by Jeff Dunham
Peanut: Sounds like a good mystery. “This is the case of the empty case.”
Jeff: I freaked out.
Peanut: Maybe Archie didn’t feel you were paying him enough and he quit. I’m doing that tomorrow.
What the—? I stood there, dumbfounded and mouth open. Was it a joke? Had someone stolen him? I had been sitting not ten feet from the trunk the entire evening! Then I remembered. For a gig over the weekend, I had put Archie in a little suitcase, and NOT back in this regular trunk. I’ve always prided myself in being able to ad-lib pretty well. If something goes wrong in the audience or with one of the characters, I could usually come up with something pretty fast.… But a missing dummy? I had no goofy lines ready for this! Did I mention these guys were court judges ?
Achmed: That’s what happens when you do drugs.
Jeff: I wasn’t taking drugs.
Walter: That’s what happens when you’re a moron. Why didn’t you just use a sock?
Jeff: It’s not the same.
Walter: Whatever.
A pause, then… “Gentlemen, I’m very sorry. It seems like someone has kidnapped my partner Archie.” This got a nice chuckle, so I kept going… “If you wouldn’t mind sitting here for a few minutes and talking amongst yourselves, I will go and try to find him.” Another nice chuckle.
I bolted off the stage to a fair amount of laughter—they thought this was all part of the act. I ran out the front door, jumped into my car, and did some crazy-ass driving to my apartment. I figured if I got pulled over, later the judge would understand since he was probably back in that banquet room wondering, “What the—?” I made it back with Archie in twenty minutes. Twenty minutes!
I busted back into the banquet room, wondering if they had all departed. Instead of anyone having left, I found them all still sitting there, smoking cigars and shooting the breeze—apparently not caring much that their entertainment had flown the coop for almost half an hour! I told them the truth again about what had happened, then went on with the show, and it was fine. Afterward, the horror of opening that trunk haunted me for many days, but it finally started to fade until about a month later, when a friend of mine living in Fort Worth (a hundred miles away!) called and said, “I heard you left a room of judges in the dark for a while! HA HA HA HA.” NOT funny.
I’m a great believer that we all have tiny pivotal moments and people who enter our lives that determine destiny in very large ways. As most of us do, I look back at my own life and career and know that if it weren’t for three or four incidents, things might be very different for me right now.
One of those pivotal moments was during my junior year at Baylor with Wes Johnson, a former student at the university who now coordinated events and activities at the Student Union. I had performed in Baylor’s annual talent show, the “Pigskin Revue,” and Wes Johnson had been in charge of much of the production. He and I, along with another Baylor employee, Kathy Darden, had all become great friends and we went to lunch together almost every day. Once in a while, the head of the Student Union, Ruben Santos, who later became the mayor of Waco, would come with us. One day Wes got a simple trifold flyer in the mail from New Mexico State University that was advertising the “All American Collegiate Talent Search” (ACTS). It was very simple: The school was to submit a videotape of a student that they thought had some kind of talent, doing whatever it was he or she was good at. Would-be participants—singers, dancers, comedians, et cetera—were asked to show off their wares. The tapes would be viewed by a panel of qualified judges at NMSU, and the ten finalists would then be invited to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to perform in the big show at their indoor arena. A runner-up and winner would then be chosen and receive a plaque and some accolades. Wes asked me if I was interested.
“I don’t have a recent tape of my act,” I said.
“We’ll set up a camera in the Union when no one’s around, and you can just do a few minutes. That’s all they want.” Wes replied.
“With no audience?” I asked, concerned.
“What will it hurt?” was Wes’s answer.
Okay, fine. I’ll do my act in an empty room to a sad little video camera and Wes. This won’t be awkward at ALL. Of course it turned into one of those times in life.
We sent in the tape and both Wes and I pretty much forgot about it until Wes got a phone call. There were ten acts chosen, and I was the alternate and they wanted me to perform. I actually placed in the contest. How did that happen?
Walter: I know! Everyone else sucked?
A few weeks later, Wes and I were off to Las Cruces, and we had no idea what to expect. It was a huge venue, and I couldn’t have been happier with the way my show went. Neither could one important stranger in the auditorium who had also been one of the judges: Dave Douds, a talent agent from the William Morris Agency, who approached me after the show.
“You were great,” he said. “And we’ve all been arguing behind closed doors. We’ve concluded that you can’t win because you’re an alternate. I really fought for you, but there aren’t enough of us who want to bend the rules. However, I think you should come back next year and win the whole thing the right way. And one other thing: Would you be interested in signing with the William Morris Agency? I think you have a great future ahead of you.” Whoa! William freakin’ Morris!
Dave had one condition. “I want you to finish college. Then when you’re ready, come out to Los Angeles, and you can seek fame and fortune.” Dave wasn’t stupid. He was giving me a huge confidence boost, but I think he knew I wasn’t quite ready for Los Angeles.
As flattered and overwhelmed as I was, I didn’t sign with him immediately, and he didn’t expect me to. I went back to Waco. I talked to Wes and Ruben and Kathy, and of course my father. Dad had tried to make it as a stunt man in LA back in the 1940s, so he knew the Hollywood dream. You can see him getting thrown around a little by Gene Kelly in the film The Pirate, from 1948. He even taught the famous actor-dancer a few moves for the film. So Dad understood my dream. I soon realized it would be stupid NOT to sign. Here was one of the biggest and best talent agencies in the world wanting to sign me and they would wait for me to finish school. For now I could stay in Waco, get my degree, stay a big fish in a small pond, continue to strengthen my act and, whenever possible, dip my toe into the comedy scenes in LA and New York. Perfect. It was a pivotal moment.
I continued with school, and soon I made some big adjustments to the act. I replaced the toy little dummy with another little dummy that Archie referred to as “UUUUGLY.” I would pull him out and say, “He looks a little like me.”
And Archie would say, “NAAAAAAHHHH… he looks a LOT like you!” I had constructed him to look as much like me as possible… how much did he look like me? Well, the clothes matched but I hadn’t exactly gotten very good at sculpting. Mini-Jeff looked more like a mailbox with hair than he did me.
Peanut: A mailbox with hair?
Jeff: Yep.
Peanut: So it DID look like you.
I also dumped the Talking Tic Tac and replaced it with a tequila bottle, complete with a supposed talking worm inside. Believe it or not, this was a bit of a daring move for someone attending and performing at a conservative university with deep Southern Baptist roots. At that time, Baylor didn’t even allow dancing on campus, much less talking liquor bottles. My favorite slightly off-color Baptist joke back then was, “Do you know why Baptists don’t make love standing up? Because someone will think they’re dancing.” Bwwaa ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Because I was going to stay in school, I still had to worry about classes and my major… you know, the little stuff. I was planning on majoring in Business Broadcasting, but then I figured out I was no good in two of the areas necessary to fulfill that degree—math and foreign languages.
You’d think that someone who talked for a living could handle something as simple as Spanish or French. Oh sure, I could do the accents and make a funny-sounding French dummy, but conjugating verbs? Merde! (I had to look that up before I typed it.) So d
uring the fall semester of my junior year, I stood in front of Dean Toland deep within the bowels of the Baylor administration building.
“Mr. Dunham, you have proven to Baylor University and a good portion of its faculty that you cannot pass a foreign language,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“This would usually mean that you couldn’t get a degree and graduate. However, in light of all your service to this fine university”—he was talking about me doing shows and not cursing and then saying I went to Baylor—“we can waive this foreign language requirement and change the required hours to something you might find more useful.” Uh oh, here goes. “Our computer lab has recently purchased a good number of these new Apple computers, something called a Macintosh. I think two semesters of programming in Fortran, then a semester programming in Basic, plus a semester of Mythology should round out your degree requirements nicely.”
“Uh… okay! Thank you, sir!” I blurted out. I understood the computer thing… but Mythology? Well, that worked out well since in the last twenty years I wrote one joke about Mercury and his hat.
Not long after that incident, Ruben became mayor of Waco. Ruben was a genuinely good guy; the kind of person who made you feel happy just to be around him. He had a warmth and laugh that were both contagious. With all that came a pretty good sense of humor too. I don’t know what Ruben’s exact ethnic background was, but he was very obviously Hispanic, and I used to poke good fun at him in inappropriate ways. He’d make white jokes right back at me.
One day we were walking in downtown Waco, going to meet Wes and Kathy for lunch. I thought it was cool that my friend, though a good bit older than me, was now the mayor, and I could still just hang with him. This happened to have been a hot day, and Ruben had taken off his typical coat and tie, and was now in rolled-up shirtsleeves, and I was in jeans and T-shirt. We were walking down a fairly empty street when I saw an official-looking car slowing down as it got near us. It slowed more as it went by. On the side I read, “INS.” Immigration.
“I hope you have your green card,” I said to Ruben.
He laughed, but his eyes never left the car. “Uh oh,” he said, as the car rolled to a stop a few yards in front of us.
“Oh, this is awesome!” I said to Ruben.
“No, it’s not,” he said.
As the guy started to get out of the car, I started to laugh, and I couldn’t stop. “Keep it down,” Ruben whispered. The whole scene was even funnier in my head. A young white male and an older Hispanic guy with gray hair walking through downtown together… but the Hispanic guy was the mayor! Holy moly.
As the guy approached, he said, “Sir, I need to see your—” And as Ruben’s face registered in the guy’s head, I swear I almost fell on the ground, I was trying so hard not to laugh. “Sorry, Mr. Santos, I didn’t mean—”
“No problem, son,” was Ruben’s reply.
“Yes, sir,” the guy stammered. “Have a nice day.” He was back in his car and gone in NO time. Ruben was amused, and a little miffed, all at the same time. We laughed about this one for a LONG time.
José: That is a great story, Señor Heff.
Jeff: Thanks, José. You want to hear more of the book?
José: Zzzzzzzzzz…
During my junior year, some pretty important characters started showing up in my act. Before I had my own apartment, Ruben let me set up shop in the attic of the Student Union. Amid the dust and old furniture, I had a place to work and create. Here I taught myself how to build dummies. Between classes and sometimes late at night, I would be locked in the attic, molding, carving, welding, sanding, and painting away at figures that never saw the light of the stage.
Most of the basics of figure building I learned from Alan Semok (remember, he gave me Archie), who had become a close friend over the past few years. He would show me his techniques for building puppets, giving me tips on materials and procedures, and I would struggle along, trying to make usable dummies. I even made a few and sold them at the convention one year. They weren’t the most beautiful things, but I was learning.
Peanut: Good for you on selling the dummies you made.
Jeff: Thanks.
Peanut: Must be a good feeling to get paid for something that was substandard. Good for you.
As a Radio-TV student, we worked with the local CBS affiliate, KWTX. This conglomerate had television studios, plus an AM and an FM station. To get experience, I auditioned for the morning drive-time spot as a personality at KWTX-FM, which was one of the highest-rated stations in Waco at that time. I got the job, but never considered even for a moment an actual career in radio. I just wanted to learn and have the experience. For eight months I got up at four A.M. so I could be at the station to do my shift from five A.M. to ten A.M.
One of the advertisers at the station was an entrepreneur named Roland Duty who was the sole proprietor of Poppa Rollo’s Pizza, a well-established restaurant in Waco. Roland had used some creative advertising tactics in the past, and I don’t know if he saw my act, or if someone at the station recommended him to me, but he and I got together to talk about doing some off-the-wall radio ads.
I pitched an idea to him that sounded fun to me. “What if we had a bunch of different voices for the different ingredients on top of a pizza?” I said. “There could be Trixie Tomato, the hot female voice. Then there’s Pepe Pepperoni, the Italian voice. How about Otis Olive, a black olive? And then José Jalapeño, the Mexican jalapeño?” Soon I was doing thirty- and sixty-second commercial adventures with all these different voices running around on top of the pizza. Some of the commercials were lame, and others were pretty darned funny. I don’t know if they sold any more pizza for Roland, but the characters certainly started me thinking.
José: I miss Trixie Tomato.
Jeff: Where is she now?
José: Heinz.
Throughout college, I was constantly on a quest for those characters that would stand out from the trite and tired. Now in my head was a pizza… a pizza with multiethnic ingredients running around on top and telling jokes. I was convinced that this could be a new bit in my act.
I had moved into my own apartment by then and I was able to spread out. The most important area was my workbench. It was just a solid core door laid on top of two big wooden chairs. Many things were yet to be created there.
For the pizza I began by molding all four main ingredients out of Plastic Wood dough. The crust would be about three feet in diameter, made out of plywood and more Plastic Wood, and each character would pop up and a conversation would ensue. The first character I decided to put the movements into and paint was José Jalapeño. He was about ten inches tall from the top of his hat to the bottom of his chin. After painting him a nice jalapeño green, in order to let him dry, I put him on a small dowel rod and placed him in the window in the front of my apartment.
This was in 1983, and one of the recurring characters on Late Night with David Letterman was the bespectacled, aging, and pudgy Larry “Bud” Melman. One of Melman’s bits revolved around offering servings of “toast on a stick.” It was goofy as hell, and it made me laugh.
Not long after I’d put José in the window, one of the football jocks from the complex came by my open front door. He looked in the window and said, “Hey, look! A jalapeño on a stick!”
My expression never changed but my brain clicked. “Yep,” I said. “Pretty funny, huh?”
“Heck yeah,” the guy said, and he was on his way.
And there you have it. I put the tomato and olive and pepperoni in a storage box, and cut the dowel for José to the perfect length. I then glued and fiberglassed José to his stick and then onto a small desktop microphone stand, and there he stood.
Peanut: You glued a stick up his butt?
Jeff: Well…
Peanut: And you call Achmed a terrorist!
Not every character I came up with was a success. Quite the contrary. For every José or Walter or Peanut, there were two or three that I categorize
as, “What the hell was I thinking?” (My favorite disaster? Tony the Talking Meatball. And I’m not kidding.) But as with both Peanut and Walter, I had no idea where this simple little pepper on a stick would lead me and to what heights he would help my career ascend. José was the first of the trio that got me there, and numero uno was almost ready to start performing.
With most of my characters I first sort out the basic idea of who and what they are, then I think up a few jokes that might work, then I construct the first version of the character and try him out for a while. José was no exception, but the basic personality for him was already in place thanks to the Poppa Rollo’s commercials. The inspiration for his slow demeanor was Slowpoke Rodríguez, Speedy Gonzales’ cousin in the Warner Brothers’ cartoons. The basic idea of a jalapeño on a stick was funny to me, and the idea that this poor guy was stuck where he was lent itself to some pretty silly humor. None of the jokes I came up with were very sophisticated, and I jumped on the “on a stick” thing right off the bat. Of course, with José’s Mexican accent, the pronunciation changed to “On a steek,” and I’m pretty sure that’s where the hook for the audience was, just as it was for Achmed’s “I KEEL YOU!” twenty-three years later. While José’s catchphrase was never as popular as Achmed’s, in the early 1990s, “on a steek” became a tag line all around the country, thanks to a bunch of appearances on numerous comedy shows. But back in the early 1980s, I had no idea how far and wide the laughs for José would travel, “on a steek!”