum collection continues to grow, and currently includes more than seven hundred vent figures, numerous oddities such as talking walking canes, beer steins, boots, and the list goes on.

  You see, not all vents use only dummies. In bygone eras, just about anything and any item you can name has at one time or another been turned into some sort of vent puppet. A lot of vents are pretty inventive, and usually this creativity happens in the spirit of trying to create a new act. The worst example I can give you? One year at the convention, a guy showed up with a talking toilet. I’m not kidding.

  Vent Haven contains literally mounds of history. There’s a huge library of books on ventriloquism, hundreds of vent playbills, and photos dating back to even before the Civil War. Some of the dummies are hundreds of years old as well, most with colorful pasts. Many vents who wanted a safe refuge for their now silent wooden partners have donated them to the museums. Early versions of Peanut and Walter and José are there already.

  Walter: A museum with seven hundred dummies… Oh no, that’s not creepy at all.

  The convention is sponsored every year by the museum. Since that first gathering in 1975, I’ve missed only one. Throughout the years, I learned a great deal from many of the attendees and lecturers. Also I’ve seen some of the best and the worst performers in our art. You think open mike night at a comedy club is funny? Try open mike night at a ventriloquist convention. It’s funny, but not always in a good way. There are usually some surprises and delightful acts, but others are… well, yikes!

  As a self-trained vent, I literally had no contemporaries to compare myself to other than the pros. There weren’t any television shows that regularly featured ventriloquists then. I knew nothing other than the two basic rules for success—don’t move your lips, and make your audience laugh. You had to be as funny as Bergen, and with technique as good as Nelson. Now here I was at a convention where I could watch and emulate whoever seemed best.

  Contests were held for both senior and junior vents, and no limit was put on the number of performers that could enter. In that first year, somewhere around forty kids aged seventeen and younger entered the junior contest, and with each vent doing five or six minutes each, that night wore on seemingly forever. But when the dust settled and the judges tallied their scores, at age thirteen I won first place as Best Junior Vent. I received a giant trophy along with a big heap of bewilderment and excitement.

  Shy as I was at this age, I still made a few acquaintances, and some of them would become friends for life. My mother made me say hi to Jimmy Nelson at the first large social gathering, which was poolside at the Rowntowner Motor Inn. He couldn’t have been more gracious and even posed for a picture with Monty and me. Yes, I was carrying my dummy around talking to everyone, as was just about everyone else. This was the time for everyo
ne to let the figures socialize as well. It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized how truly strange this convention was, especially to the poor non-vent guests who happened to be staying at the Rowntowner at the same time.

  Some of the vents would take the dummy thing way too far and enter the creepy zone: They would take the figures into the coffee shop and talk among themselves and to others, or sit in the lobby with the dummies and chat with passersby. Of course the press would eat it up. Almost every one of the print or broadcast stories would paint the convention as a gathering of the nuts, and I don’t blame them. If you’re having a grilled cheese with Dummy Dan on one knee, and your buddy across the table from you is enjoying a muffin while chatting with his stuffed monkey, you need to be labeled oddball.

  There was one lady who was so bonkers that I wonder if she has been committed yet. It was a convention in the early 1980s, and the movie Magic, about a murderous psychotic ventriloquist, had been released a few years earlier. This woman, whom I will call Fran, had literally fallen in love with Fats, the scary dummy in the film. Fran had, in fact, liked the movie and the figure so much that she had commissioned someone to construct a full-sized replica of Fats. She brought him to the convention and carried him everywhere. She even claimed she had a kid’s seat in her car that Fats rode around in, probably scaring the crap out of anyone who looked in her window. Fats had a grotesquely large head, slightly larger than human, but with a typical dummy-sized body. The hands were disproportionately large, and the thing would give just about anyone the shivers.

  I became a bit leery of Fran after one incident. I was walking by her hotel room door, and she just happened to be walking out. The door opened, and I couldn’t help but glance into the room. There in one of the double beds lay Fats, with the TV on and the covers pulled up to his chin. I stopped in my tracks, backed up a few steps, and looked in again. I turned to Fran, who was standing there smiling, and I said, “Fats is in bed?”

  “He likes it there,” she said. I quickly walked away, wondering how long it would be before she was running after me with a knife and a screaming dummy.

  Achmed: I bet later she went to another movie and fell in love with that Chucky doll.… Is he one of your homegrown terrorists?

  Jeff: I guess you could say that.

  Achmed: I liked his films. Very inspirational.

  The 1975 convention was one of the highlights of my early life. There was, however, a ramification that came from attending the convention that made an indelible mark on me forever.

  I started charging for my shows early on and by the time that first convention rolled around, I was making $60 a gig for a thirty-minute show. W-2s were being filed, and I had to pay taxes. My father handled all the bookkeeping for me of course, but that year he got a little too generous with deductions. He had deducted both his and Mom’s travel costs, but apparently you were allowed to deduct the expenses of only one guardian, so when my taxes were filed that year, a red flag went up somewhere.

  Every day I would head out the front door and get our mail out of the mailbox on the street. On this particular day, I opened the mailbox, only to find an official-looking letter addressed to me from the IRS. It said I was being audited! I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but after hearing Dad gripe about the IRS somewhat regularly, I knew it was something not to be overjoyed about. It’s funny to look back at now, but as a kid, it scared the living crap out of me. Years later, I delivered some kind of payback when the characters and I were in Washington, D.C., taping the Comedy Central special and DVD Spark of Insanity. Walter said he had been sightseeing that day. He said he enjoyed going to the IRS building. I asked, “You took a tour?” He said, “No… I just stood outside and flipped ’em off!”

  Junior high was the typical awkward time in life. I wasn’t popular and yet wasn’t a total outcast either. Back in the 1970s, the three caste classifications we used to identify everyone with were the preppies, the freaks, and the nerds. I think I was somewhere in the middle of preppie and nerd. I kind of had my own category. I played the trombone in the school band, was on the tennis team (hated every minute of that), and had a decent number of friends. Some of my buddies were the popular preppie sort; others were not. I entered school talent shows, still did oral reports with the help of a dummy or two, and got up in front of everyone to perform as often as possible. I was soon known around my junior high, which had a lot more students than my elementary school.

  Eighth grade was the year that my two friends Lon Kelly and Ross Sivertsen and I started hanging out together. They introduced me to a TV show that had been on the air for a few years at that point. It was something called Star Trek.

  I couldn’t help it then and I can’t help it today. I love the original series and even The Next Generation… and now, of course, the latest film. As a joke, and with some sort of major geek pride, for years I have carried a Star Trek Master Card, complete with the original USS Enterprise emblazoned across the face. It wasn’t until I wandered into the middle of a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas a few years ago that I realized that maybe I should be more of a closet Trekkie.

  I had been living in Los Angeles for a while and was working a week at the Vegas Improv, which at that time was located inside the Riviera Hotel and Casino. For those gigs we had our days completely free, and one day I opened the magazine of what was going on that week in town. Lo and behold, there was a Trek convention taking place just a couple of casinos away. Another performer at the club that week was also a Trek fan, so off we went to check out the gathering.

  Oh my lord. It took literally ten seconds from when we stepped inside the main room of the convention for me to figure out that I’d better stop telling people I loved this stuff. We paid our entry fee, and were pointed to the main room, where they were showing a slide show. Yes, a slide show. Each slide was a random frame from a random episode from the original television series. Just as the slide would barely come into focus, the entire room of Trekkies would yell out the name of the episode. I stood there, dumbfounded for a few seconds, taking in the uniqueness of the situation and the people in attendance. And these folks were focused and dedicated. My friend and I literally backed out of the room, afraid to turn around, lest we be shot from behind by a Phaser set on something above stun.

  We made our way to the Dealers Room, only to be greeted by a bunch of folks in full costume and makeup. A couple of guys were carrying on a full conversation in Klingon, and a skinny guy with rubber Spock ears told us to live long and prosper, and I knew that was our cue to transport the hell out or be assimilated.

  Peanut: Those Trekkie gatherings make the ventriloquist convention look like a board meeting.

  For years I have remained a faithful fan, but I’m never above firing a comedy shot at all things Trek. Seriously, if you’re dressing up like a Starfleet officer and you can quote the Prime Directive, but you don’t know our own secretary of state, you need to be made fun of. (I know both.) I was pretty happy when the newest in the long line of Trek movies did well in the early summer of 2009. My MasterCard doesn’t feel so geeky anymore.

  Okay, now back to junior high. As my little career started to grow in Dallas, word of mouth about my act took root, and the local press actually took note as well. First, the Dallas version of PM Magazine did a very nice piece on my characters and me, which eventually ran nationally. A more noteworthy story, however, was done on us by a somewhat unknown local field reporter who interviewed Monty and me in April of 1976. Obviously, this guy had drawn the short straw that morning to be assigned the story on the junior high boy who talked to dolls.

  At that time, the new thing in sports and news reporting was a portable field camera that utilized a new format called videotape. COOL! Well, the lowly reporter and cameraman showed up, but to my disappointment, they brought the old-school FILM camera. What a drag.

  Anyway, these guys showed up and proceeded to filmtheir story on me. In the background, my mom took pictures with her Kodak Insta
matic camera. It’s sort of funny to look at those pictures now, because the only one who looked excited in the shots was me. I’m betting the poor camera guy wanted to shoot himself, and the reporter looks like he would be having more fun getting a root canal. He was a young guy with long hair, and he didn’t exactly grill me with tough questions, but I guess he would learn that skill later in his own career. That lowly reporter at channel 8 in Dallas in 1976 was none other than Bill O’Reilly. (Take a look at the photo in the insert of this book!)

  I was pretty serious about my career at a very early age, and I never stopped thinking about the next way to move it all forward. Not too long ago, my three daughters asked if they could see some of my old yearbooks. I couldn’t resist, so out came the annuals from Northwood Junior High and Richardson High School. The girls quickly noticed something unusual in each of my individual class photos. I wasn’t by myself: A ventriloquist dummy was sitting on my lap in every single picture, every single year.

  “Oh my gawd, Dad!”

  “That is SO EMBARRASSING!”

  “WHY?”

  I offered what I considered a logical explanation. “I needed professional-quality studio photos to help promote my act, but they were too expensive to have done. So I posed with my main character each year for my school pictures. The photographers usually thought it was funny. What’s wrong with that?”