by Jeff Dunham
I went to my workshop and began creating a new Little Dummy for Peanut. A week or so later, and I debuted him at the Brea Improv, and within a couple of days, he went on E! News and Extra. Who was Peanut’s new sidekick? A junior-sized Judge Ito dummy. The jokes were stupid, but the reaction was huge.
As the day for the jury performance grew near, I knew I might be risking getting locked up, but I had to try and make them laugh with the junior judge. When the day finally arrived, what came as not much of a surprise was the fact that I wasn’t given the location of where the show would take place until just before we were supposed to start driving there. The reason was that they were trying to limit knowledge of where the jury would be and when. The press was crazy. I always thought the court’s concern was a little overcautious when I saw later that the jury was taken out for some fun to a couple of Lakers games!
Anyway, I got a call from the courthouse a couple of hours before show time, and was told when to be at the Police Academy in Fuller-ton. So off I went. When I arrived, I was promptly escorted to a back room with six of the deputies, where I was asked to go through my act joke by joke to make sure there was nothing inappropriate for the jury to hear. I was told I couldn’t mention the case, the defendant, the prosecution, or the judge. I then pulled out the little Judge Ito, and all the deputies laughed and laughed, and then said, “NO.”
Well, despite having to dismiss my latest cast member, the performance couldn’t have gone much better. Everyone was very affable afterward and I was allowed to chat with the jurors a bit. My confidence in our jury system was shaken a little, however, when one of the alternate jurors walked up and started a conversation. She was young, blond, and cute, and every bit a stereotypical Valley Girl. I heard her say to someone a few feet from me (and I’m not kidding here), “Ohmigod! When he pulled out Peanut, I was just freakin’!” Not long after that she of course was hearing evidence based on test results of deoxyribonucleic acid.
Peanut: Would you have done the show if you had known these idiots were going to let O.J. go free?
Jeff: Don’t call them idiots.
Peanut: Sorry. Morons?
In the same way that quickly writing jokes for the Dear Walter cards backstage developed a skill in me to come up with good jokes quickly, doing literally hundreds of radio and TV interviews a year taught me how to be a good interviewee, or in some cases, how to take over a show and move things in the direction I wanted it to go. But most important, I learned the power of making jokes from current events. Morning radio guys loved it when Walter and I would come in with fresh material about whatever had happened in the news the day before, or even from that morning. It wasn’t unusual for me to be sitting in a taxi on the way to the station going through the morning’s newspapers and writing quick jokes about whatever was in the headlines.
While sometimes the morning jocks were good and would go back and forth with me and Walter in interview style, many times they would be a bit put off that I was even there. Why? Well, the comedy clubs would purchase commercial time on the most popular radio shows to run ads, and if the radio jocks didn’t have any say-so with management or the salespeople, the morning teams would be forced to have me on as a guest. In the early years, there were many morning radio teams that would either sit there with a major attitude during the interview, or they would try and make fun of me. Sometimes they would make things uncomfortable simply by turning on my mike and throwing out mundane questions like, “What’s going on?” I quickly learned how to take the ball and run.
Sometimes I had to win over the morning teams before things went sour on the air, and that meant being funny immediately and without platitudes. No “Hi, how are you?” It would be Walter jumping in and going straight to the material. Oftentimes, if a comic went into an obviously well-worn comedy bit, many of the jocks would shut down. I’m sure they would be thinking things like, “We’re here for five hours every morning thinking on our feet with new material at every break, so you should be able to as well.”
Every so often, a morning host would ask, “What topics do you want to talk about?” or “What questions should we ask to lead you?” I got to the point where I would usually say, “Just say hi and I’ll run with it.” It just became easier that way because I had the jokes and material ready, and with a tiny bit of interaction, Walter could just spout off for minutes on end about what was in the news. That way it usually went over perfectly. Everyone just had to sit back and laugh.
Of course the one glaringly obvious goofy aspect about me doing radio was the simple fact that I was a ventriloquist. Poor Debbie Keller, my longtime friend and publicist, must have had a hell of a sell job in front of her back in the early days. Eventually people caught on that it was simply characters telling jokes on the air, and the ventriloquist aspect didn’t matter. And yes, every single time, I would take either Peanut or Walter with me to the radio studios. It was amusing for the jocks that Walter was even there, but what was even funnier would be when an engineer would give a microphone to me, and then not thinking, also put a second one in front of Walter. That happened numerous times and the poor guys were the laughingstocks of the station for the next month.
Every so often the odd audition would come up when a sitcom or a commercial was looking for a ventriloquist. If I was in town, I’d take a dummy and make a go at it. As most folks in this business will attest, you usually go on dozens of auditions, and you’re lucky if one or two of them pan out. So by the mid-1990s, I was used to being turned down. For whatever reason you’re rejected, you try to learn not to take it personally. Usually the casting folks know within a few seconds of you walking in the room whether you’re right for the part or not, simply by your looks.
On one particular occasion, however, I was called in for a Hertz rental car commercial. Every other ventriloquist I had ever heard of who lived anywhere near New York or Los Angeles had gone on the call, and I knew I was just one more on the list. I was one more guy with a dummy at an audition. I had become fairly jaded at this point, but I couldn’t help getting excited about the potential of something as cool as a national commercial for a well-known product. That could mean big exposure and incoming, unexpected cash if it aired a decent number of times.
When I arrived, it was the same old thing: Here’s the script, read the lines, try your best, and go with your instincts. The Hertz campaign at that time was the “Not Exactly” campaign. They’d left it open to the vent to bring whatever dummy he chose, which was kind of unusual, so I took Walter. He was still my strongest, most versatile and universal character.
The script called for the ventriloquist to be running through the rain, looking up at the storm, while the dummy griped at him for choosing the wrong car rental company. Since we were in a small room with one little video camera, I had to pretend I was running while holding Walter, and I did what I was told. I looked around, acted as if the storm was pelting down, and Walter did what he did best: looked at me and told me what an idiot I was.
When I was finished, the guy just stood there and looked at me. “Okay. That was great,” he said. I’d heard that a million times. “Thanks,” I said, and I left.
Unlike other auditions when I felt good about what I had done and that I really had a shot, this one left me knowing I hadn’t a chance in hell. I couldn’t help but be depressed because nothing in television in the past four or five years had panned out. It had been all guest spots here and there, but every year when we shopped around my own television show idea, no one would bite.
Driving home from the audition, I took the Reseda Boulevard exit as usual, and there at the bottom of the ramp at the stoplight in the normal spot was a homeless guy with a sign asking for handouts. I always struggled with whether to give to these guys or not. Are they just going to spend it on booze, or do they really need it? Here I am in a nice vehicle, and they supposedly don’t have enough cash for a donut. I was feeling sorry for myself, and was ashamed. I rolled down the window and gave him a $20. End
of story. So I thought.
The next day, the call came in, and I had already tried to put the whole Hertz thing out of my head. I didn’t even have to go in for a callback. They wanted Walter and me on such and such a date, I was hands-down the best, and congratulations. What the—?
So now I was going to be in a national television commercial. I was stoked. Granted, it was one simple spot, but I had never done a national one, and I knew that exposure like this would probably jump ticket sales once again.
I found out later that day that they needed two Walters.… And the shoot days were in one week! There had been the one and only Walter for all these years and shows, but they needed a backup in case the deluge of water made one of the dummies inoperable.
I hadn’t built a figure in many years, and I was in a time crunch. So I phoned an old friend in Las Vegas named Joel Leder, who was also a vent and figure maker himself. I flew up one afternoon with the original Walter so Joel could make a quick silicone mold of the head, then cast a couple fiberglass head shells. I then flew back to LA the same day, headed to Sears and the local hobby store, and purchased all the materials I would need to construct two new Hertz Walters.… Waterproof ones!
What Joel made was just an empty shell of a head—no mechanics; the mouth wasn’t cut out; no paint or hair; just a shell, like the body of a car with nothing in it to make it run. So now I had one week to construct these two Walters, and I was booked at Zanies Comedy Night Club in Nashville for the next six nights. I had to take all the materials and tools, pack them in a box, and ship them to the hotel in Nashville, where I would build the figures.
The next day I arrived in Nashville and proceeded to set up shop in the hotel, unbeknownst to the maids. The shows at night were more of a nuisance than anything, interrupting my construction process.
Joel had done a good job with the fiberglass, but before installing all the mechanics, a LOT of sanding had to be done. Gary Brightwell was with me that week, and as a truly loyal and good friend, he came to my room and went to work on one of the heads, as did I. We sanded and sanded until the heads looked good and were ready for the mouths to be cut out and for me to install the triggers, levers, springs, strings, rods, and customized pieces of brass, all cut and welded by me right in that little room. I had even purchased a little Workmate bench with a built-in vise. I did accidently drill a hole in one of the counters in the room, but that wasn’t the biggest issue—by the end of the six days, the entire room, including the bedspreads, pillows, and curtains, were covered with a thick layer of sawdust and fiberglass dust. I’d kept the DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the doorknob all week, so no one had a clue. I can’t remember if I left the maid a tip or not.
Walter: Maid? They probably should have bulldozed the place.
Jeff: Probably.
Walter: Imagine what the folks in the room next door must have been thinking hearing two guys talking and laughing, followed by the sounds of power tools.
As I departed the hotel, one new Walter dummy was finished, paint and hair and all, and the second one was close. The Hertz commercial folks had paid me to build two, but I knew the one would never break in the rain, so I didn’t worry about the second one being a little shy of the finish line.
Taping took place over two days and at two locations. The inside scenes, which were supposed to be in an airport, we filmed at the Los Angeles Convention Center, out in the main area where there are long escalators. I had to carry Walter, pushing my way down the stairs and through the “extras” who were standing in place. The whole time Walter was of course doing his lines, bitching about the crappy other rental company I’d used.
That went well, but being the novice TV guy that I was, when I had to make a phone call (still mainly car cell phones at that time; no small handhelds), I picked up the receiver of a pay phone that was one of a bank of phones near the bottom of the escalators. I put in a couple of quarters, and when it didn’t work, I moved to the second one. A crew guy finally walked over and whispered, “Those are part of the set. They’re not real. So… they don’t work.” DOH!
The next day we were on location, ironically, just outside the Los Angeles International Airport at a former Hertz rental location, which was now an empty set of buildings. Once again, the set and prop guys had done an amazing job at making Hollywood magic happen. I thought it was an actual Hertz rental place.
This was where I had to run through the rain.… And if you haven’t seen rain machines work on TV or in movies, you wouldn’t believe it. Simple raindrops don’t look like much on camera. So to make up for what you can’t see, they have to create a deluge to make it look like a normal rainstorm. To make matters worse, what I was running through was supposed to be a torrential downpour! So… the rain machines were pretty much put on full blast. Plus, and also ironically, because it doesn’t rain much at all in Southern California, this happened to be the one week that we got heavy rain in LA, and yes, it was raining pretty hard. Walter and I might as well have jumped in a pool in our clothes and swam around for a while. Oh, and it was also during a rare cold snap in LA too.
Walter: Only in LA do folks call a little rain in 68 degrees a “cold snap.” You’re a wuss.
Remember how I told you I wasn’t worried at all about Walter getting wet? This one commercial reportedly cost about $1 million, and in the mid-1990s, that was a big budget for a thirty-second spot. Well, Walter’s mechanics were brass, and the head and all other construction was fiberglass, so nothing was going to have a problem while soaking wet. The head would have been fine if it had been in a pool underwater. I even used acrylic paint, which is actually a form of plastic, so that was waterproof as well. However, when painting the faces of the characters, I like to put on a little texture, and also take any kind of shine out. Acrylics shine, so in a pinch, I had run to the local store looking for some kind of powder to mix in and dull it down. Not thinking, I grabbed some after-shower powder.… I didn’t know what it was; all I knew was that it was a powder, and that it would dull a shine if I padded it onto wet acrylics.
Oops. It turned out that it was some kind of soap. So guess what? When the rain got really intense near the end of the filming, Walter’s face started to foam! I kept wiping it off as the bubbles came out of his head. No one ever saw, and it was late enough that it only happened for the last thirty minutes or so, but at one point it looked like Walter had rabies.
By 1994, I was stuck on the idea of having a TV show. I could see that throughout the decades, many of the more successful stand-ups had, and were, parlaying their success into sitcoms: Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, Tim Allen, Ellen DeGeneres, Roseanne Barr, Brett Butler, and so on. It seemed an obvious move to me to be looking for a similar avenue.
“Holding Deals” were popular in that time period, and this was when a network or production studio would pay an actor (or comic) a big sum of money to reserve him or her for a certain amount of time while the potential for a television show was explored. “Development Deals” is another term for it as well. I can thank Tony Danza and his company, Katy Face Productions, for my first holding deal in the early 1990s. We tried to come up with a sitcom idea for many months during my “holding,” all to no avail, but that money paid for my 1994 red Dodge Viper. When that big check came in from Danza’s company, it seemed like goofy “found” money to me, like I’d won a lottery or something. I remember thinking, “Shouldn’t I have fun with this chunk of cash?” I think I threw off the Dodge salesman in San Diego a bit when I walked into the dealership that night, pointed to the Viper, and said, “I’ll take that one,” then proceeded to write him a check for the whole amount. It probably wasn’t the wisest financial move, but I have to admit that being able to do that felt really cool. Within the next few years, I wouldn’t even be able to think about doing that again. As for my own sitcom, it seemed to me like the only way I would be able to progress in my career, other than by simply making a seemingly unending journey around the country playing small clubs. I thought that if
I was going to continue to succeed, I had to follow the route every other famous comic had gone before me.
Among a few of the guest appearances I made on numerous television shows of the time was a single episode appearance on Ellen. I played a ventriloquist who was actually an undercover CIA agent. Walter was their dummy of choice, and after a mean slight from the little old man, Jeremy Piven, who was a regular on the show, attacked Walter and started choking him. Jeremy was great, and completely got into the scene. We wrestled back and forth with poor gagging Walter. Jeremy, however, gets the credit for being the only guy in my memory to have incapacitated any of my characters when, during one of the takes, Jeremy pulled on Walter one way, and I pulled the other, and the trigger that controlled Walter’s mouth snapped off in my hand, hidden inside Walter’s body. We had to cut and take a “time-out” while I ran to my dressing room and glued the gadgetry back together!
Peanut: It would have been funnier if he had gotten beat up by Ellen.
Walter: Hey!
Peanut: And then a caged death-match with Rosie O’Donnell.
Jeff: Let’s move on, please!
There was only one other person who had tried to damage one of my characters. A few years earlier during the taping of a Hot Country Nights episode, Walter and I were interviewing Hank Williams Jr., and after numerous retakes when we’d finally gotten it right, Walter looked at him and said, “Hank! You kept fucking up your lines!” After a big laugh, Hank was obviously miffed with the little guy, and proceeded to abruptly walk off set, but not before taking his handheld mike and bonking Walter on the head with it.