by Jeff Dunham
“Twenty-five thousand?” I thought. “If we get it on the air, it’s going to be a lot more than that.”
Peanut: I was tired of being poor and hungry.
Jeff: It wasn’t that bad. No one went hungry.
Peanut: Oh yeah? Did you see Achmed?
Remember my formula for great television comedy? For it to be good, you need a laugh about every ten seconds. In my eighty-minute show, that would come to 480 laughs. Granted, if you get a twenty-second laugh, you’re cutting down the numbers. But you get the idea. This shit ain’t easy. I had work to do.
I also had to decide what characters to use. Too long with one character and it would drag. Peanut, Walter, and José were a given. But who else? The Dead Osama was simply not an option. He was old news and outdated. After Osama, I had been pushing myself to come up with a character that was even more outside my comfort zone.
I had never forgotten what I had originally intended when creating Peanut, and that was to make fun of prejudice. It cracked me up when black comics would make fun of white people. They would point out laughable aspects about myself and my race that I couldn’t see, because I lived it every day. In the summer of 2004 during the ventriloquist convention in the dealers’ room, I picked up a character that had been built by figure maker Tim Selberg. It was a little African American guy who had a tough-looking scowl and made you laugh just by looking at him. So as to not lose a week of work, during the day I attended the convention, but at night I would drive up the freeway to the Funny Bone in Newport, Kentucky. I asked Tim if I could try his creation out a couple of nights. Once again, just like the Dead Osama, I had to carefully write jokes that would fit my purposes and not be racist or offensive to a majority of the room. I decided to introduce this little guy as my P.I.M.P. No, not my pimp, but my “Play-uh In Management Profession.” He was my career manager. In this way, I would be acknowledging the obvious hipness of the way he was dressed, but also as my manager, he would be “above” me the minute he hit the stage. Next I came up with a few jokes that made fun of white people, and especially me for being “tight and white.” I simply wanted to see how the character went over.
He killed. My goal was to never be disparaging to blacks, and to make sure as many people as possible thought the character and bit were funny, no matter what their race. To ensure the former, I would go outside the club and stop African American couples as they were walking out to talk about what they had just seen. I told them, “Be brutally honest. I don’t want to offend. I’m simply trying to make everyone laugh. Tell me how or where or if any of what I did was offensive to you.”
Very quickly I discovered I was on the right track. The laughs were big from both blacks and whites, and as far as the people with whom I spoke after the shows, I didn’t seem to be offending anyone.
I purchased the figure from Tim, and told him I would put him to good use. What I didn’t know at the time was that this wasn’t the first of this dummy that Tim had sold. There was nothing wrong with that—I just didn’t realize he wasn’t one-of-a-kind. There were in fact two others, being used by vents in different parts of the country. I was completely bummed when I found this out later, but this was a no-go for me. I had to be completely original. So out to the workshop I went, ready to create my own African American figure.
My workshop was my two-car garage. I had a workbench and just about every shop tool imaginable. I had built my last helicopter in that garage—if there hadn’t been bay windows for the tail to stick out, it wouldn’t have fit!—as well as many things for my girls. Dummy repairs took place there, and it was my refuge. After being on the Best Damn and sitting next to guys the size of John Kruk and John Salley, I realized that Walter was too small. It was here that I had created a larger version of Walter, once again starting from nothing but a pile of clay and my face in a mirror. I now had to create someone who was nothing like me. Most of the jokes I had come up with had worked for the little guy, but every bit as important, the relationship with me was believable and the character was strong.
To create a face first in clay, I needed inspiration. With Walter I had stared in a mirror. Obviously, that wouldn’t work here. So I got on the Internet and found some black guys whose faces I really liked. I printed full-color eight-by-tens of Usher, 50 Cent, Michael Irvin, the godfather of soul, James Brown, and Chris Tucker. Then I hung all the photos on the wall above the workbench. It must have been a little disconcerting or somewhat unsettling for my kids and the boys from down the street when they walked by the garage and looked in, only to see me, the one white guy, sitting on a stool, staring at big photos of a bunch of black dudes. The funniest part was, Chris Tucker actually lived six houses down from us, and every once in a while, he would come tooling down the cul-de-sac on his Segway. I would have given just about anything if he’d come down that month and peeked in.
As I sculpted the head and face, my goal was to make my dummy ethnic, but not racist. I kept this goal in mind throughout the entire process, including when I was installing movements, painting him, and even having his clothes made. The entire process took a few weeks, and I had him ready for the next convention, which was in July. From then on I used him onstage as much as possible, developing material as quickly as I could. Of all the guys I’ve built, he’s probably my favorite character in terms of creativity. I love his features, his coloring (on close inspection, you’ll see a virtual rainbow of colors in his face), plus the movements I took extra time in installing. It always gets a nice laugh when he raises his upper lip, and a sucking sound emerges, as if he’s sucking on his teeth.
Though I thought that the jokes I’d come up with quickly at the convention were promising, I still certainly didn’t have enough for an entire routine for this guy. I also needed to really understand him so I could successfully and fully develop his character. Unlike Peanut and Walter, who were just exaggerated extensions of my own kind of thinking, inside of me was no hip, streetwise brother. And being a pimp? I obviously don’t know anything other than what a pimp did, not how or why or when or with exactly whom. So to be convincing and make him seem legit, I had to do some research.
At first Judi and Robert hired a few black comics to help me out in all aspects of trying to create this new little guy, but ultimately I ended up having to rent some videos and do most of the figuring-out on my own.
Snoop Dogg’s Puff Puff Pass Tour documentary was unbelievably insightful. That led me straight to Archbishop Don “Magic” Juan, who was featured in the film and had been “spiritual advisor” to not only Snoop, but to Mike Tyson, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Kimberly “Lil’ Kim” Jones, and Mariah Carey, just to name a few. According to the Web, the Bishop had been a street pimp for many years before he became a preacher and spiritual mentor. But what really caught my attention, besides his look and dress, was that he won the award of Pimp of the Year thirteen years straight at Chicago’s annual Players Ball. There was an annual convention of pimps. Awesome.
The Bishop was the subject of the 1999 HBO documentary Pimps Up Ho’s Down (which, incidentally, would have been the title of this book, but it was already taken), and the film and the archbishop became my touchstones for the creation of this new character. The documentary was an invaluable research tool, helping with the nomenclature, diction, manipulation, and of course the look of what became a character that was a big leap for anything else I’d attempted up to that point. The character’s name, Sweet Daddy Dee, by the way, was suggested to me by Darryl Quarles, who wrote the film Big Momma’s House, starring Martin Lawrence. Darryl also said, “When he says his name, jump on the SWEEEEEEET….” The teeth sucking I just hit on by accident. As for some of the street vocabulary and phrasing, I again headed to the Internet for that. I downloaded urban and street dictionaries for days, poring over everything and choosing the best stuff for making Sweet Daddy sound legit.
Sweet Daddy Dee: Thanks for making me sound street.
Jeff: You’re welcome.
Sweet Daddy Dee:
At least the white folks bought it.
Aware that I could be stepping into a hornet’s nest of controversy, I continued to try to handle the whole thing with sensitivity. Just because an audience knows and likes a comic doesn’t stop even loyal fans from turning very quickly if they don’t like what they’re hearing. If I didn’t do this right, I would easily be labeled a racist. On the other hand, if I was too politically correct, it wouldn’t be funny. Once again, I was pushing myself up against a very fine line. The main theme of the relationship onstage was making sure that the audience knew that Sweet Daddy was hip, and I was not. All the fun had to be made of me, pointing out the foibles of being white and, well, lame.
Jeff: Sweet Daddy, what do you call white people who try to act black?
Sweet Daddy Dee: Irritating.
I also didn’t hesitate to let the audience in on the joke. Everyone knew of course that this was a white guy trying to be a black guy, who was trying to make fun of the white guy:
Sweet Daddy Dee: I’m like coffee.
Jeff: Coffee?
Sweet Daddy Dee: Yeah. Before you can experience any of my brown goodness, I gotta go through a big-ass white filter.
The most obvious and trite thing I did with Sweet Daddy was make him a pimp. But that was a very thought-out and purposeful move. In doing that, I was shining a glaring light on the whole thing right from the start, so the audience didn’t have time to get nervous about what they were seeing. Then I would immediately start in with him bashing me for being so white, and we were off to the races.
Sweet Daddy Dee: That’s why I love white folks—if you make fun of them, they actually enjoy it!
Jeff: I’d like to think most of us have a good sense of humor.
Sweet Daddy Dee: Either that or you just don’t get it.
While honing the act with Sweet Daddy in all corners of the United States and in front of all types of audiences, the most surprising revelation was this: Multiracial audiences and more urban audiences reacted the most favorably to Sweet Daddy. The hipper the crowd, the more black people in the audience, the more and bigger the laughs. In the South, on the other hand, and the more white the crowd, audiences were more tentative. No matter where else I took him, there was always an ooh cool, where’s he going with this? reaction when I first introduced him and pulled him out. In the South, it was more quiet—perhaps because the white folks were afraid that they’d be reinforcing old stereotypes if they laughed, which of course was the opposite of what I was trying to accomplish.
In truth, as I stated before, the butt of the jokes when Sweet Daddy Dee is onstage is me, not him. I’m the dumb, hopelessly unhip white guy. When he says “Word” to me, I’m lost, having absolutely no idea that it’s a term from the street.
Also, throughout the bit, it’s usually Sweet Daddy who raises the issue of race. Scanning the audience, he asks if there’s another brother in the house. When he gets a shout-out, he says, “Yo, brother: RUN! We outnumbered like at a Dwight Yoakam concert!”
He probably could have said “NASCAR race” and gotten the same laugh, but I saved NASCAR not as a punch line, but a setup joke for the next character. Sweet Daddy confesses that he’s completely bamboozled by white folks’ fascination with auto racing. To him it’s just three hours of guys driving around in circles. “Hey, they’re makin’ a left turn! Hey, they’re makin’ another left turn!”—leave the room for fifteen minutes and come back—“Hey, they just made another left turn!”
Bubba J.: I’ve seen guys make right turns.
Jeff: You have?
Bubba J.: Usually into the wall.
Since this was to be my first DVD, material for the preexisting characters almost picked itself. All I had to do was divide the show up into segments and decide how long to perform with each one. Then I just picked my favorite material for Peanut, Walter, and José.
We had chosen a tape date of August 13, 2005, and as the day approached and as I honed material, we began to wonder if in eighty minutes, four characters was enough. Robert asked me if there was another character that I thought would be strong enough for the show. I reminded him of my little white trash buddy, Bubba J., who had been my answer to Bergen’s Mortimer Snerd.
In 1993 I was using an earlier version of Bubba J., who was perfect during the Clinton administration, as Arkansas and Southern jokes were running rampant. NASCAR had also been growing in popularity, so subjects for Bubba’s material were plentiful. Like Dead Osama, I put him aside after a few years, wanting to explore other ideas. But now I thought this might be the time to resurrect him. Stylistically, however, he didn’t match the other guys. All the “humans” in the show were “hard” figures. Peanut was a “soft” figure, but he was non-human, so it sat okay in my head. If I wanted Bubba to be a significant character, I now had to build another dummy. We were now in mid-July. Was I truly going to build an entirely new dummy plus have the new routine ready in one month?
It seemed crazy, but I knew I could do it. Once again, I sat down with clay, but this time no pictures.
In the middle of construction of the head, I told my friend, the figure maker Alan Semok, that I was redoing Bubba J. He suggested that I make one of his eyes move. “One?” I asked. “Just one?” Then I thought about it for a second. That was a genius idea!
Bubba J.: Thank you, dear friend Jeff.
Jeff: For what, Bubba J.?
Bubba J.: That’s the first time my name and the word genius were ever used in sentences that close together.
Bubba J.’s material was not that difficult to choose, as I could pull from the routine from a decade before. I added some NASCAR stuff plus a few new jokes here and there, and practiced with him as much as I could before the DVD taping. The NASCAR reference would be set up perfectly by Sweet Daddy in the act, and now when Bubba J. said he loved NASCAR, it got an even bigger laugh.
Bubba J. was very easy for me to write for, simply because I had grown up in Texas and I knew a bunch of folks who were just like him. In fact, I actually don’t think I’d be much different from him, had one or two things been slightly different for me growing up… like getting braces, for example.
Bubba J.: You mean your legs were crooked too?
Jeff: Well, not leg braces; teeth braces.
Bubba J.: I’d rather walk straight and eat crooked.
For the DVD taping, we’d chosen the newly refurbished and beautiful OC Pavilion in nearby Santa Ana, California. By my standards back then, we had a large audience. About six hundred folks squeezed in and were ready to rock. I had invested another $70,000 and now we were at $120,000 for the endeavor. The pressure was on.
We were scheduled to shoot two shows that night, and would edit between the two later, picking the best pieces of both shows and mending them back together as one. We had five cameras and lots of tape. Out in the production truck behind the theater, Stu and our director yelled, “Action!”
An hour and a half later we had in the can one of the best times I’d had onstage in a long time. My team all came backstage afterward, beaming. Stu said, “You really don’t even have to do another one! We got it!” He was kidding of course. All he meant was that it went really, really well.
During the show, a guy near the back of the audience got up during the Walter segment, probably for a restroom break or whatever. Having worked clubs for so long, I was ready with a few prepared ad-libs, but also I was feeling comfortable enough to really screw with the guy and whoever he was with. The jokes were good and the laughs were great. It turned out that this “Michael” was actually a neighbor of ours and was there with my wife and a bunch of our friends. I had no idea when he got up, as all I could see from the stage was a silhouette. It wasn’t until Walter started yelling back and forth with his wife in the audience, while we waited for Michael to come back, that I realized who I was screwing with. It made the bit even funnier.
Walter: Did you tell them that adult diaper sales went up after that aired?
Jeff: No.
&
nbsp; Walter: Pretty certain they did.
After the show, Michael was at the bar, and since things had gone so well, I accepted the two shots of tequila he bought me. I was so happy with the way things went that even though I had another show to go, I figured I could loosen up a bit.
But this was ten minutes before the second show was to start. The new audience had already loaded in, and Stu was yelling, “Places!” It wasn’t until I started walking back to the stage that I thought, “Uh oh. This isn’t good: I haven’t had anything to eat all day. Nada. Zilch. And I just downed two big slugs of Patrón Platinum. Oops.”
Yep, the timing was just about perfect. As the show went on and with a slightly clouded head, I forgot to check Walter’s arms before I pulled him out of the case, and in the middle of our routine for that second crowd, his arms fell to his sides, out of his typical “crossed” pose. Since we were taping, it was no big deal to stop, fix his arms, and then keep going. Trouble was, after I stopped to fix his arms, when I tried to start up again, I had NO idea where I had left off. All I could remember was, “shots of tequila: BAD.” We didn’t have a teleprompter because I’d done the show a million times, so there I stood… clueless. I was trying to shake the cobwebs, but there was just too much booze and not enough brain cells. It doesn’t look like anything is wrong on the tape, and the guys in the truck thought the same thing because no one tried to help me. They were all laughing, thinking I was just screwing around since the first performance had gone so well. The great part was, Walter kept making jokes about what an idiot I was for forgetting my own show, so that made everyone think all the more that I knew exactly what I was doing.