All By My Selves

by Jeff Dunham

  Peanut: Well, at least he hit the right guy.

  The American Comedy Awards were a group of awards presented annually in the United States from 1987 to 2001 recognizing performances and performers in the field of comedy. The awards focused mainly on television comedy and comedy films, but there were also awards for the year’s funniest male and female stand-up comics. Some of the earlier winners were guys like Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin… that caliber. So when Debbie (my publicist) told one of my agents that she really thought I could win the award, she heard him cover the phone and repeat the sentence out loud, which resulted in a big group, background laugh. That wasn’t the end of the story, however.

  The years of roadwork and hours of doing radio obviously paid off, because appreciative club owners around the country nominated me, and then the voting public made the final decision… and I won. Many folks in the business thought it was great, some were stunned, and others were pissed. Why were a portion of people unhappy? Some in the comedy industry just didn’t think that a ventriloquist should be classified as a comic. My argument has always been the same. What I do is still the spoken word. I’m not demonstrating any physical feats or accomplishments that elicit an audience response. The wonder of a guy talking without moving his lips is gone within thirty seconds of seeing it. I’m simply speaking in dialogue rather than monologue. But whatever the case, winning Funniest Male Stand-Up Comic of the Year (1998) was a big step in shedding the “only a variety act; not a real stand-up” stigma.

  Peanut: It was an honor just to be nominated.

  Jeff: It was.

  Peanut: I was kidding. That’s what the losers say. It’s WAY better to win.

  Some of my favorite bits throughout the years have been built from real-life moments that take place when I’m onstage. It usually starts with an ad-lib, which I’ll then repeat the next night, adding more jokes on either side of the first one, and then after a few weeks of working and massaging the pieces, they turn into an entirely new routine. One of the best examples of that took place at the Washington, D.C., Improv in the late 1990s.

  The club manager came to me before the show one night and very apologetically let me know that in the front row that night, sitting almost on the stage and facing the audience slightly to my right, would be a signer for the deaf.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said, “somebody signing for deaf people.” I stood there looking at him for a moment, thinking about what I was being told here, plus all the implications, and then just to clarify and make sure I heard him right.

  “So we have deaf people here tonight?” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied, very matter-of-factly. Once again I just stood there looking at him, probably a fairly perplexed look on my face.

  “Tom,” I replied, “do they know what the show is tonight? That I’m a ventriloquist?”

  “Oh yeah,” Tom said back. “They’re big fans.”

  You know how, in a cartoon, when a character is just standing there looking straight ahead, contemplating, and the only sound you hear is a xylophone hitting two notes each time the character blinks? That was me.

  Then Tom said, “I know it’s a pain, but they insisted on coming, and by law, I have to put them in the front row so they can see what’s happening onstage and at the same time see the signer.”

  “Oh, I understand the distraction part,” I said. “I’m just trying to wrap my head around somebody trying to read Walter’s lips.”

  A signer right up front is undoubtedly distracting for an audience for a few minutes, but just about everyone gets used to the whole idea very quickly and eventually the added movement blends in and becomes no problem… even with stand-up comedy. So within a few minutes of the opening act and middle guy, it was smooth sailing and nothing felt odd during my set either. All was fine. Well, all was fine until Peanut came out.

  The next part may be a little hard to describe, but I’ll give it my best shot: I know the difference between right and wrong. I know what should be made fun of and what shouldn’t. But I’ve also been doing what I do for so long, that whenever a character gets onstage with me, there’s a part of my brain that is that little guy, and the part that’s me doesn’t tell that other guy what he can and can’t do. It’s almost like I’m a bystander in my own head, and the little guys can do what they want. And no, I’m not nuts. Maybe it’s more like every character is a different gear and my head shifts into each one when needed.

  But back to the problem at hand.… I’ve had signers in the audience many times since that night in D.C., but when I was getting ready to pull Peanut out that first night, the part of my head that was me was thinking, “Uh oh… this should be interesting….” Because I knew that I, or should I say Peanut, couldn’t not say anything! It was once again that roller-coaster feeling of being taken up the hill, hearing the clickity clack, and knowing that there was no way I could get off this ride. And sure enough, Peanut is out of the box, on my arm, and within a minute or two of being onstage, he noticed the woman. Once again, the idea of “getting away” with stuff that a normal human couldn’t was very much in play with all that happened for the next ten minutes. Like a little kid, Peanut watched the signer, fascinated to see his words being acted out visually. Then he would throw out random words, just to see what they “looked” like. And of course, like a naughty kid, he wanted to see what a few curse words would be in sign language.

  Then Peanut started to think about the whole idea of deaf people coming to see a ventriloquist.

  “WHAT?” he said. “What’s next? Blind people going to David Copperfield? Do they have a guy telling them what happened? The elephant disappeared ! It just f-ing disappeared!”

  And then came my favorite part: He tried to get the signer fired by making up sentences that made no sense. The audience caught on right away.

  “My up new round the bend doink, doink pink slam of course bag to the optimum blang see the blender run sideways kinda for help fish?”

  Yes, it was just wrong, wrong, wrong, but the audience was literally howling with laughter. And of course part of the reason they were laughing so hard was because it was so wrong. But Peanut got away with it, and even the deaf folk were laughing. Plus, I knew I had found gold with this new bit. If you want to hear the full story and see Peanut act it out (shameless plug alert), it’s in his segment of my first DVD, Arguing with Myself.

  Peanut: I knew that bit was going to be great.

  Jeff: You did?

  Peanut: Yep. Or get you killed.

  After 1993 and the theater run, the next ten years were filled with a seemingly endless road of shows, one comedy club at a time. Almost every year my representatives and I would pitch a different sitcom idea to the networks and studios, but to no avail. I simply worked week after week, club after club.… The one thing that did grow, however, was a very loyal following of fans. Part of me knew this was great and important, but I was also bothered, wondering who, if anyone, in Hollywood was paying attention. Was there a next step up in my career, or had I already peaked?

  As the years continued, even though I stayed as one of the top acts in the clubs, I became more and more convinced we could do bigger and better. There were just too many fans coming out on a regular basis bringing family and friends, and my ticket sales hadn’t waned in a decade.

  I remember stating one year at the vent convention that ventriloquism as entertainment would continue to die a slow and embarrassing death unless someone made it hip again to a wide audience in a mass-media fashion. It had been decades since anyone had accomplished that.

  By this time I had taken on new representation. Robert Hartmann, who had been managing Improvs for more than a decade, was now the co-owner of many of the clubs, plus he had formed his own talent management company. After a couple of partnerships that didn’t work out, he finally signed on Judi Brown, a former Colorado comedy club talent booker, who was now living in LA and making a good name for herself b
ooking comics at comedy festivals and on HBO. One of Judi’s fortes that made her appealing as a manager was that she had a good handle on the comedic sensibilities of “the rest of the country.” A great many comics tend to develop a big-city flavor to their acts, mainly due to the fact that to be successful as a stand-up with any chance of being on television, you usually have to move to LA or New York and make those audiences like you. Judi appreciated the fact that there were a bunch of states between those two cities, and a lot of work was to be found for the uncommon comics who had more universal appeal. I never did figure out how to be citywise and slick, so I just continued to do the same kind of material I always had. It must have worked, because we could never describe my typical audience. Every crowd looked like a cross section of Americana. There were young folks, old folks, and middle aged; blue collar and white; housewives and hippies; ballplayers, cops, and military; lawyers and farmers; gay dudes and lesbians. Peanut and the guys could sell tickets in just about every corner of the country and my job was to just keep the dummies talking and the people laughing.

  One of the larger problems I had to deal with in the clubs in those years was getting true ticket counts. As our draw became bigger, ticket prices were then raised, and some club owners and managers began to take advantage. Because of what I know now, I feel sorry for many of the comics who can draw at a club. A bunch of comedians get screwed nightly.

  When an agent works out a deal with a club for his client, ticket prices are agreed to, the gross dollar amount of tickets sold is estimated, and either a fixed fee is agreed upon to pay the comic plus bonuses at sellouts, or he is given a percentage deal for every ticket sold. This is the procedure for just about any venue and any kind of performance. You can see how an artist can easily be at a disadvantage, having to trust whatever numbers he or she is shown at the end of the night. How does anyone know if those are actual true numbers?

  All I can say is that many of the clubs were honest with me, and many were not. I began to develop a pretty good skill of estimating crowd sizes, and noticed that the numbers I was being given at the end of the night didn’t match what I saw in the seats. I would go in and count chairs before doors were open, and during the opening acts went out and estimated how many people were there. Many times I heard a lot of BS about a huge number of comps, or that a bunch of four-top tables had only two or three people, et cetera. Some of that was true some of the time, but there are a million ways to cheat an artist, and comedy clubs are masters at it. Granted, a good agent will negotiate a huge sum for their comic up front, so a lot of clubs feel justified in selling a few tickets off the books. Whatever the case, as our ticket sales and prices increased, I knew a lot of the places weren’t being honest with me.

  There were a couple of blatant rip-offs that clubs tried to pull—like selling a certain number of “VIP” seats at a much higher price, or simply raising the ticket price by even three or five bucks a head without telling me or my agency, hoping I’d never notice since I never entered through the front door. Three or five dollars might not sound like much, but multiply that by three hundred seats a night at eight shows in a six-day week… and that’s a lot of pure unreported profit to the club. It’s an ugly business sometimes.

  Sweet Daddy Dee: That’s showbiz, people. Same as pimpin’.

  Jeff: It is?

  Sweet Daddy Dee: Sorry, ho. I mean, Jeff Dunham.

  Let me tell you what I did when I’d finally had it with a club owner one week. I won’t mention cities because I still work with this gentleman occasionally. He’s a personable guy, but he’s also a crook… and on one memorable night, I turned him into an honest crook.

  It was probably sometime in 1994, and my agent was now constantly on the lookout for clubs trying to screw us. By this point, we’d been burned so many times that the first night of the week, my agent would call the box office and try to buy tickets for my show to check the prices.

  This was not the first time I’d been to this particular club. In fact, I’d been there many times, but I had never done the business that I was doing that week with seven sold-out shows. Also because of the screw-overs, I’d recently started paying more attention to how many seats were in a place compared to what was on the contract. I’d never bothered to look at this particular club’s contract, but on the first night after a sellout, I went back to my hotel room and took a look. The contract read 350 seats total. I hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck.… I knew even without counting that this number wasn’t even close.

  Gary Brightwell was opening for me that week, so the next day he and I went early to the club to physically count all the chairs. There were five hundred. I was pissed. It hadn’t really mattered in earlier years, because I hadn’t been selling out. But now it mattered a LOT.

  When the club owner got to the club that night, I confronted him. Keep in mind that I had known this guy for many years and I considered him a friend. I don’t want to use his real name, so let’s call him Bob. I said, “Bob, explain to me why the contract says there’s 350 seats in here.” He replied, “Because that’s how many seats there are!” I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. There’s not a club owner or manager in the country who doesn’t know exactly how many seats there are in his club, plus they know exactly how many seats they have hidden, stacked somewhere out of sight. Those are then pulled out and added to sell more off-the-books tickets to get more folks in when the fire marshal and headliner aren’t looking. And, oh yeah, I’ve caught clubs doing that as well.

  I said, “Bob, there’s five hundred seats in here!”

  “Oh, no,” he started huffing. “No way there’s that many seats.” I couldn’t believe he thought I was that stupid, or that he thought he could get away with his lie.

  I said, “Bob, I’ve already counted them. There’s five hundred seats.” It was ridiculous. Was this his defense—that he didn’t think there were that many? I said, “Let’s count!” And off we went. When we finally agreed there were five hundred seats, Bob said, “Well there’s no way we can get that many people in here at once.”

  At this point, I’m just standing there, looking at Bob, wondering what to do next. “So how many people do you think you can squeeze in here on a good night?” I asked. “Three fifty,” he replied. Good lord.

  I waited until Saturday night’s first show. Not just sold out, but sold out sold out. The folks were packed in like sardines. I was scheduled to do fifty minutes, and I did just that. But instead of my typical “thank you, good night,” I put away the last character and had a chat with the very cooperative crowd. I said, “Well folks, this has been a lot of fun and you’ve been great. But I have a problem. There seems to be a misunderstanding with the management as to how many of you there are in here tonight, and how many tickets were sold. Just a show of hands first: Did any of you win free tickets from a radio station, or get in here free tonight? Don’t worry, no one will throw anything at you… anyone?” None. I continued, “Well, I need to ask you a favor. I need to know how many people are here tonight, so if you will oblige me, I’d like to spend about ten minutes and do what we used to do in grade school: I need you to count off one by one. Just one person at a time. Please don’t cheat and count yourself twice.” And with that, the folks started to number off. I couldn’t believe how orderly and nice these folks were, alcohol-loaded and all. Brightwell told me later that Bob was in the back, ready to have a heart attack.

  Lo and behold, within about fifteen minutes, we ended up with a count of 492.

  At the end of the week, a disgruntled Bob gave me a very large additional check to make up for what he’d been stealing. Although I wasn’t happy with what he’d pulled, and no telling how many times he’d done it to me before, I still liked the guy. He had a lot of good connections in comedy, so for business reasons, we kept things friendly. Though he’s a lovable crook, a tough lesson was learned by me that week, and it was a big disappointment: Good business doesn’t always make good friends.

 
Peanut: I remember Brad.

  Jeff: “BOB!”

  Peanut: Oops!

  Just before the turn of the century, in late 1999, a seed of a relationship was planted, and little did I, nor anyone else, know how important this tiny step would be for my career. Judi got me booked on Comedy Central’s stand-up show Premium Blend. It was a half-hour program, not much different from any other stand-up show from the past few years. It utilized the simple formula of a host introducing four different comics who would each come out and do a few minutes. Taped at a rented theater in New York City, the production would bang out three or four shows a day for about five days, ending up with a lot of inexpensive programming which, in typical Comedy Central style, would be aired, then repeated ad nauseam.

  Judi had used whatever connections and pull she had to get me booked on the show, and as far as we could tell, no one at Comedy Central was expecting me to be very funny. With very few exceptions in its recent history, the network tended to utilize only traditional monologists, so a ventriloquist wasn’t exactly their cup of tea. They put me on dead last in the episode, which, for television, is not the headliner spot.

  Whenever I do a television spot, one of my goals is to make the crew laugh. It’s a good barometer because these guys have seen everything and are usually pretty jaded when it comes to guests on the shows they’re working. If it’s a comedy show they’re filming, they’ve heard all the zingers. If it’s a morning talk show, they’ve seen everyone from heads of state to the guy who grew a tomato that looked like the Madonna. So if I come in, do my thing, and they go out of their way to compliment me, mission accomplished… and that’s exactly what happened that night. It wasn’t my best TV spot by a long shot, but what was important was that we now had a foot in the door at Comedy Central.