All By My Selves

by Jeff Dunham

  The third big name Barbara hooked me up with was inarguably the biggest of the three. Unlike Milton Berle, Bob Hope never offered me any material, but I got to work with him at Miami University too, as well as at a Clemson University homecoming weekend, and a few other notable events across the country. One of my favorite times with him took place after our show together on October 17, 1987, also at Miami University.

  Immediately following his performance, Mr. Hope and I and about twenty school dignitaries and guests were taken to the school’s guesthouse on campus. We were treated to an after-hours hors d’oeuvres party, and everyone stood around making small talk. After a little while as the crowd slowly dwindled, I found myself alone in the living room on the couch with Bob Hope himself. He pointed to the remote and said, “Do you know how to work that thing?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, “I think I can figure it out.”

  “That Steve Martin guy is going to be hosting Saturday Night Live. I wanna see that,” said Bob freakin’ HOPE!

  “Yes, sir,” I stammered. I managed to get the TV on and to NBC, and sure enough, SNL was starting up and Steve Martin was the host. So there I sat, on the couch with Bob Hope watching Saturday Night Live. How the hell did I get HERE? Bob kept pointing and saying, “Boy, he’s funny. He’s really funny.”

  An equally uncanny incident took place a couple of years later when Mr. Hope and I were in New Mexico performing at a national Lions Clubs convention. Backstage before the show began, I was introduced to him again, and he said, “So what are you doing after the show, kid?”

  “Going back to my hotel, sir,” I said.

  “Why don’t you get on the plane with Dolores and me and go home tonight? Back to Burbank.”

  I had moved to Los Angeles by then, so I stammered, “Uh… well, if that’s not an inconvenience.”

  “Hell no! Jump in the car with us after the show.”

  “Yes, sir!” So once again, I found myself in a time and place that was so surrealistic, I didn’t know what to think. There I sat on Bob Hope’s private jet in the middle of the night. But to top it all, after Bob had nodded off to sleep, if I said it once, I must have said it four times during the flight: “No, but thank you, Mrs. Hope. I don’t know how to play Gin Rummy.”

  Walter: You could have played Gin Rummy with Bob Hope’s wife?

  Jeff: Yep.

  Walter: And you DIDN’T?

  Jeff: No.

  Walter: You’re an idiot. You should have changed the story a little bit and called it “Strip Poker with Dolores.”

  So during my college years, Barbara Hubbard got me work with Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and George Burns.… And a lot of this happened even before I could legally drink.

  Bubba J.: What’s that mean?

  Jeff: What’s what mean?

  Bubba J.: Drink “legally”…

  Jeff: Bubba J.…

  Peanut: How cool, you got to work with all those famous old dudes.

  Jeff: Yep.

  Peanut: And now you’re stuck with Walter.

  Walter: Someone hand me José so I can beat Peanut with his stick.

  Also during my college years, I got a booking to be the entertainment at a huge corporate gathering for General Electric. It was an annual dinner for all their big brass, honoring the top salespeople and their spouses. Black tie, live band, five-course dinner, booze flowing, and at the fanciest hotel in Connecticut. They spared no expense and left nothing to question. You get the idea.

  When I say they left nothing to question, that included my act. They made sure that the show would be absolutely squeaky clean and offensive in no way to anyone. I told them, “No problem.” When I asked them for a few names and facts to personalize and use in the show, they had a list ready for me with some very mundane facts about the people listed. I said, “Okay, but what about the head guy? The CEO? Is he on this list?”

  There were four men in well-pressed suits in charge of the evening and they all stood there looking at one another, seemingly not knowing how to answer me. I said, “What’s wrong? I shouldn’t make fun of him?”

  Immediately and almost simultaneously they all said, “NO NO! You can’t make fun of Mr. Welch!”

  “Just a little?”

  “No! He doesn’t have a sense of humor… at all.” So this was Jack Welch. THE Jack Welch. He was going to be there along with his wife.

  COOL. Then I asked, “Well, can I at least acknowledge that he’s there? Just say hi with the dummy?”

  All four of these guys looked at one another, in fear for their jobs, and possibly their lives. “Well,” one guy finally said, “just say hello to him with the dummy then move on. He’s very well respected and doesn’t like to be made light of in any type of forum.”

  “Of course,” I reassured him. “No problem.”

  Whoa. THIS was awesome. I truly didn’t want to get anyone into trouble, and I had all intentions of respecting their wishes and not making Jack Welch the butt of any jokes. Besides, I knew that if I did well here, there were probably more high-dollar gigs for me in the future with GE.

  Well, cut to my show. Dinner had droned on, a few awards had been handed out, some dry speeches had been made, and now it was my turn. I got up and did a little stand-up, then introduced my main character, who at that time was Archie. I did a few jokes and then got to my list of names to poke fun at. There was the top sales guy in appliances here, the top regional sales guy there, et cetera. Finally Archie looks at me and says, “Who’s the head guy of all this? Shouldn’t we talk to him?”

  There was dead silence in the room. Apparently the four guys in suits weren’t the only ones who knew that Mr. Welch didn’t like to be made fun of. I said, “Well, yes, he’s here. Mr. Jack Welch.”

  Archie looked at me, waited a beat and said, “Jack Welch? THE Jack Welch? Top Cheese Mr. Welch? The ‘No messy with Jackie,’ Mr. Welch? THAT GUY?” Still a little uneasiness in the room, but a couple of chuckles.

  “Yes, that’s him” I replied.

  “Where is he? Can I say hi?” Archie asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “He’s right over there.” Archie looked over at the head table and said, “Oh, uh… good… um… good evening, Mr. Welch.” Silence. Then from the table a low grumble, “GOOD EVENING.” I waited a pregnant beat, then Archie let out a huge breath and said, “Okay, that enough. Let’s not mess with him.” Big laugh of relief from the crowd, and a smile from the Welches.

  Now you’d think that was the end of that. But it wasn’t. Something inside of me clicked and I thought I just might have paved a path for myself that had otherwise been hidden in the brambles of fear and circumstance.

  I went on to pick on a couple of other guys, including the number one corporate sales guy for the past year. Everyone knew who he was, and he was a big shot as well. Archie read his title off my sheet of paper to the crowd in a slow and careful way. He then read the guy’s job description out loud as well. He cocked his head at the paper, then looked back out toward the guy and said, “You know, Bob, I’ve read the stuff about you in the program, and I’ve talked about you to a few guys around here, and no one is quite sure what you actually DO for GE.” BIG laugh from the crowd. I even saw Welch chortling at that one. Then Archie asked, “What DO you do?” Another big laugh, and then we waited for an answer. The guy had a sense of humor and apparently some big cojones, because he responded with, “I don’t know.” Another big laugh. Then he looked over toward Jack’s table and said, “Mr. Welch, what DO I do?” A HUGE laugh from the crowd. The guy was good. And there it was. I couldn’t pass it up.… When the laugh was dying away, Archie fired back, “What are you asking JACK for? He doesn’t know what the hell HE does!” Now THAT laugh almost took the roof off the place. And most important? Welch was laughing and banging on the table.

  Afterward I got to shake hands with Jack and his wife, with the four suits standing around nervously. Jack assured me that the show was great and that I had some good work ahead of me with his corpora
tion. Throughout the next couple of years, I ended up doing a total of eight well-paying corporate gigs with GE. All first-class events with unmatched accommodations and treatment.

  In my college years I was booked on “Campus Comedy,” a very early HBO comedy special hosted by SNL veteran Joe Piscopo. I shudder when I look back at that tape now, but in 1983, Joe was big news, and there I was, on national cable, doing the best I possibly could have done at the time.

  In the early 1980s cable wasn’t in a majority of U.S. households, but HBO was one of the most prestigious cable channels, and they were having success with some of their stand-up comedy specials. “Campus Comedy” was just what the title implied—college-aged stand-up comics doing their thing on a college campus. We taped it at Tufts University in Boston, and I wasn’t nearly as nervous that night as I thought I was going to be. I think the main reason for this was because after meeting a few of the other performers, I realized I’d been doing stand-up a lot longer than almost everyone else. I guess it gave me a little confidence because I didn’t feel intimidated like I had expected.

  As for how it went, I didn’t kill, but I did well; I wasn’t the worst and I wasn’t the best. But when the special aired a couple of months later, the editing that they had done to my set showed me how important timing was and how for television, you couldn’t have any “fat” in the act. It had to move. In the editing bay they had removed every pause and breath that didn’t add to the comedy.

  On the negative side of things, I also realized that my act didn’t make much of an impact on the audience. It wasn’t memorable enough. The characters didn’t have enough personality, and they weren’t something people could identify with or that they felt affection for. The search for my own unique and defining characters would continue.

  Peanut: Did you find anyone?

  Jeff: I found you.

  Peanut: I know. I just wanted to hear you say it, oh Jeff-fah-fah.

  That summer at the 1983 Vent Haven Convention, I was honored with the Ventriloquist of the Year award, which at the time was an award voted on by all the vents attending that year. In the worlds of show business and comedy, it of course meant next to nothing, but to me, it meant everything. Even at age twenty-one, I had been working at my art for most of my life… thirteen years to be exact, and to be acknowledged as one who had “contributed most to the art of ventriloquism that year” was a true honor.

  Don’t get me wrong: Even then I knew what a quirky and looked-down-upon art form it was that I had chosen for my vocation. In the stand-up comedy world, vents were looked at as sad at best. Only a few decades earlier vents had been celebrated; now we were either made fun of or made to look like psychopaths who either murdered people with our dummies or who sat alone in dingy hotel rooms talking to ourselves, only wishing for social interaction. But I loved what I did. Laughs were an elixir and applause was social acceptance and approval. I could see no downside to what I was doing. There was none.

  Fall of 1983, Dennis Alwood had heard that I was in the market for a McElroy figure. A McElroy is the Stradivarius of dummies, made by the McElroy brothers during the Great Depression.

  These two young men were barely out of high school when, with very little training, they started making and selling these unbelievable dummies. Made not of carved wood, but molded out of Plastic Wood dough, the faces and mechanics on their figures showed just how far one can go with a dummy. The faces were wonderfully cartoonlike, and the mechanics were a marvel. Most dummies today have a moving mouth and possibly moving eyes and eyebrows—but the McElroys’ little guys boasted as many as fifteen separate movements. The deluxe models had everything from a wiggling nose, to stick-out tongue and a fright wig. The brothers stopped production during World War II because of rationing of materials, and although the total number of figures they made has been debated for many years, I’m pretty sure they probably finished only about forty in total.

  For years I had wished and hoped for a McElroy figure, but I never quite believed I could own one. Somehow Dennis had acquired Ezry, a character the brothers custom-made for the American singer and band leader Rudy Vallée back in the late 1930s. Ezry was supposed to have been a goofy, hayseed type character, but with a change of clothes and the right voice, I was pretty sure he would replace Archie and become my main sidekick.

  Dennis wanted $7,500, which was a pretty high price for 1983, especially for a full-time college student. I had, however, saved enough from all the weekend shows, so I sent Dennis a check in full, and a few days later, Ezry arrived via American Eagle at the Waco Municipal Airport. I didn’t love the dummy at first. In fact, his looks scared me a little. Though he had been repainted a few times, his face showed all of his nearly fifty years. And as for his mechanics, well, I had only seen pictures of the insides of a McElroy. Oh, man, was it a mechanical dream or nightmare, depending on your perspective. Ezry had sixteen movements all crammed inside the head. Here’s the list:

  1. Movingmouth(lowerjaw)

  2. Raisingupperlip

  3. Head movement via a cradle mechanism

  4. A 360-degree eye movement operated by tilting the head the direction you wanted him to look (amazing and unparalleled in operation even by today’s figure makers)

  5. Cross-eyedmovement

  6. Raisingeyebrows

  7. Wigglingears

  8. Fright wig (tuft of hair in the front pops straight up)

  9. Wiggling,sniffing nose

  10. Stick-out tongue

  11. Winking left eyelid

  12. Sleepy eyelids taking both eyelids to half-mast

  13. Light-up nose (a C battery inside the head powered a flashlight bulb inside the nose—the end of the nose was translucent and would glow red, achieving a drunk look)

  14. Spitting (a rubber bulb inside the figure’s body, previously filled with water, could be squeezed by the vent, and water would spray a stream of water out a tiny hole between the figure’s teeth at the audience)

  15. Smoking (another rubber bulb would be squeezed by the vent inside the dummy’s body cavity, then the vent would place a lit cigarette between the figure’s teeth and into a slightly larger tube receptacle inside the mouth. The bulb would then be slowly released and the smoke would be drawn into the tubing system and bulb. A flip of a valve inside the head, and squeezing the bulb would then push the smoke out small holes from the figure’s ears)

  16. And finally not a movement but a feature: One of the front teeth could be removed. When the vent pulled it out, the tooth even had slightly yellowed roots!

  Walter: Wow. All I do is sit here looking like an a-hole, thanks a lot.

  Bubba J.: I can pee myself. Want to see?

  Jeff: No, we don’t.

  Bubba J.: Too late.

  A good ventriloquist and puppeteer can entertain and bring the most simple of characters to life with a minimum of mechanics, but I wanted to see what I could do with one of these masterpieces. Would this guy be the defining main character I had been looking for? Whatever the case, I first had to do a little repair work.

  Ezry had been created by a couple of geniuses and decades later, the mechanics were still mostly there, but were worn in places. I soon discovered that the tongue was completely missing too. I didn’t really need a dummy with a working tongue, but I wanted the character to operate like he did originally, so many years before.

  With no e-mail in the early 1980s, I exchanged snail mail with the brothers, who were now easily into their seventies. I told Glenn what was missing from Ezry, and he sent me some sketches of what I needed to construct. I had gotten pretty good at creating from wood and brass, solder and epoxy, so I constructed mechanics and a new tongue and went to work repairing the little guy. I got the tongue installed and working, and a few months later, showed the head to Glenn, who gave it his whole-hearted approval.

  I think what impressed the brothers more, though, was the fact that one of their creations was living onstage again. I renamed the character Ollie and made him
the centerpiece of my show. I even did the dummy-on-dummy bit with him, and upgraded the toy little dummy to another little dummy that Ollie called “REEEAAALY UGLY!” Of course, that dummy looked like me. I still had my mustache at the time and had done my best in creating a self-portrait in miniature dummy form. It wasn’t perfect, but with matching clothes for whatever I was wearing onstage that particular night, the audience got the idea and it would get a pretty good laugh when I brought him out.

  I worked with Ollie for a couple of years, and was pretty good with the complicated mechanics. Mastering the rows of keys under the head and inside the figure’s body required a good deal of practice, but my goal from the beginning was to bring him to life using the movements sparingly, and relying on the humor and material to get laughs, and not the tricks. The very best compliment I ever received when working with Ollie was from George and Glenn, who said they’d never seen one of their creations manipulated better.