No Strings by Keith Sisson

MARCH 2008 • Y’ALL 43

Out-Spoken Southerner: Jeff Dunham

44 Y’ALL • THE MAGAZINE OF SOUTHERN PEOPLE MARCH 2008 • Y’ALL 45

me because the audience now knows in-side stuff about me.”

When going to a Dunham perfor-mance, be advised that you might find yourself a part of the show. He rou-tinely seeks out audience members for his characters to have fun with. In fact, his favorite part of the show is when “Peanut” improvs with the audience. “The greatest compliment is when peo-ple walk away from the show thinking the guy in the audience was a setup,” he explains. “It was so natural that it sounded like jokes that were setup.” It’s all in good fun though, as Dunham notes. “The dummies make more fun of me than anyone else.” (A fact that Dunham pointed out in reference to “Walter” hammering on sports super-stars John Kruk and Michael Irvin on the Fox Sports Net show Best Damn Sports Show Period.)

The success of the DVDs have not been a surprise to Dunham, who is an expert in the Macintosh-based video editing software, Final Cut Pro; and played a large role in producing the vid-eos. “My 15 minutes have lasted over 15 years, so when we put out the DVD I thought this thing has to be a success because of how long I have been doing this and by how many people have en-joyed the show,” he says.

Currently, Dunham is touring the nation. Though now he is selling-out large theatre-style venues, he still plays the occasional comedy club. He counts his favorites in the South as Charlie Goodnights in Raleigh, N.C., The Star-dome Comedy Club in Birmingham, Ala., The Addison Improv in Addison, Texas, and McCurdy’s Comedy The-atre in Sarasota, Fla., saying that all of those are “great clubs with great audi-ences and great owners.”

For fans wishing to know more about his upcoming schedule or to own a piece of the Dunham show, visit his upgraded website, Jeffdunham.com, complete with tour schedules, show clips, DVD sales and new product sales; includ-ing the talking “Walter” and “Peanut” dolls.

“The main thing I like about my show is that it has no socially redeeming value whatsoever,” declares Dunham; which perhaps that is what keeps the audiences coming back for more.

When Texas native

Jeff Dunhamtalks to himself...

people listen, and they have been listening and laughing for his entire life.

In fact, with the help of his “little guys” or “characters” Dunham has spent two decades entertaining audienc-es all around the world. He is one of a handful of ventriloquists that have made the big time—and by most accounts, this puppeteer and comedian is the best ever at the craft.

Growing up in Dallas, Dunham was drawn to this form of entertainment at a very young age. He was intrigued by the actual dummies and found their peculiar look appealing. At eight, he asked for a dummy for Christmas and he received a toy version and began practicing, “I got books from the local library and records from the toy store and just began teach-ing myself,” he explains.

The first show Dunham performed as a ventriloquist was actually a classroom-assigned book report on Hansel And Gretel at the age of eight. “It was a two-minute book report. During the presentation my puppet picked on my classmates and teacher and they liked it,” he says. “I wasn’t a great athlete or a popular kid, but with performing I had something fun to do. I started doing Kiwanis shows and Boy Scout shows and just kept it go-ing from there. I never had a reason to stop.”

And he never stopped. Dunham is proud to claim that he has never had a “real job” in his entire life and following that fourth grade book report he knew exactly what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

He left the Metroplex after high school to pursue a degree in radio/TV and film at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “It was the closest thing I could find to what I wanted to do in show business,” he says. “I thought that degree would give me a taste of what I would experience out in Los Angeles.”

Dunham, 45, graduated from Baylor in 1986, and in his final year of college he quite literally “made” a few friends that he would forever be associated with.

“Walter,” “Jose Jalapeno,” and the purple crowd-pleaser, “Peanut,” are

the main characters that the performer brings to life during every show. “They all three came to the show about the same time.

“I had been searching for many years for a character that would get me away from the little boy-stereotypical rude dummy. I didn’t want that little wooden doll that looked like ‘Charlie McCarthy’ and every other ventriloquist dummy you can think of.”

The evolution of the Jeff Dunham show really began to excel from that point. With “Walter,” he could show a dark side of comedy. “Walter” is a wrin-klely-faced old man that usually sports suspenders and a bow tie. His eyebrows scrunch and his jaw drops as he is al-ways mad about something. Dunham planned on the character being used for a few good laughs, thinking that no one would want to listen to him for more than few minutes. “Boy was I wrong,”explains Dunham. “Everybody can identify with ‘Walter,’ everybody knows somebody like him.”

Similar to “Walter,” “Jose Jalapeno,” or the “Jalapeno On Stick,” was never meant to be a main character in the ventriloquist’s act; but quickly became a part of the show that audiences be-gan to expect. “I thought here is some-thing that maybe the Texans will laugh at. I don’t know why it’s a big hit,” he says. “It’s a stupid jalapeno on a stick, why is that funny? I have no clue.”

Dunham tried to retire “Jose” a few years ago and move past the jalapeno and stick jokes, but audiences wouldn’t have it. “People got angry,” and “Jose” has since returned to the main cast.

With “Walter” and “Jose” only serv-ing as a segment of the show, Dunham needed a main character. He needed a companion on-stage that could carry the

entire act. With that in mind, he created what “Walter” refers to as “The Purple Idiot.” He created “Peanut.”

Unlike “Walter,” “Jose,” and the less-er-known characters of the act, “Pea-nut” is not wooden; instead the two-foot purple, green-haired, one-shoed, pea-nut-shaped character with a wide smile is more Muppet-like, soft as opposed to wood. “Peanut’s” trademark laugh and eagerness to seek-out audience members that are slow to laugh at a bad joke have made him the chief on-stage companion to Dunham.

In addition to performing, Dunham designs and builds the hard, wooden puppets himself. As far as the variety of skills needed to make the solid dum-mies, learning the process was simply not an option. “There are so many hours involved in making dummies,” he says. “Necessity is the mother of all inventions. I just taught myself to do it. I got tired of relying on other people to do it. It was never what I wanted. I thought if I want it done right I need to learn how to do it myself.” (A section on the making of the dummies can be found of the 2005 DVD release, Arguing With Myself.)

With his main characters in tow, the Southerner spends over 40 weekends a year on the road. His second full-length stand-up DVD, Spark Of Insanity, was released late 2007 and features a longer stand-up comedy-style monologue from Dunham at the beginning before intro-ducing his cast of characters—some-thing that has helped him become a more established comic in the difficult world of show business.

“I thought if I want to be a comic I need to go toe-to-toe with other comedi-ans first and then pull out my characters in the box. When I’m on stage, nobody associates me as a character, they focus on the little guys; so by doing standup first I can establish myself as a character. By doing so, I have created reference points by which the little guys can make fun of

“I’m carrying Jeff. I have been carrying him for years. ‘Peanut’ and I are talking about breaking out and doing our own thing solo. Its just frightening how long this guy has ridden my coat tails. It’s frightening, and it’s sad.”-Walter

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