by Jeff Dunham
The girls just stared at me. Then they did the sweetest thing in the world: They went through my entire senior yearbook page by page and marked all the pictures of me and my partner Archie with sticky notes. As they got toward the back of the book, they opened it to a full-page shot of me with a girl.
“Whoa, Dad! Who’s THAT?”
“Archie,” I said.
“NO,” they said. “The girl!”
Oh. In 1980, my high school classmates voted me and my friend since kindergarten, Christy Dutter, as Most Likely to Succeed. The yearbook picture recognizing that honor shows Christy and me sitting on the hood of a brand-new, awesomely cool Datsun 280ZX. Seated between us was my dummy of choice at the time, Archie Everett. “See,” I said, “that’s cool.”
“You’re a geek, Dad,” Ashlyn, my middle daughter, said.
“Can I at least tell you about the car?” I asked.
“It looks old,” Kenna replied.
“It wasn’t back then. And it was my fifth one!” I blurted out.
“FIFTH?” Bree and Ashlyn yipped, almost in unison.
“Yes, that was my brown 280ZX, and it was the fifth Z I’d driven the wheels off of in less than a year without having paid one cent.” That story comes later.…
Achmed: What a good father.
Jeff: Thanks.
Achmed: It’s so sweet how you let your daughters speak freely and look at books.
When I graduated from Northwood Junior High in 1977, my vent pursuits were progressing nicely. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was learning to entertain a fairly wide range of audience members. I was getting laughs from my peers as well as young adults and even older folks. More important, businessmen who had seen me at the Sky Ranch fund-raisers began to book me for their own parties, banquets, and corporate gatherings.
I returned to the Vent Convention in the summer of 1976 and won Best Junior Vent again. I don’t know if I could have won the contest three summers in a row because the only convention I ever missed was 1977.
That summer my church’s youth choir toured parts of Europe. I couldn’t sing a single note, but I played a decent trombone and was part of the orchestra. I also took Monty overseas with me, and even did a couple of bits between songs with an interpreter. That’s right: I was a ventriloquist with an interpreter. Of course it was a disaster every time. The choir director would say something, wait for the interpreter to repeat it, then he’d turn to me and ask me a question, then stick the mike in my face. All the while the one interpreter struggled to keep up with all three of us. The choir director kept talking while I would try and pause for the interpreter to catch up. Timing is everything in comedy, and that experience put the dread in my head about ever again performing for an audience whose native tongue was not English. That would bother me well into later years, until I once again tried to make a foreign audience laugh. The outcome was a bit different. More on that later too.
Upon returning to the convention in the summer of 1978, I was honored with a couple more awards that very much helped build my determination. I entered the junior contest, but didn’t win a thing… because they decided to make me the winner of the senior contest instead. I also won the Bill DeMar Figure Manipulation Award.
Figure manipulation is what the vent does to make the dummy move and seem alive by doing more than simply moving the mouth. Bill DeMar was an incredible manipulator of dummies and puppets, and I was honored that he chose me for the trophy that year. Bill has since become a friend and he was truly one of the best acts I ever had the pleasure of watching at the convention. His timing and movements breathed life into his characters and made him stand out from everyone else. I have emulated much of what Bill did and taught during his lectures when it came to manipulation. Operating a “soft puppet” like Peanut, versus a “hard figure” like Walter, involves two completely different types of manipulation. So if you ever see Peanut move and come to life, much of that is thanks to Bill.
Peanut: I’ve been working out.
Jeff: So?
Peanut: I’m tired of being referred to as a “soft puppet.” Go on, feel my abs.…
Jeff: No—
Peanut: FEEL THEM!
Also at the 1978 convention, I picked up a new main character who took the place of Monty. Each convention, a generous figure maker would watch the contests and then pick out the ventriloquist whom he thought had the most promise to put one of his dummies to good use. The award was called Most Deserving Vent. In 1978, Alan Semok, one of our great contemporary figure makers, selected me and presented me with one of his creations, which was a boy figure. I later named him Archie Everett.
Archie didn’t become as famous as the current guys in my act, but he was my main character for a long time, including the four years we did regional Texas television commercials. This brings me back to those 280ZXs I had in high school.
If you watched television in Dallas in the 1970s and 1980s, you couldn’t help but see the cheese-ball commercials for Carl Westcott Ford. In these seemingly “live” spots, Carl would appear on camera walking up and down his lot full of cars with giant prices stuck to their windshields. “Hurry out tonight,” he’d say. “Your car is RIGHT HERE on our lot!”
“Geez,” I thought, “I could do THAT!… and with a dummy!” So at age sixteen, I phoned the dealership and asked to speak with Mr. Westcott. Not surprisingly, I was put off over and over again. But I was persistent, making call after call, and one day, probably out of sheer frustration from his secretary telling him I was calling again, he finally heard me out.
“Mr. Westcott,” I said. “I know I can sell your cars.” He must have been having a slow day, because he agreed to let me come in and pitch him my ideas. A few days later, Archie and I showed up. I told him what I thought I could do and then Archie and I did a short bit for him. To this day, I don’t know how I had the chutzpah to pitch myself like that. But I guess Mr. Westcott was impressed by my confidence, because he hired me. The first commercials were for his Datsun dealership in Richardson, Texas, Courtesy Datsun. Those commercials were horrendous thanks to my overconfidence, inexperience, and giant bundle of nerves. What made it worse was that we did them in the Dallas market, which wasn’t exactly small potatoes. Everyone I knew saw them and saw how truly horrible they were. We shot them at the dealership, and I had never done any camera work like that before. I was timid and nervous and could barely get through it all. Westcott must have seen through the nerves, because he hired me for a much larger dealership, though in a smaller market—Courtesy Pontiac and Datsun was ninety miles to the east in Tyler, Texas.
Barely old enough to have a driver’s license, I negotiated my own contract with the seasoned salesman. Apparently he thought my goofy antics and lame humor would actually work. In addition to getting paid pretty decent money, after a couple weeks of good commercials I bugged him enough that he finally agreed to let me “demo” almost any brand-new 280ZX on the lot. That meant that I could drive the vehicle for four thousand miles and give it back, only to pick out another one for another four thousand miles. During the four years I worked for Carl, I went through eight 280ZXs and one Pontiac Trans Am.
When shooting the commercials in Tyler, I was treated to the luxuries of showbiz a bit too early. At three P.M. every other Thursday, a big stretch limo would show up in front of Richardson High, and I would jump in the back with Archie in the suitcase. Carl’s driver would then speed us off to East Texas.
At the dealership, Archie and I would utilize a different theme in these “live” commercials, where we would walk up and down the lines of new and used vehicles, extolling their virtues. For each of the taping days, I would come up with a different theme for the commercials. One week I’d dress Archie as a cowboy, or Superman, or whatever else I could think up to make people remember the commercials and the cars. We would shoot somewhere between fifteen and twenty commercials in the daylight, then wait for the sun to go down and do fifteen or twenty nighttime spots. The following
is an example of how Archie and I did our thing, and for this one, I’d pieced together an outfit that looked, well, somewhat Star Wars-ish:
Jeff: Good evening, folks. How are you this fine Friday evening? Archie: Hi everybody! Its Archie Skywalker here, fighting Car Wars, and making the other EVIL car dealers fear the Force of Courtesy Pontiac and Datsun!
Jeff: Let’s see what we have on the lot tonight, Archie!…
Then we’d walk up and down the lines of cars talking about their attributes. There was a commercial for Tuesday morning, one for Tuesday evening, one for Tuesday at midnight, et cetera. Then for the next two weeks, all the commercials would be shown in their appropriate time slots. It looked as though Archie and I lived at the dealership, doing commercials every single night and day, a few times every hour.
While the money and the demo Zs were seemingly the high points of the gig, there were other huge benefits to this job that I wouldn’t recognize until much later in my career. This was the first time I had really performed on camera consistently, and I was practicing a skill and getting an education about television in a way that could never be understood from sitting in a classroom or studying books. After a few weeks of this work, I could do exactly 29.9 seconds of talking in my sleep. I could walk and talk and read and manipulate Archie and do ventriloquism and watch the director and listen for cues in my earpiece, all at the same time without missing a beat. This was invaluable experience. Many years later, when the little guys and I were on television shows like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson , or when we shot the Comedy Central specials, I had a working knowledge of how things operated on both sides of the camera. Add to that my eventual Bachelor of Arts degree in Radio, TV, and Film, and it was as if I had the perfect little toolbox, ready to work on the career I was headed for.
Walter: You had a cool job and a cool car at that young age… impressive. Reminds me of me when I was that age.
Jeff: Thanks, Walter.
Walter: Except I had a girlfriend.
I did the car commercials well into my college years. When we finally ended the run, Carl gave me a decent deal on the latest model Datsun (which that year was changing over to the name Nissan), and it was a dark pewter 1984 300ZX. I ordered a Texas vanity plate that read DUMMY. And in 1984, I have to say, this was a pretty sweet vehicle to be driving around campus. It wasn’t a Porsche or Mercedes, but I was very proud of the fact that I’d paid for it myself.
I still have that car, by the way. There are even receipts still in the glove box from dinners with one of my college girlfriends. Eventually I put 113,000 miles on it, driving all over the country doing shows. It was the first expensive thing the dummies paid for, so I could never let it go. It sat in my parents’ back driveway in Dallas for almost twenty years, and I recently had it refurbished and rebuilt from the frame up, making it look and run almost exactly the way it did when it was brand-new.
Over the years, the speeding tickets I received driving that car helped a lot of officers in small towns between Dallas and Los Angeles meet their monthly quotas. My best ticket experience was late one Friday night, driving the hundred miles from Dallas to Waco. Around Hillsboro, I got nailed with a radar gun doing about 118 miles per hour… And I had just slowed down from 128. Why was I going that fast? Well… because!
The cops pulled me over and I was fully expecting to be hauled out of the car and off to the pokey. The guy sauntered up to my window, flashlight in my face.
“Hi,” I said. “Any chance you could knock a few miles per hour off the ticket you’re about to give me?” The guy chuckled. I spotted the other cop trying to stay in my blind spot near the back right rear of my car. I’m sure they were expecting me to be drunk or pissed off or both.
“Driver’s license and proof of insurance?” he asked.
Both of them had their hands on their holsters as I reached into the glove box. I gave the officer the documents. A few minutes later I had a huge ticket. “Give the judge a call tomorrow. He’s a good guy.”
Well, the next day, I made the call. I talked to the actual judge himself. He was a good old boy like no other. In a full Central Texas drawl I heard, “Well, son, we get these big ones every once in a while. Looks like you like to go fast. Just pay the fine and go to traffic school. We’ll wipe this one off for you.” Holy crap! How did THAT happen? I honestly don’t know what I did or said to deserve that treatment. Maybe it had something to do with my license plate.
My other favorite ticket incident happened somewhere along the Arizona-California border, when I tried to utilize my ventriloquial skills in an imaginative manner. In a 55, I got pulled over for doing about 95, and as the cop stood behind the car jotting down Dummy on his ticket pad, I grabbed one of my characters from the backseat and got out to try and do a little resourceful “tap dancing.” The dummy was a goofy earlier version of Bubba J. As the cop looked up, the dummy said, “You got him at 90? You shoulda seen us a while back.… We were doin’ better than 100! Duh, huh, huh, huh!”
The cop laughed, and then he said, “Hold on, hold on! …” He went to the trunk of his car and got his camera. “Can I take a picture of you two? The guys back at the station aren’t going to believe this one.” I said, “Sure!” He took the photo, laughed again, and I headed back to the car, congratulating myself on having brilliantly avoided a very expensive speeding ticket. “Thanks, officer!” I yelled back.
“No, thank YOU, son!” he said as he returned to my car window and handed me the ticket with a $250 fine. Doh!
Bubba J.: You shoulda said you were the designated driver.
Jeff: I think he still would have given me the ticket.
Bubba J.: Yeah, maybe you should get out of them the way my wife does.
Jeff: How’s that?
Bubba J.: I don’t know, ’cause she says it’s a secret. But it must work ’cause the cops stop her a LOT.
When I started at Richardson High School, I was ready and in anticipation of this next “bigger pond.” Once again, I immediately started looking for events and excuses and every opportunity to do my act in front of as many students as possible. But a tangent business I created gave me invaluable experience with sound, and music, and controlling an audience in an entirely different manner.
This was the late 1970s and disco was huge. I hated dancing and felt like a complete moron having no idea what I was doing on the dance floor. I was, however, becoming enamored with the emerging technology of high-quality portable sound equipment, plus I was really interested in how the mood of an entire crowd could be controlled simply by what they were listening to. So, to get myself off the dance floor, stay among my peers, plus at the same time make a little extra cash, I started my own deejaying business. Money from the vent shows paid for sound equipment, plus a huge collection of 45s. I also cobbled together some light stands with sound-controlled colored lights. I asked my friend Glenn Gaines to help me, and on weekends when I wasn’t doing my vent act, we would pile the sound system, turntables, records, and lights into my first car, which was my parents’ handed-down 1971 Mercury Marquis. Yeah, baby! A virtual boat (also known as a chick repeller)!
The business became pretty lucrative within a few months, and my father was always encouraging me to save my money. Instead, I would invest it right back into the business, getting bigger and better sound equipment. There was another guy at my high school who had superior speakers and amps, and even a van to haul his stuff around. Though he had superior gear, I’m pretty sure I could read the crowd better, and would play stuff that everyone liked to dance to more. It was much different from performing comedy, but this is when I began to realize that an audience is not simply a group of people in one place. It’s more like a hive of bees.… It’s an entity that the performer has to learn to understand and communicate with.
As my deejay business grew, I started paying attention to personality-driven radio, and in particular, Dallas radio station KVIL and their morning drive guy, Ron Chapman. Ron, like Carl Westcott, had
been a Dallas staple for years. Chapman was number one in the mornings and he was loved by housewives and soccer moms and drive-time families. He was a master at morning radio and, while most of my friends were listening to either disco or rock stations, I was more fascinated with how Chapman could do what he did. He seemed like such a great guy. I was pretty young and naive and never considered for a minute that someone could be different in person than they were on the air. I was in for a big surprise.
A girl name Laura Mercer was in my high school class. We were acquaintances and spoke now and then, but it took some time before I realized that her father was Bill Mercer, the guy who did sports at KVIL during Ron’s show. Anyway, Laura and I went on a couple of dates, and one night when I picked her up, I met her father. He and I talked a little bit, and I told him what a big fan I was of the Chapman morning show. “Well, then you should come by one morning and see how it works!” I jumped at the chance.
A few days later, I met Bill at his house at four thirty A.M. and we went to the hallowed radio studios just off of Central Expressway. I had never been this close to a celebrity, or even the studios at any place that was number one in a big market. “What a great guy Ron Chapman is!” I thought, “Everyone LOVES him!”
Bill walked me right into the studio and there I was, shaking hands and sheepishly saying hello to Mr. Chapman. Ron smiled forcefully and was a bit on the cool side, but he motioned me to a tall chair not far from the audio board. Keep in mind that even the best radio studios are usually not much larger than a good-sized bedroom.