Episode #414
Jeff Dunham is undoubtedly the most successful ventriloquist comedian of our lifetime. The 60-year-old from Dallas made his first appearance on The Tonight Show back in 1990, competed in disguise as “Pi-Rat” this fall on The Masked Singer, and in between, he has released 10 comedy specials — six on Comedy Central starting in 2006, followed by a primetime NBC special, two Netflix specials, then back to Comedy Central during the pandemic, where he debuted a “Completely Unrehearsed Last-Minute Pandemic Holiday Special” for the Friday after Thanksgiving 2020. His 11th special, Me The People, came out this Black Friday, also exclusively on Comedy Central. Dunham sat down with me to talk about his career and the state of comedy/ventriloquism.
Here’s a preview of his newest special:
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This transcript has been edited and condensed only slightly for your convenience.
We pick it up after my opening question, asking if the Dunham household had World Cup fever! Alas, they did not…
I used to play soccer as a kid. That’s probably why I don’t appreciate it anymore, because my parents made me play it.
They just wanted to stall you before you could start your burgeoning career as a ventriloquist, right? Try soccer first!
No! I was already doing that. They were trying to get me away from the dolls, I think.
(NOTE: After thanking Jeff for joining me and congratulating him on the new special, Dunham alerted me that his special will remain Comedy Central exclusive for a few months before joining the Paramount+ platform)
The press release says that your 2019 Netflix special, Jeff Dunham: Beside Himself, still ranks among the top five most-watched Netflix comedy specials?!
Wow! I’d forgotten that. I always pay attention to the Comedy Central stuff because the numbers are so big and they give exact numbers there….That’s pretty great!
What’s even greater about that to me, is so many other comedians and showrunners have complained they can’t even get hard numbers from the streaming giant, so the idea that you’d know where you ranked is amazing to me.
In all these years. It’s like, we have agents and people who go ‘No no, I can get the numbers.’ Like, how do you do that? And then nobody will tell you, but it’s always the agents. Somehow the agents have, I don’t know, backdoors into there. Maybe there’s couches and horrible things that go on to get numbers, but I don’t know.
I do have compromising photos of Robbie Praw somewhere, so
(laughs) Maybe that’s how it works. I have no earthly idea. So there are a handful of people who have proven they get real numbers, so, great.
Your new specials since then have premiered back on Comedy Central, where you earlier broke network-viewership records for the cable channel in the late 2000s. Does that history go back long enough, that that’s what keeps you loyal to them, in the face of Netflix money or an NBC wanting to do a special with you, that you’re like, no, Comedy Central, that’s my home?
I love Comedy Central simply because it’s not the dark abyss that happens on, Netflix is great. But Comedy Central tends to re-air things, and so it’s in your face and it’s different than a subscription service where you have to search for it and download it yourself. They only have X amount of acreage that they can advertise stuff. Your interface looks way different than mine. So it’s whatever you’re interested in, those are the things that get promoted to you, so if you haven’t ever looked for me or searched, then you’re never going to see me on Netflix unless you actually look for it yourself. Which is fine. I get it. But I love that Comedy Central actually does promotions and repeats, so it’s always there. People flipping through the channels. There it is, on cable TV. It’s great.
I want to go back before that, if you don’t mind, because I know I’ve mentioned this to your manager Judi (Marmel). I was living in Arizona in the early 2000s, and I have this distinct memory of seeing you perform at the Tempe Improv in like 2002, and it was the very first time I ever saw fans bring merch to a show.
I stumbled into the merchandise thing. I first started coming out with plush Peanut dolls in ‘97. And it was great. It was crazy. I think it’s just because of my characters and what they are and they just it’s kind of lends itself to, How can I not have merchandise? Then we did T-shirts and stuff like that. You give somebody a doll, and they love the doll. And then there’s the event comes back again and they can get bring it back? I just, I understand it. It’s great. It’s really fun. Yeah. I have people that will bring Peanut dolls from back then that I signed back then and have me re-sign it. So it’s pretty great. A long time ago.
I mean that’s that’s a testament to the loyalty that you inspire in your fans.
Well, I treat it like a business. I’m an artist onstage, but a business person when I’m offstage and I look at it like Steve Jobs did. When the new year would come along, you knew that Apple was gonna give you what you wanted. You’re gonna find something cool, whatever it was, they’d slightly improved it. The launch was in the fall of that year. You know they will have improved upon what you like. But then every once in a while, Steve would bring out something that you didn’t know you needed, and you loved it. So I try to do the same thing. When people come to my show. I give them what they expect and what they love and make it a little better than last time and more material and different material. But then I also try and come up with something new. So when they come to the show, they’ll see something completely different. So I think it’s just a matter of a real careful balance. of giving people what they expect and what they didn’t know they wanted.
Right, but two decades ago, you had such devoted fans, and yet you’re still playing at the comedy clubs. You couldn’t convince Comedy Central to give you airtime. And you had been in the business already, for a couple of decades at that point. You’d done Carson, you had Hertz commercials (shown below, circa 1996). You’d done Broadway. You had all this stuff. And yet…
I completely understand it because a ventriloquist act, on the outset, is kinda sad.
Hey, my last name is McCarthy. You don’t have to tell me.
Oh, yeah, that’s right! It’s just kinda sad at the outset. The trouble begins when somebody learns the art of ventriloquism. It’s just a skill. A developed skill that you take a little practice at, it’s like playing a musical instrument or a sport. Anybody can learn it. That’s where the trouble begins. Because then people think, Well, I’ve learned the skill of ventriloquism. Now I’m a ventriloquist. Now I’m going to do a show. Wait wait wait! You have to learn to be funny. You have to learn to entertain. So it’s too easy to become a ventriloquist because you can just get onstage after you’ve learned the skill. So becoming a comedian to me is infinitely more important than learning that skill. So that’s why those dedicated fans keep showing up over and over is because I think they find the act funny.
But how did you psychologically get through that part of the grind before to make that first special yourself and then have Judi sell it to Comedy Central. And then the ratings came back and it’s like oh, yeah, people actually do love ventriloquism.
Yeah, I didn’t complete that thought there. So yeah, if the act is funny, it’s still a ventriloquist act. And I think anybody at that network level is not going to bother. They’re gonna go ventriloquist? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don’t want that. That’s not our brand. It’s not worth it. It’s not cool. That’s the bottom line. It’s not cool. So, Judi, and other management at the time time, I think they had to pretty much big Comedy Central look, he’s produced this special. He’s paid for himself. Why don’t you look at it? Could you show it just once? Just once and let’s see what happens. So they said — and Oh, I think they did some horse trading where they said we’ll give you this other comedian if you play Dunham, and they said ok, fine. You know sometimes that’s how it works. They did and they were on a Friday night one time and we got to hold of them on Monday and we said, what were the ratings? And what they said: They literally said, we think there was a mistake, we’ll get back to you. The number was so huge, they couldn’t believe it, and they immediately asked for another one. And that’s when I did Spark of Inanity and the second one, which was introducing Achmed the Dead Terrorist, and that in ‘08, just literally, excuse the expression, exploded.
Wasn’t that special itself? Or was a YouTube? Or was it a combination of the two that really broke you on a global scale? Because then after that, you started doing world tours and he jumped from clubs to theaters to arenas.
We looked at it like a perfect storm because at that time, in ‘07, it was the perfect time for Achmed the Dead Terrorist. I used him first invented a year after 9/11. Nothing funny about 9/11, never will be. At that time. I looked to Letterman and Leno, and what were they making fun of? They were making fun of Osama bin Laden, and those guys that did that horrible thing. And so they were joking about where’s Osama bin Laden? And I thought to myself, I know where he is. He’s dead. He’s living in my suitcase with my guys hiding out. So I created this bumbling skeleton and called him the dead Osama, used that for a couple years, couldn’t have gone over better because the country was ready for it. Then I waited a few years, took him out of the show when Osama bin Laden got out of the spotlight, and then brought him back in ‘06, getting ready for that next special because I wanted a new character. I thought, I’ll change from the dead Osama to just a general terrorist. I’m not gonna say where he’s from. I’m gonna say he’s not Muslim, but he’s just a terrorist. Then I rewrote things and came up with him. You’re right, when that special came out, the country was ready for that kind of humor. They were still making fun of — they were happy to make fun of that stuff. You whistle in the dark. And you make fun of what you’re afraid of and it makes it more tolerable. So that’s what I was doing. It was that. They were ready for it. It was a perfect timing for Achmed. It was also when YouTube was taking off with not just college kids, but with older people and with the military, especially. And so we came out with a couple of YouTubes and it went like wildfire, all over the world. People in other countries thought it was great. I even heard that people in Iran were sitting around at lunch, going ‘I kill you.’ It was a pretty much a phenomenon. That was this giant engine that got me off the launchpad, Achmed was enough fuel to keep the career really going hard.
With Achmed, you had definite source material for creating him. You introduce a new character in this special: URL. What goes into the calculus of deciding it’s time for a new character, and this is what the new character is going to be?
I always try and create characters that I think people will respond to. They have to identify with them. They have to know that character and understand them kind of intuitively. That’s where Bubba J comes along. Just this redneck guy. A lot of people know who that guy is. Of course, Walter, this curmudgeonly old man. Who doesn’t know that guy? Nobody knows a terrorist. But at the same time, I think just this bumbling idiot with anger. Everybody can at least laugh at that. But then, URL: Everybody gets stuck on their devices. Ninety-nine percent of us gets stuck on our smart devices too much of the time, so we can identify with that. Children are on them too much. Parents have to deal with it. Kids complain because their parents are on them too much. So everybody knows somebody stuck on the smart device. So I thought, I’m going to create a younger guy that also has the problem of living in his parents’ basement. So many families are dealing with that now. The kids come back and won’t go away. So there’s all kinds of things there that people understand, right at the outset. Then you write jokes around that and it’s almost a surefire thing.
Your A&E Biography episode from 2012 showed that even 10 years ago, you were on the forefront of 3D printing. Considering your career now spans five decades at this point, how amazing is it to think of how different character-building is for you now with URL compared to when you were a teen?
I really seriously didn’t get into the dummy-making until the mid-80s when I was in college, and back then it was plastic, wood and fiberglass. And those are the mediums that I used until, like you said 10, 12 years ago. I still sculpt them in clay. I still sculpt them. However, I do have a digital sculptor now that helps me every once in a while. I’ll give him notes and he’ll come up with something digitally, and we put it together. I’ll give him notes and he’ll make changes. But still, though, when I have the time, I make them out of clay, then I do a 3D scan, and then I build the shell of the dummy with a 3D printer. So yeah, there’s still a little human element in there, with the sculpting by hand. But the technology is great. All that’s doing is saving time. It doesn’t make the dummy any better. It’s just a timesaver. Oh and the chemicals, too. I hated doing the fiberglass stuff. This Walter that I use now, I made out of fiberglass and after getting high in the garage, not meaning to, I thought this was a horrible thing. So I then would give the sculpts to somebody else and he would make the fiberglass head for me but that was nuts. I got out of fiberglass as fast as possible. That’s for people who have air filters.
You said when you were younger in your career, you had to fight against the industry having more of a stigma against being a ventriloquist. But your success has proven, as well as just watching America’s Got Talent on any given summer on NBC, that people love ventriloquism. At least three have won the TV competition: Terry Fator (Season 2), Paul Zerdin (Season 10), and Darci Lynne Farmer (Season 12).
I don’t understand it. I really don’t. But it is a self-contained special effect. So there’s this dummy talking and it shouldn’t be talking. And it’s talking, so there’s that. There’s entertainment value. Everybody you named right there. I think is pretty musical. For sure, Terry and Darci Lynne. Paul did more tricks. So you’ve yet to name a ventriloquist who does ventriloquism.
Oh, snap.
Well, I’m serious. Those guys, they focus on music, and they’re brilliant at it! They’re great. Darci Lynne is an amazing singer. Terry Fator, same thing, great impressions and voices. Paul did some amazing effects and tricks, stuff like that. And I’ve done ventriloquial tricks a few times. But I tend to go with the comedy of it. And I knew years and years ago, when I started doing the comedy clubs in Los Angeles. I’d do the ventriloquist trick thing, and then Jerry Seinfeld would follow me and kill. I’d sit there and watch these guys, and I’d go, ‘What is the difference here?’ The difference is they’re just comedians. They’re just telling jokes and funny stories, and they’re entertaining. How am I different? I’m doing tricks that won’t last. I can’t come back to this same audience tomorrow night and do the exact same show because they’ve seen the trick. It’s like seeing a juggler. You can see that guy one time, maybe twice. Then you know the act. And so he’s gonna have to come up with a whole new act of juggling different things in a different way. That’s not gonna last. So a juggler cannot have his show on TV. But somebody who’s funny. I would watch a bad juggler that’s funny for 45 minutes. You’d watch a skilled juggler for how long? Not very long. You know what I mean? All it is is bunch of amazing skillful tricks? How long can you do that?
Right, because on America’s Got Talent, they’re competing to win the prize of headlining a Vegas show. But they’re only performing for three minutes at a time on TV. How does that translate to an hour and a half?
That’s exactly right. You think about that. You wonder about some of the ones that they push on and go forward. I get it. It’s for great TV. Even then, sometimes you go well, they did two really good bits, what’s going to be their third one?
Focusing on the comedy, then, and I’ve spoken to a number of comedians about this. The idea of when you’re famous enough and popular enough to graduate theaters and then arenas, on the one hand is great because you get the adulation of 20,000 people all at once. But then as a comedian, but as a fan. There’s this toggle of like, well, how enjoyable is it to watch it in an arena versus watching it in a club? I feel like it might even be more of a weird discussion to have with a ventriloquist, right?
A 2,000 -eat house with what I do is OK. But even now, if I do some fill-in dates or some practice dates for special we’ll do theatres. Even if it’s a 2- or 3,000-seat house. We put up the giant screen and now certainly in the arenas when you’re doing 8, 9, 10, 12,000 people, it’s got to be a giant screen so they feel like they’re right there. But I will admit it is fun to go back to the 2,500 seat house because it is more intimate. And those laughs are so much faster. And that’s what I loved about the special that’s coming out Friday. We went back to the Warner Theater in DC where I did Spark and that is a hip, hip crowd man. They were right on top of everything, every reference, every joke, every little nuance. They were just right there. It’s really interesting how you can feel an intelligent crowd versus one that’s drinking too much or not the sharpest tools in the shed. That’s what happens when you throw in the alcohol. They’ll get all the references.
OK, so speaking of which. Since you just brought up with the references…I don’t want to be one of the two boneheads that you mentioned in your special out of the 100, who might get offended. Because I’m not offended, more asking out of curiosity, but some of your references are distinctly partisan. For an audience to laugh at the joke about José Jalapeño On A Stick arriving on a bus from Martha’s Vineyard, that’s not only a very specific reference, but also a partisan one.
Sure. What I try and do is this — whoever’s in office is who I make fun of. I think what’s happened today is comedians pick sides, and then they start getting really nasty about it. They call the other half idiots, and that happens on both sides. I go back to the guys like Will Rogers, Bob Hope, Carson, Leno, you never knew what those guys’ preferences were when it comes to politics. It’s like, you had no clue. They would make fun of whoever was in office. They would make up front of an individual guy. They wouldn’t make fun of big groups. And it was good-natured fun. It wasn’t anything mean or nasty. And it’s the same way in my show. When Trump was in office. I had a hell of a lot of fun with that. The videos I did on YouTube, where Walter dressed up as Grump, President Grump. He had on the big wig and all that and we made a goof of him. I even had a character named Larry who was Trump’s personal advisor, and of course, he was a mess. He was a stressed-out mess, half on drugs, didn’t know what was going on because he was just couldn’t deal with the stress of Trump’s Tweeting, didn’t know if he was supposed to tell him to stop or whatever. So that was then. Now the calendar moves forward. And now we have Biden in office, so I’m having fun with that as well. So yeah, there’s partisan jokes, but hopefully I do a little bit of both throughout the years. It’s whatever’s on the forefront. Whoever is on the pedestal, to me is the one who gets the most tomatoes thrown at him.
You also obviously know that there’s a certain criticism of you, because you introduce it in this new hour, with Peanut being the head of HR, accusing you of all these things.
Oh, sure. Yeah. That was the other thing. Hit it straight on the head is what I think, Peanut is there, and he’s trying to make an issue of all the HR stuff.
Are you trying to address your critics with that?
Oh yeah. I point out to the audience. I say what it is. Peanut says that my act is racist and blah, blah, blah, whatever anybody says all the time. I make fun of that. And I don’t think I defend it. I think I just more make fun of the fact that everybody thinks I’m racist. Where I don’t — I don’t think I’m racist. I think I’ve created characters that are caricatures of certain walks of life and certain people. But We never there’s never any jokes about those groups putting them down. I mean, Bubba J is this redneck guy, is celebrated as being a redneck. Old people don’t get upset that I’m making fun of old people with Walter. It’s just kind of celebrated and people laugh at it. Terrorism, again, I’m not celebrating terrorism, but I do celebrate the fact that Achmed has fallen in love with the Western culture. He loves the movies. He loves the cars. He loves the rock ‘n roll. So that’s the way Achmed works now. He’s certainly not what he was 10 years ago.
That’s the delicate dance of being a comedian ventriloquist. The idea that the dummy is saying the offensive thing, not Jeff Dunham. But that’s a conceit, and as Peanut points out, you’re still the person in control of what the characters say.
Yes. But usually what I try to do is argue the other side. And that’s what I tell people, I love what I do. Good comedy is creating tension and conflict. You use those two things to create the comedy. And so having both characters. Have me and the other character. I think I can argue the opposite side of what they are, and we can have discussions about it. And usually I try, the dummy if they say something that’s completely outlandish. And I think that’s, again, I think where good comedy is built.
It feels, though, that you usually lose your arguments to your characters. You end up being a part of the joke
Of course. Yeah yeah yeah. I have to. Otherwise, it’s not funny. It’s like well, that guy’s not very nice.
Do you care if people think that you’re nice or not?
Oh sure! Who doesn’t want to be thought of as nice? I don’t like people who go, I don’t care what people think. I’m like, yeah, somewhere down there you do. Sure. And again, I just want everybody to come out and have a good time at the show. It’s like driving. I’m a really nice driver, unless somebody is an asshole to me. I’m supposed to live by forgiveness, but it’s like really? You’re gonna tailgate me? Maybe I should tailgate you. So I think it’s a little bit the same way in comedy. If somebody’s misbehaving in public and being an idiot, then that’s who’s gonna get made fun of.
I know one of the other things came out in your Biography special was that you had taken out in a library book called “Fun With Ventriloquism” in 1972. Ten years ago you hadn’t returned it. Have you returned it now?
No! Thanks for setting me up on that. On one of our tours in Dallas, we had a representative from the Dallas Public Library come to the show. We figured out. We calculated what the fine would have been from 1970 to whatever it was, and then I paid the fine, and then I paid for the book and then I gave them a $10,000 donation.
OK. I just wanted to make sure things were good now.
I told her onstage: You’re not getting this book back, and we got a big laugh. I gave her one of those big checks — So I used to give these donations onstage. And now we just do it quietly because it was like, why am I doing this on stage? What am I showing everybody I’m a good guy? So that we do these donations without saying anything. But I used to have a representative from whatever food bank from that city come onstage, give them the check for 30 grand or whatever. We’d do $1 per ticket, we’d put aside and use that money for charitable organizations. So we had this one woman, I can’t remember what city it was — but we gave her this giant check. It’s five feet wide, right, two and a half feet tall. We got a call about a week later. And she called my promoter, she goes they wouldn’t take that check. She’d actually gone to the bank with it, because I say onstage, this is an actual check. And it gets a big laugh and she thought I was serious. She took that giant check to the bank. No no, we’re sending you the real money.
When you did the pandemic special, also for Comedy Central, you mentioned that the pandemic was the first time outside of your honeymoon that you had taken a sizable chunk of time off from performing. How did that impact your approach coming back?
I always wondered. I was worried about the voice, number one, because I had never gone that long without using my voice. I had never gone more than two weeks without doing a show. So to sit there for months I was like, is it gonna be like a muscle where it atrophies? And I wasn’t sure. Then I thought just getting onstage, is it going to be like riding a bike? Is it going to be easy? I went through and I wrote that special, and I didn’t go and try out the material anywhere. I just sat down and worked on that stuff. And I thought, I think I know my craft well enough that I think these are gonna be laughs and I didn’t try a joke out on anybody. I didn’t try them on my wife. Nothing. We went and did the special, and it actually went really, really well. And it was really interesting getting onstage to see if that it was like riding the bike and it was…it was months, but it actually went great. The voice held up. The timing was there. The audience was awesome. They were a little more forgiving, too. People sitting in tiny cocktail tables, four people to a table, most people had masks on. It was nuts, but everybody was ready to laugh. So it was great.
So you’re 60 now. Do you think that means when you’re 70 and I come back to interview you, you’ll still be touring relentlessly?
Man, I don’t know. If you’d asked me when I was 50, if I’d be still doing it when I was 60, I would think I would’ve slowed down by then. Isn’t it funny how so many comedians live to be ripe old ages? It’s really, really interesting. I wonder if that says anything. I don’t know. I know Jerry Seinfeld was working on a book or a film or something, about all those old guys that would live to 100 years old. And it’s like, why is that? And then the question is, why do they keep doing it? Why does Leno still get out there? And I guarantee you when all these burns are done (or did he say all those birds are done??) (Leno just got out of the hospital after suffering burns from a car explosion in his garage), he will be onstage doing shows again. He is not going to slow down. It’s crazy.
I guess the only thing that may slow you down is if one or both of your sons starts taking it up.
I’ll be like: Please do something else! Don’t be in show business. It’s a pain in the ass.
Have you thought about soccer?
Yeah. Exactly. I’ll go to those games.
Jeff Dunham, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
Sean, thanks for the time. I appreciate your questions and your research, just thoroughly went through it all, so really great.
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