by Jeff Dunham
Walter: Little did the audience know you really were a dumbass who forgot where he was.
Jeff: Thanks for that.
Peanut: That’s why we’re here. Just keepin’ it real, dude.
If you want to see a desperate man with an unrelenting dummy, you can see the whole thing unfold in the extras on Arguing with Myself. For me, it was a nightmare. The audience and the crew thought it was great.
It ended up a fantastic night, and I remember walking offstage after the second show and thinking, “Wow… making a DVD was a lot of work. I’m glad that’s over!”
I had no idea what I was talking about. The real work hadn’t even begun, and, we still had to sell it to somebody. We had potentially a great product, but no one who wanted to air it. As a result, the raw footage just sat untouched for weeks. I finally got impatient enough that I got a copy of the tape and edited the show on my PowerBook. It was great, but it still had nowhere to go.
Finally in January of 2006, Creative Artists Agency set up a meeting at Comedy Central for the trio of Stu, Judi, and Robert. They were pitching to Dave Bernath, executive vice president of acquisitions at Comedy Central. The three headed to New York City. According to the reports I got later, Dave listened politely to their fifteen-minute spiel, and then gave them a very emphatic no. And of course it was for the same old reason: Nobody at the network wanted a ventriloquist on Comedy Central.
To this day, no one can tell me exactly what during that meeting finally made Dave relent. He listened to the trio’s arguments and admitted that if someone were flipping channels, they would probably stop and watch me for the simple fact that my guys and I looked like nothing else that was on TV anywhere.
Stu thinks it was out of sheer frustration simply to get them out of the office, but after some final begging (everyone agreed that actual begging took place) Dave decided to give me a shot and agreed to buying a fully produced one-hour special for $75,000 and promised one—count it: ONE—airing. And by the way, $75,000 for a special was pretty much next to nothing. We didn’t care. We just wanted it on the air because we believed it would get good ratings and that solid DVD sales would follow.
Walter: Good thing they bought it or Stu would have ended up on your other knee… with your hand stuck up his… back.
So now that the special was sold, we had that mountain of postproduction work to conquer. And when I said that the work hadn’t even begun, I wasn’t kidding. By the time all was said and done, a team of probably thirty-plus people and I had spent approximately $130,000 on the thing, plus hundreds if not thousands of man-hours. I was still making almost exactly the same amount of money that I had five and ten years before. The hope for a better future was still in the air, but hope didn’t pay the mortgage and grocery bills. I was still hammering away every Thursday through Sunday at clubs all over the United States, and now I had a huge loan to pay back.
We finished our cut of what we thought the forty-two minutes should look like for airplay—that’s an hour show allowing for all the commercials—but then sent the entire eighty minutes to Comedy Central for their input and changes. After not much argument, the final final cut was agreed upon and now there was nothing left to do but promotion.
Bubba J.: My daddy never got a promotion.
Jeff: Did he work hard at his job?
Bubba J.: He never got a job either.
From what I understand, no one at Comedy Central was expecting anything big for my special in the ratings. A typical new episode of South Park drew a rating of 1.5, and for cable, that’s pretty darned big. The premiere of any other typical stand-up special would draw somewhere around a 0.6. Comedy Central said that for us, a 0.6 would have been just fine, a 1.0 would be a grand slam.
Arguing with Myself premiered on Comedy Central on Saturday, April 8, 2006. Ratings would be reported in New York the following Monday, usually in the morning. I was home and waiting.
We really had no idea what to expect. We had done everything possible in print, on air, and on the Web. And, by the way, we received very little support from Comedy Central. We felt like they just wanted to air it and move on. It was seemingly an embarrassment to them.
Sometime in the morning on Monday, Stu missed Dave Bernath’s call, but the message was, “We need to talk.” Stu remembers saying, “How bad could it be? Could it be worse than a 0.5? A Yule log at Christmas gets a 0.4, for God’s sake.”
When Stu finally got him on the phone, Dave was still stunned. “I just don’t believe the numbers; I don’t believe how good they are.”
It was a 1.9, which translated to 1.7 million viewers. That was as good as a South Park rating, and it was the second-highest rated show on Comedy Central that weekend. It also attracted the third-largest audience of any stand-up special premiere on Comedy Central year-to-date.
When Bernath said he didn’t believe the numbers, he wasn’t kidding. They repeated the special ten days later, and it was the second most watched show on CC for that day, second only to The Daily Show. And now, Bernath was once again the genius at Comedy Central.
Sweet Daddy Dee: That’s when I knew I should be managing you.
Jeff: But you made a big commission after the years of hard work had already been done.
Sweet Daddy Dee: Welcome to Hollywood!
Even though ratings were something to brag about, we had to pay equal, if not more attention to DVD sales.
As I was an unknown commodity to Comedy Central, I certainly was a nobody in the retail DVD world. I’d never had anything to sell in retail, so no one, including Image, knew if I’d sell even twenty DVDs.
Arguing with Myself was released for sale in retail and online to the public on the Tuesday following the premiere. Although pre-sales had been big on Amazon, that didn’t necessarily translate to actual in-store retail sales. What if all my fans were cybergeeks, and no one who shopped in actual stores put the DVD in their carts? Just because Walmart was carrying them didn’t mean they would sell. No one would know anything for certain until numbers came in from the stores. In the meantime, I just kept working the clubs.
Walter: So, what were the numbers?
Jeff: You have to read the next chapter.
Walter: Fine. Turn the damn page!
CHAPTER NINE
To the Stars and
Back Times Infinity
We had to wait through the week to get any kind of DVD sales numbers back from Image. Like ticket sales for movies, you look at total sales after the first weekend to see how you did. We were optimistic, because not only were presale numbers good, but the title actually reached number one in comedy two weeks before the air date. This was, of course, due to a bunch of loyal fans who had been anticipating a DVD for a long time. We’d done everything we could up to that moment to get the word out, but we weren’t slacking off just yet either. We continued to send out e-mail blasts to my list, plus I would talk about the DVD at every live show and on every radio and TV interview possible.
Early on we learned that a typical good-selling stand-up comedy DVD sold a total of twenty-five thousand units over its lifetime. Unfortunately, we’d spent so much money on the production, even at twenty-five thousand of them, I’d still owe the bank a lot of dough. John Power, my business manager, said we’d need to sell forty thousand DVDs just to break even. Even our distributor was saying they would be very happy with twenty-five thousand in the title’s entire lifetime. Holy crap. Robert told me I was crazy and Stu just looked at me stone-faced when I said I thought we’d do a hundred thousand in the first year. Almost no stand-up titles did that.
When we tallied the numbers nationwide for the first weekend, it looked promising. We’d sold 3,827 in the first week. Four days later Comedy Central aired the special for the second time, and once again we pushed it online and through e-mails. We also purchased a couple of thirty-second spots during the broadcast, advertising the DVD.
Throughout the next few weeks and months the sales continued to build. In the DVD world, a title
goes platinum when one hundred thousand units are sold. That had been my goal, but everyone told me not to get my hopes up.
But… we didn’t hit platinum in a year. We hit it in three months. By September, when I was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman for the first time, we’d sold more than a quarter of a million units. It didn’t stop there. When the holidays rolled around, the sales had grown almost exponentially. In the month of December alone, we sold nearly fifty thousand copies. It was going bonkers.
Peanut: I remember dancing around the room.
Jeff: To celebrate the fifty thousand copies sold?
Peanut: No, Bubba J. was hollering and shooting at my feet.
My first appearance on Letterman was in the fall of that same year, but not until writing this passage in this book had I really thought about how long the journey to get even there had been. More interesting to me, however, was that I’d never recognized the bit of irony that prevailed both that night and in 1990 when I first appeared on Carson . It was now September 2006, and Walter shared the stage with me on Letterman, just as he had on Carson sixteen years before. It seemed a lifetime had passed since I sat at my workbench in my apartment in Waco, sculpting Walter’s head. I had created Walter nineteen years before, while at the same time watching the very two programs that were to make him famous.
Maybe the reason I hadn’t thought too much about irony or the significance of being on Letterman was because after that night in 2006, I’d tried to completely shut the whole thing out of my head. Not many people have ever heard about the absolute debacle that took place that evening. What happened just moments after I walked offstage after my performance has made me not only never want to watch the playback of the show, but I also don’t even like thinking about that night. I didn’t know if I was going to tell this story, but I’ve spilled just about everything else, so here goes.
The occasion for my appearance wasn’t exactly anything I could have imagined even a month before it happened, but it was a vintage wacky Letterman gambit for which I was most appreciative. It was Ventriloquist Week on The Late Show. The idea was that each night a different ventriloquist would be introduced in one of the very early segments of the show, and then do four or so minutes of his or her best stuff. I was slotted for Thursday night and even before the booking, I knew what my set was going to be. 9/11 was five years behind us, and I’d honed some incredibly strong material with Walter making fun of terrorists. In the clubs, this stuff was getting absolutely huge laughs. And it wasn’t inappropriate. I was now doing the same material at very conservative corporate gigs where being politically correct was an absolute must. Walter was simply saying the stuff about terrorists that a lot of us were thinking. This was the perfect example of me being able to say more than the average stand-up because it wasn’t me saying it.
Walter: I think it’s some kind of a reverse insult that you even imply that it could be you.
Jeff: I agree.
Walter: Right. Wait.… What?
Before a stand-up performs on Letterman or Leno, the entire set has to be seen and approved by at least one of the producers of the show. In my case, Eddie Brill was the producer who worked on Letterman with most of the guest stand-up comics, and he had worked with me very diligently, making sure that all the material I was going to do was completely copacetic. He came and saw me live doing the set, and he’d gotten everything approved by other higher-up producers at the show. I was ready to go.
Thursday is now the coveted night on Letterman, as that’s when ratings are usually highest. Out of the other four vents that week, I was given the prime spot because of the recent success of the Comedy Central special, plus the huge DVD sales. We were now well over the double platinum mark of two hundred thousand DVDs sold.
Being introduced by David Letterman was every bit as exciting as Johnny Carson so many years before. We hit our mark, and got started.
Jeff: You’ve been looking forward to this?
Walter: Oh sure. I love Dave.
Jeff: Why?
Walter: I don’t know.… A few more years and he and I are going to look exactly alike.
Jeff: What about Paul?
Walter: We already do.
We continued with some jokes about Walter’s wife and their sex life, then he made fun of mine. Next we moved on to our travels and airline security jokes. These were the pieces that had been doing so well for so many months—jokes that would get applause breaks from American audiences from all walks of life. A few weeks before, the new “no liquids over three ounces” rule had gone into effect:
Walter: That “no liquids” thing is a pain.…
Jeff: They do that because those potential terrorists were trying to sneak explosives on inside shampoo bottles.
Walter: That’s pretty funny.
Jeff: What?
Walter: Like those guys actually use SHAMPOO. What was it? Head and Shoulders and Neck and Back?
Jeff: I don’t know.
Walter: Gee, Your Ass Smells Terrific?
Jeff: Walter, the terrorist stuff is very serious.
Walter: There’s the one group of folks I don’t understand at all… damn suicide bombers.… Good lord… what the hell is this, “Eye e eye e eye eye eeeeeeee…” (Then Walter made an exploding sound…) “PCHCHCHHHH… WAY TO GO, HABIB! BETCHA CAN’T FRICKIN’ DO IT AGAIN! Eye eye eye eeeeeeee… PCHHHH HH…” Dumbass.
Jeff: Well, you know, Walter, most of those guys truly believe that if they martyr themselves like that, there will be seventy-two virgins waiting for them in paradise.
Walter: April fools, dumbass! If there are any virgins waiting for you, it will be seventy-two guys, JUST LIKE YOU!
Walter: Seventy-two virgins… why not seventy-two slutty broads who know what the hell they’re doing?
Walter: “Eye e eye e eye eye eeeeeeee…” (long pause) PCHCHCHHHH. He had a longer fuse.
Walter: I wonder if they play THAT joke on each other every once in a while?
Jeff: What joke?
Walter: “Eye e eye e eye eye eeeeeeee…” Click… what the—?… PCHCHCHHHH.
Walter: HO! DID YOU SEE JAMIL’S FACE!? It’s gone now, BUT DID YOU SEE HIS FACE!?
Those were jokes that made me laugh. And they made the producers laugh… and the audience. Applause breaks are a big deal for comics, and I got seven in that set.
The bit wasn’t perfect because I took a few chances with ad-libs, especially at the end, but for the most part, the entire set was great. A friend of mine who was in the audience said Dave laughed pretty hard at the “slutty broads” joke. I sat in the Green Room for the rest of the show, happy as a clam. The guests who followed me were Ted Turner and Fergie, but most of the details were a blur as I sat back and tried not to grin like the Cheshire cat.
The show ended and I looked at my watch, counting the hours until the show aired. Soon Eddie Brill came running into the room. “We have a problem,” Eddie said.
“With what?” I asked.
“Can you go out and do your set again before the audience leaves?” he blurted.
“Do what?” I spat back. He was in a huge hurry and kept glancing over his shoulder back toward the studio.
This was a nightmare even I couldn’t have imagined: My set, and every single joke, word for word, had been approved by the Letterman producers. But the person who hadn’t heard the jokes was the CBS censor who sat in on each and every taping, just to make sure there were no problems. On any other day, what I had done that night would have been fine. But lo and behold, in New York City on that particular day, many of the high-profile leaders from the Middle East were in town for a gathering at the United Nations. Now, considering the material I had just done, the censor had watched my act and said it couldn’t air. Eddie and the other producers wanted to detain the audience and have me do the set again without all the terrorist references and jokes. Those were the biggest laughs in the bit, and I had organized the pieces together in such a manner that the laughs built. Plus, t
he audience had already heard the jokes once! How could I take the teeth out of my act and then expect them to laugh a second time at the B material? I protested and the clock ticked. Within a minute or two it was too late. Most of the audience had gone. Now what?
Eddie left for a quick powwow, then came back and told me that the show would do something they almost never did, and that was to edit my set. The beauty of live television is that the unexpected can happen. But even in live broadcast events today, there is a built-in delay of a few seconds so if an inappropriate word or sentence slips out, it can be muted or bleeped, and thus not be heard by the viewing public. In a nightly talk show, they pride themselves in keeping it as live as possible, but in a rare instance like this, an exception had to be made. I was about to be sliced and diced.
I asked if I could stick around to give my two cents’ worth during the editing process, but that was nixed and understandably so. They had to get this thing done quickly and they didn’t need me looking over their shoulders and arguing.