All By My Selves

by Jeff Dunham

  Bubba J.: I had my foot in a door once.

  Jeff: You did?

  Bubba J.: Yeah, but it was a car door.

  Jeff: I see.

  Peanut: I knew Comedy Central would want us.

  Jeff: Why were you so sure, Peanut?

  Peanut: Because we had something they needed… comedy.

  As the year 2000 approached, I was doing everything I could to keep expenses in check, stay financially somewhat above water, and of course, not buy anything crazy. But sometimes, when you work hard, you feel like treating yourself.

  One beautiful Southern California day, the kids and I were driving by the Thousand Oaks Hummer dealership. Sitting on their cement “stage” in front of the building sat an H1 Hummer, the model with the swinging doors in the back. (The H1 is the real Hummer… not the shrunk-down, soccer-mom one.) As we drove by, the girls went, “Daddy, LOOK! A purple Hummer!”

  “Purple?” I said as we kept driving.

  “Yeah,” they said. “It’s… BLUE. Whoa!”

  “You said it was purple,” I replied, not looking out the side window at what they were talking about.

  “DAD, IT CHANGED COLORS!” one of them yelled.

  “No it didn’t,” I calmly stated, knowing they were mistaken.

  “Yes it did! LOOK!” And as I looked out the passenger window toward the platform, the blue Hummer suddenly blinked to a dark orange color. “What the—?” We came to a screeching halt, scrambled out of the car, and ran to the truck. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Don’t forget, this was a few years before the Green movement took over, and you weren’t regularly given the finger for driving a gas-guzzling behemoth vehicle. But not only was it a Hummer, the dealership had loaded this one. A salesman came out with the keys and let us play. It had a huge stereo system with giant woofers. It had an Alpine GPS nav system, video player and four screens, a top-of-the-line communications system, custom leather seats, a custom chrome-and-leather steering wheel, and on and on. You could now count me as the fourth kid. This was awesome. But the coolest thing was the paint. My kids weren’t nuts; the thing did change colors. And it wasn’t one of those paints that simply had various luminescent colors in it. No, this was a color-shifting paint that jumped from one color to the next, depending on what angle you were viewing it from. It was pretty new stuff, and the dealership had customized this machine with it.

  That day I talked to my accountant about buying a new car as a treat for myself. The deal was that I would purchase the vehicle, but promise to drive it for ten years. Though it was a pretty stupid move considering our financial status at the time, I loved that beast, and still do to this day. Unlike a lot of other guys with big SUVs, at times I’ve taken it out in the wilderness and beaten the living crap out of it and the people riding with me! I’ve even driven it around in a lake with water sloshing over the hood. My kids grew up in it, and Kenna has made me promise to never sell it. I gave her my word.

  It was the perfect vehicle to have ready for the oncoming promised disasters of Y2K, for which I was one of the idiots who was prepared. I didn’t dig a cellar in the backyard, but I overstocked on survival food, batteries, bottled water, a portable toilet, and yes, some artillery.

  As we all know, nothing happened when the computers clicked to 00, but now I had a cool vehicle and I could eat dried beans for the next quarter century.

  Bubba J.: You had a ARTILLERY!?

  Jeff: Yes.

  Bubba J.: To shoot at other comedians who were going to steal your JOKES?

  Jeff: Not exactly.

  Walter: Good for you, teaching your kids to be paranoid.

  Jeff: I was just being cautious.

  Walter: Looked like you were getting ready to appear on Real Morons of LA County.

  Starting in 2000, Robert and Judi tried for three years to convince Comedy Central to give me my own half-hour special. These were called Comedy Central Presents. My team had to argue about sales numbers from the road and ratings from even Premium Blend three years earlier. The network was still not excited about putting a ventriloquist on the air and they weren’t budging.

  Another performer that Judi had managed and pushed to get on the air at CC was The Amazing Johnathan. He is a magician who uses a very twisted and sometimes brutal approach to another old vaudevillian art form. After his half-hour aired on CC, ratings showed that there was certainly room for something other than straight stand-up. The network finally relented, and in the fall of 2002, I once again headed to New York to tape in front of a live audience. And once again, the network stacked show upon show over a few days. It was the same formula as Premium Blend, but this time instead of a five-minute bit, I did an entire half hour.

  Though I had input on my set design, there wasn’t much else besides material that I had control over. The network brought in a different audience each night of taping, but used the same crowd for more than one comic. In other words, this wasn’t my crowd. Even though there were a few hundred people there, most of them had no idea who I was, and thus had little idea who my characters were. This was completely unlike what I was used to, where the people paid to come see me because they wanted to. Long story short, I hated the show that night. Though I did make the crew laugh, what I had practiced over and over in front of my own audience didn’t and couldn’t have gone over as well in front of newbies.

  I’ll never forget a few weeks later, sitting by myself at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, watching the first airing of the half hour. Since the taping, I had been reassured by the network that they were doing a great job of editing and that anything that wasn’t perfect was either being cut out or edited carefully to make sure it was funny to the TV audience. So I was excited to see what they’d done. This was my first solo almost-full-length special!

  I hated it.

  Having had zero control over editing, there had been some decisions made that I never would have been okay with. Jokes that I would have cut out because they didn’t go over as well were left in, and some of my favorites that I knew would air well were cut out. A very important step in my career now appeared to be a very big misstep. A failed corporate gig here or there could be hidden and wouldn’t make any difference in the future. But here was something that would air over and over and I didn’t feel it did one thing to make me look in any way outstanding.

  Fans are a beautiful thing. When Comedy Central got the ratings back from the premiere airing, they were very solid. But better than that, the repeats maintained very high numbers compared to other comics’ half hours. When we got that news back, plus the very positive reactions from those inside Comedy Central, I felt like my career was taken off life support.

  More importantly was that any comic who appeared on Comedy Central had a bump in business and sold more tickets than the guys who had any type of TV exposure anywhere else. Stand-up fans watched Comedy Central and then they’d come to the clubs to see who they saw on TV. Even heavily advertised and highly rated HBO stand-up specials had little to no effect on sales compared to airings on Comedy Central.

  It’s difficult to argue with ratings, and although my numbers were as good if not better than most of the other comics’ half hours, there was still resistance to putting me on the air. So in 2003, I was turned down by Comedy Central for anything else. The next step would have been my own hour special, which the network would have produced, but they wouldn’t discuss the possibility. A ventriloquist simply wasn’t their cup of tea.

  On the road I stayed, club after club after club. In maintaining the lifestyle we’d become accustomed to, family spending started to far exceed what I could comfortably afford, despite the Hummer. I had to stay out on the road working an average of 250 shows a year. That meant forty weeks a year I was out, each Wednesday through Sunday.

  As the ensuing months clicked by, Judi and Robert and Debbie and I would strategize how and where to get me on television in any capacity. I knew that was the fuel for ticket sales. My managers and I would strategize about the next s
tep. Sometimes questions and doubts for the future of my career would try to crawl into my head, but I never doubted for a moment that something big could still happen. I had been working at my craft and nothing else much too long with too much success for it to stop at this point. It had now been thirty-two years of pursuit with never a consideration of doing anything else. I refused to believe this was all there was. Maybe this new little skeleton dummy I had just made would help out.…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Little Terrorist in

  the Best Damn Chapter

  I was asleep at home in Los Angeles on the morning of September 11, 2001, when we got a phone call to turn on the news. Like the rest of the country and most of the world, we watched in disbelief, horror, and heartbreak as the Twin Towers in New York City were destroyed. Like most parents, my wife and I did our best to help our young children understand what had happened, and at the same time try to make sense of it ourselves. Almost a decade later, it seems cliché to recall the words we all repeated to one another that day: Life will never be the same. But it was true and we see it even now, all around us and everywhere we go. (Or try to go.) Almost everyone in this country was in some way affected by the events of September 11, and as the days went by and the initial shock wore off, I began to wonder how, as a comedian, I was supposed to get back onstage and tell jokes? If so, when? It didn’t seem like something to even consider. In fact, it felt wrong.

  9/11 happened on a Tuesday, and that weekend we canceled my scheduled run at Uncle Funny’s, a club in Davie, Florida. Performing was the last thing on my mind. Everyone’s priorities had changed and now nothing mattered more to most people than being with family. That’s all I wanted to do, and home was where I stayed.

  The next Thursday and weekend I was scheduled for the Tempe Improv just outside Phoenix. Letterman and Leno had each gone back on the air the Monday of that week, both with great poise, and in what could only be imagined as incredibly difficult positions. These were the guys that were supposed to make us laugh despite everything else. The audience of four hundred people in a club where I was performing was microscopic in comparison to the number of their nightly viewers, but the questions and the fragility of our audiences were the same. What would be my first words onstage? What should be my demeanor? What material ? Should I even be thinking about going onstage?

  During these early days after the terrorist attacks, we would embolden each other to move on with life by saying that if we didn’t, “. . . then the terrorists have won.” But I was not one of the heroes risking my life, helping to dig and search for the fallen at Ground Zero. I wasn’t a soldier, ready to fight for freedom, nor was I a farmer, helping to provide. Did I now even have a purpose in a post-9/11 world? Or was my clownlike profession a soon-to-be forgotten luxury, enjoyed in a past life when the world was innocent and naively happy?

  What finally made me realize that I really did have some sort of role in the healing process, no matter how small, was when we started getting ticket sale numbers back from the Improv a couple of days before my first scheduled show that week. All six shows at four hundred people each were completely sold out. And the club wasn’t getting any cancellation calls. In fact, they were turning away business and were considering adding shows. There were people coming to my show who wanted to laugh… again.

  Walter: But unfortunately, they never did. THE END. Thanks for reading!

  Jeff: Walter…

  Walter: Sorry; I need a nap.

  I can honestly say that it was probably one the best weeks of shows I have ever experienced at a club. I wrote material about 9/11 and surrounding events and people that in no way made light of any part of the tragedy, but instead was unifying, patriotic, and challenging toward any outsiders who oppressed our ideals as Americans. Certainly it was a little bit of figurative flag waving, but it needed to be. In the more literal sense, remember how many American flags were mounted on cars in the months following the event? I had two flags on my Hummer, and I didn’t shy away from material that bolstered the American spirit either. Walter certainly had his thoughts about the whole thing.

  Jeff: Did you know polls are showing that 88 percent of Americans will support Bush if he decides to strike back?

  Walter: Then I say let’s round up the 12 percent who won’t and bomb the shit out of them.

  And then there was this guy to talk about:

  Jeff: I heard Bin Laden has four wives.

  Walter: I think the U.S. should get him back by giving him four more.

  For weeks there was almost nothing else on the news:

  Jeff: A whole bunch of sporting events were canceled, but now they’re getting back into it.

  Walter: Yeah, it was sad: Last week I turned on SportsCenter, and all it showed was a bunch of ESPN guys watching CNN.

  There are certain subjects that in my opinion will never be okay to joke about, so I have a few things under a heading of “no-gos” that I simply won’t make light of. Of course the 9/11 tragedy is at the top of that list. But as the one-year anniversary grew closer, I listened to Leno and Letterman consistently joking about Osama bin Laden and the continued and unsuccessful hunt for him. Then one day it finally hit me—“I know where Bin Laden is!”

  I knew I might be pushing the limits of what was okay onstage, but the mind-set of the terrorist is so far removed from anything that we in the free world can fathom, I knew there was comedy just waiting to be unearthed. And who was the face of all that we loathed and who was it that a vast majority of the country wanted brought to justice? Of course, it was Bin Laden. But no one could find the SOB. I began to postulate, like many people, that maybe he was already dead. Of course his annoying videos kept popping up on the Internet, to help squelch that fantasy, but I began to imagine, what if he was dead, but was still in hiding! And if he was hiding, where would be the perfect place for him to be? Ah HA! He’d be in my trunk with all my little guys.

  As lamebrained as the idea sounded, I knew I wasn’t doing Shakespeare or Neil Simon. When you boil it down, all I do onstage on a nightly basis is… well, a puppet show. Additionally, I was working in front of no more than three or four hundred people at a time, so why not experiment with a Dead Osama character?

  Achmed: Finally, we get to talk about me!

  Jeff: Actually, this is the guy before you.

  Achmed: WHAT?

  Walter: Ha ha.

  So there was the idea. But before I moved forward on the actual physical puppet and potentially wasted a lot of time, I knew I had to carefully consider what I would be doing with this guy onstage. Here was a perfect example of that fine line between what I could do onstage with characters, compared to as a regular stand-up comic. Success would be unlikely for any comic who might dare to don a terrorist outfit and jump around on a comedy club stage telling terrorist jokes. Oh sure, there’d be a few venues here and there where it might go over, but I’m fairly certain that the public outcry and the fear from club management of any reprisals would keep that comic out of work until he came up with something else.

  My opening act was now Canadian comic Jeff Rothpan, who, most important, was someone whom I could write with very well. I’d tried out other writers in the past and almost no one worked out for any length of time. One guy, however, who a few years before had written some good stuff for Walter was a young, little-known stand-up comic at that time named Judd Apatow. (Yes, that Judd Apatow.) Sometime around 1996, I was paying Judd a measly $50 a joke. He’s earning slightly more than that now for his creativity. Here’s one of his jokes that Walter used for a good while:

  Walter and I had been talking about the lack of sex Walter has experienced as he’s gotten older…

  Jeff: I thought making love got better with age.

  Walter: Hang on to THAT dream, pal.

  As simple as that joke is, it was a perfect, surefire line for Walter that worked every single time, and in front of any kind of audience. Okay, well, not at the Cub Scout banquets.

  Walt
er: Way to go.

  Jeff: What?

  Walter: You paid Apatow so little, it motivated him to become one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood.

  Jeff: I guess you could look at it that way.

  Walter: Cheap bastard.

  Judd was a rarity, because almost without fail, every other writer would inevitably come up with dialogue that was typical “ventriloquist vs. the dummy” crap. It was difficult to find a writer that could keep in his head that he was supposed to be writing straight stand-up material in dialogue form, and not simply “wooden dummy” jokes. I thought many times that if I saw one more “hand up the ass” joke, I was going to throw my chair out a window. Rothpan, like Apatow, understood that the dummies were characters and should be treated as real people with their own points of view. As I soon discovered, Rothpan’s true forte was pumping out current-topic jokes for all the radio I was doing at the time. I loved this, because while I would concentrate on working on evergreen material for the stage show, Rothpan would work on the current topic stuff that would be great, but would age and then I’d have to throw out when that particular subject was no longer in the news. Plus, Rothpan was good with the blank page, and I was better with punch up and expansion. Our system was pretty simple: First, Rothpan went through the news and picked out stories. We discussed them and agreed on the ones we thought were joke-worthy. Then he would write some gags about those subjects, e-mail them to me, and I would put my own spin on everything, sometimes adding more jokes related to what he had done, plus rewording his lines to fit the characters more in my style. As a team, we turned out some really great stuff.