by Jeff Dunham
In the spring of 1980, I auditioned for a summer job at Six Flags over Texas. It was a big step not to go to Sky Ranch, but I knew it was time to try to work on getting bigger and better jobs doing my act.
The audition for Six Flags went well, and I was invited to callbacks. The Six Flags parks these days are a little different than they were back then. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Six Flags had large and small production shows with singing and dancing and even variety acts placed here and there. It wasn’t all just rides. Six Flags Show Productions was influential for up-and-coming performers, and it was a big deal for high school and even college-age performers to get a summer gig there. I knew Jay Johnson had worked there when he was in his teens, so I figured I could give it a shot too.
After callbacks, I was told that they liked me a great deal and that they could probably make a space for me somewhere. I was completely stoked. Many acts—some great, some horrible and sad—had auditioned that first day. Only a few of us made the second cut, and then I had to wait a few days when they figured out what to do with me. Up to this point in my career (such as it was), I had never experienced any real disappointment when it came to performing. For eight years it had all been Cub Scout banquets, camp shows, and a few corporate gigs here and there. The worst that had happened was that the laughs weren’t as big as the last show. So I waited… fully expecting to get the gig. And I waited.
Days went by, then a couple of weeks passed. I was still confident that I would have a spot. I had no other plans that summer, and gigs for a seventeen-year-old kid doing a ventriloquist act were few and far between. Finally after a couple of weeks of waiting for the phone to ring, I decided I needed to call and see where I stood. I made it past a couple of receptionists and right to one of the guys who truly held my future in his hands. “Jeff, we love your act and think you’re talented. But all of our shows have now moved to strictly singing and dancing. They’re all musicals. There’s just no place in any of our parks for an act like yours right now.”
I was dumbfounded. I had trusted them when they told me I had a spot. I guess they hadn’t really promised me anything, but I was expecting something.
“But you guys told me…” It clicked in my head that I knew I shouldn’t beg. Just like with the car man Carl Westcott, I needed to sell myself. Why not give him ideas? I started over.…
“I could perform outside, offstage. I’ve seen acts like that in the park before. What if we just found a spot, set up a sound system, and I did a few minutes a few times a day? I’m not looking for a lot of money either.” There was hesitation on the line. “I know I can do this and people would love it,” I said. This was one of those rare moments with one of those rare guys when I could actually feel the heart in the negotiations. I look back now and I know that if this had been simply business, he would have said, “Sorry” and hung up. Instead, this guy thought about it really hard.
“Okay,” he said, “I can’t promise you anything, but there’s another person I want you to talk to. She saw you at the auditions too, and she books some of the stand-alone acts at the Texas park. Maybe she can help. Let me call you back.”
A few days later I found myself walking around the Arlington Six Flags park with a woman named Mary looking at various spots where we could set up an area for me to perform. A sound system would need to be installed, and people would have to be able to sit or stand comfortably. We looked here and there, and each place was disappointing. There was nothing that looked like show business to me. Each area was either too noisy or too small or too out of the way.
We kept walking until we came to the Southern Palace, the park’s main indoor, air-conditioned theater that seated a few hundred people and was the house of their big production musicals. There was a proscenium stage, the large audience area, a balcony for lights and sound and spotlights, a backstage, and even dressing rooms for the twelve or so cast members of singers and dancers. In my mind, that was REAL show business. This was where Jay Johnson and even John Denver had performed, early in their careers. We stood outside, looking up at the huge face of the building and the ten or so very wide steps that spanned its entire length. This is where a couple of hundred folks would stand, six times a day, waiting for the doors to open and let them into the theater. Even now, people were gathered, sitting and standing, talking quietly, eating hot dogs and drinking sodas.
“Hey! ” I said. “This is it!” It was perfect. Here was a captive audience, doing nothing but waiting. It was a huge area, bigger than any we had looked at that day. The audience would be on the steps and then spill out farther below, and my stage was the front steps of the Southern Palace! Who’d care if I wasn’t inside? I would have a guaranteed captive crowd that was there doing nothing anyway.
Mary stood there looking. It hadn’t dawned on her that this could be a theater instead of just a waiting area. I pointed out that I would be at the very top, between the pillars. She then said, “It would be a pretty big undertaking to set up a sound system here….” Wrong, I thought. Thanks to my deejay business I knew big, loud, portable sound systems pretty well. And I had all that stuff at home.
“I have all that,” I said. “I have a couple of weatherproof Bose PA speakers and stands that would go perfectly next to those side columns. The amp is powerful enough for this area. I have a mixing board and microphones, and we can even play some music between my shows.”
A few days after that, contracts were signed, and I went over my act with the powers that be to make sure everything was with okay them. Of course, “can I make fun of the park?” was one of my first questions. The only thing they wouldn’t let me pick on was the food. Apparently that was a sensitive issue.
Bubba J.: Food has feelings too.
So there I was for the summer of 1980. Six shows a day, twenty minutes each. Temperatures would reach 100°F easily, and I would be standing in the sun, wearing a coat and tie and doing jokes about the Log Ride, Pink Things, and the goofballs in Iran. It wasn’t the first time I ever delved into political humor, but Jimmy Carter was winding down his administration, the Iranian hostage crisis was ongoing, and Ronald Reagan was the forerunner for the Republicans. There was more than enough material. The rest of the routine was Little Dummy and Timmy Tic Tac yukking it up with Archie. I was becoming more seasoned as a performer, learning how to work audiences that were made up of people from every walk of life.
Day after day I did those shows—six times a day, six days a week. There couldn’t have been better training. On a few of those hot and humid days, I considered it a performer’s boot camp. Sure I liked it, but just like any job, there were the days and hours that I just didn’t want to be there, or else it was incredibly hot, or the audiences weren’t as great as the day before. But the point is, no matter what else was going on, it was my job to make those folks laugh.
Achmed: If they didn’t laugh, did you threaten to keel them?
Jeff: No.
Achmed: Works for me!
Not only did I become a better performer that summer, but I also had my first experience with an incredibly harsh and cruel critic. The timing of the event made it a truly noteworthy incident. Even to this day, thinking about how I was handled gives me a sick feeling but it taught me that not everyone would like my act.
One afternoon, I was closing one of my six shows, and was literally at the end of saying, “Thanks very much, and enjoy the rest of your day at Six Flags!” and as my voice echoed across the audience, a pigeon who had been hiding underneath the Palace’s overhanging roof decided to give me his opinion of my act. And I mean RIGHT on cue. No, the poop didn’t hit me on the top of my head or on my shoe… not my shoulder either. The aim was unparalleled. I had a mustache at the time. But it didn’t just hit that. This shot was some sort of a trajectory that came down at an angle, went down in and through part of my hair and into my eyebrow. But it didn’t stop there. It then splattered and left evidence across my nose, down my cheek, through my mustache, on my bottom lip, and f
inally onto my shirt and tie. I quickly turned, hoping no one had seen, wiping with anything I could find to quickly rid myself of this humiliation. To this day I don’t know if anyone saw.
Walter: That was a historic day.
Jeff: Why?
Walter: A pigeon understood your jokes.
After a long hot summer day and all those shows, you’d think it would be time to go back to my parents’ house and crash each night. Well, word started to get around about my act and I got an invitation to perform at the one decent comedy club in Dallas at the time: The Comedy Corner. Not even legal drinking age, I went onstage at a couple of open mike nights and did a decent enough job to get booked as the act between the opener and headliner. Not many big names came out of that club, as opposed to a couple of the Houston establishments, but I made one good friend in Bill Engvall. By this time, Bill was chasing the big comedy dream doing corporate gigs and clubs. The Comedy Corner was one of Bill’s home clubs and he really knew how to work a good ol’ boy, drinking Texas audience. As for me, since I grew up having done all the family type gigs, not to mention the happy-happy ambience of working Six Flags, I wasn’t ready for inside a seedy comedy club. I never saw the cocaine, and I’m sure Bill had very little to do with that as well, but in later years, other comics who were a good decade or more older than me would talk about how the coke flowed through that club. No one ever approached me, and I’m sure it had to do with the fact that I was barely old enough to drive. Plus, I was a ventriloquist, and I’ve never heard of a guy with dolls doing blow.
Bubba J.: Doin’ drugs is sad.
Jeff: Yeah.
Bubba J.: Beer is way cheaper.
This first comedy club experience was my introduction into an entirely new world. I realized that to be successful I couldn’t do just clever material and cute vent routines. Nor could I simply tell dirty jokes either. The comedy club audience was a completely different animal. It was rude, impatient, demanding, judgmental, and even cruel at times. If you weren’t funny within the first minute or so, you were quickly at the mercy of hecklers filled with pints of liquid courage. The overall mood of the crowd would determine the length of your grace period, which lasted anywhere from twenty seconds to two minutes.
Also in the mix was skill. I have never been impressed with “vent tricks” though I did a few myself. The multiple-voice thing I did always impressed people, but I knew deep down that doing that kind of thing had zero staying power. I have always believed that you can amaze an audience for a few minutes, but you can make them laugh for a lifetime. This insight was straight from the Bergen school that I had studied so intently. I hadn’t mastered the funny yet, but I was working on it diligently.
Walter: Keeping working at it.
Jeff: At what?
Walter: “The funny.” Who knows, maybe someday…
At the end of the summer, I headed off to Baylor for my freshman year, and I had no clue as to how much little Waco, Texas, was going to mean to me, or how much the time spent there would help build my career.
Baylor is a big Southern Baptist university, and I was very much influenced by the conservative nature of a very strict Christian environment. But I was a comedian at heart, and I had trouble not stirring things up a bit now and then. I didn’t use questionable language or tell off-color jokes when I performed there… quite the contrary. I made sure that whatever I said was completely clean, but I liked to raise a few eyebrows and step on some toes here and there. One of my favorite targets was and will always be people who have no sense of humor. If you can’t laugh at yourself, then sit back and Peanut or Walter will make sure everyone else does.
I went through my freshman year fairly quietly, but doing as many shows as possible here and there, just like in junior high and high school. But I didn’t start having real fun until my junior year. We’ll get to that in a bit.…
I performed a great deal at Baylor—parent weekends, talent shows, the Freshman Forum where they had a guest speaker twice a week, you name it. Of course I made fun of rival schools like the University of Texas and Texas A&M, but some of my biggest laughs came from picking on Baylor itself, and all things Baptist.
No one and nothing was immune. During my freshman year, I poked fun at then Baylor president Dr. Abner McCall. After a few of my shows and a few ribbings, his granddaughter told me that he thought I was funny and he loved the kidding. The next Baylor president, Dr. Herbert Reynolds, wasn’t so easygoing. He was pretty stiff, and as far as I could tell, had zero sense of humor about himself and his job.
I can’t remember the exact event, but it was a big Baylor function held in a spacious banquet room at the then Hilton in downtown Waco. I engaged in a little good-natured teasing of Dr. Reynolds, which consisted of nothing more than two or three pretty innocent jokes that got good laughs from the very conservative, mainly Baptist crowd. At the end of the evening I went up to Dr. Reynolds, shook his hand, and said, “I hope you didn’t mind the kidding!”
He frowned and said, “You know I have children that are older than you.”
“Yes, sir.” I said, having no idea where he was going with the conversation.
“I’m the president of this university, and this office demands much more respect than what you are giving it.” Without giving me even a second to respond, he turned on his heel and marched off.
I was bewildered. He was gone before I could even apologize, even though I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. I had a pretty good sense of how far to go with jokes and subject matter and any particular audience, and at no point did any of the crowd that night respond in shock. The next day I was still bothered by the incident, and I went to talk about what had happened, discussing it with a couple of my professors. They told me not to worry. Even one of the deans, who had been at the show that night, told me that Dr. Reynolds was out of line, and I had neither done nor said anything inappropriate.
This became a pivotal moment for me. Very simply, I realized that a sense of humor affects almost every aspect of a person’s personality. And as I began to perform across the country for varied groups and demographics, I found that the higher the person’s rank, the larger and easier the target. And if they couldn’t take a joke, well, that just made it more fun… for me and the audience!
By now Karen and I had gotten engaged, but a few months later I was treated to my first truly broken heart when she dumped me. I know my parents were actually relieved, because I was way too young to be getting married, plus from Karen’s standpoint, I don’t think show business had ever been her career of choice for a Prince Charming. Her father was a doctor and I, well… wasn’t. She eventually got involved with a guy in the military and I got involved with a terrorist. It all evened out.
Achmed: WHAT?
Jeff: Don’t worry, Achmed, it was a joke.
Achmed: No, I mean that you had a girlfriend!
After Karen, I went from girlfriend to girlfriend, or date to date as it were.
Achmed: You were a whore!
During my junior year at Baylor, I was making some pretty decent money, doing shows not only in Texas, but a bunch of other states as well. Sometimes I would drive, other times I would jump on a commercial flight. It was not a typical college lifestyle. While most of my classmates spent their weekends on campus partying and going to Greek events and football games, I was usually out of town doing shows. Corporate gigs paid the best, and by mid-1983, I was usually getting between $600 and $1,500 a show, pulling in about $70,000 a year. Not bad for a full-time college student.
I honestly think that the only way I passed all my courses in college was because I had one of the first truly portable laptop computers that went everywhere with me. It was long before any type of portable Mac or laptop PC. I’ll try and be non-geeky and quick with this: In 1983, Radio Shack (don’t laugh) started selling the TRS-80 Model 100. It ran the DOS operating system and I did every bit of my home-work on it sitting on commercial flights and in hotel rooms, and even kept track of jokes and new
routines. It ran on four AA batteries, and businessmen would stop in the airplane aisles and ask me questions about it. (End of geek moment.)
Every show I did back then I tried to look at as a career builder, no matter where it was or who it was for. Experience in front of every type of audience possible was my real college. But no matter what the crowd, every one of the performances was another experience.
One of my least favorite gigs was for a huge gathering of high-powered Texas court judges at a hotel only three miles from my apartment in Waco. It was a somewhat typical corporate show, with a dinner, a couple of speeches, then entertainment. I’d brought with me the big heavy trunk that I carried Archie in. Since this show was only twenty minutes, I didn’t prepare too much or worry about it at all. I had done these things a million times and with my set routine, and it always went just fine. I had a few names to make fun of, and before dinner, I had gone through my typical steps of simply setting the trunk and a stand for the dummy onstage before the show began. I’d done it so many times, I didn’t even need to make sure Archie was ready. I’d just pull him out of the case and go. A few minutes after dinner, I was introduced.
I did a few jokes of solo stand-up, then got to the real part of my show.
“Now gentlemen, please help me welcome my partner, Archie Everett!” I opened the trunk and… EMPTY!