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Terry Fator may earn more money from his America’s Got Talent-winning megadeal with The Mirage in Las Vegas, but Jeff Dunham remains by far the richest and most famous ventriloquist around the world – a position Dunham has held for a generation.
Which he’s quick to remind his audience about in his 2017 Netflix special, Jeff Dunham: Relative Disaster, filmed in Ireland.
Dunham started ventriloquism young, appeared on the TV news by 14, made a living by college, began appearing in nationwide TV commercials and hit the couch with Johnny Carson back in 1990. A decade ago, Dunham began setting ratings records with Comedy Central, and YouTube videos allowed the ventriloquist and his buddies Walter, Peanut, Bubba J. and Achmed The Dead Terrorist to not only gain fans globally, but also expand his live shows from theaters to arenas. Two years after an NBC primetime special attracted more than 6 million viewers to Dunham opposite Thursday Night Football, the ventriloquist has joined everyone else from comedy’s A-list to produce a Netflix hour in 2017.
Although he sometimes gives the impression that he wants to expand his comedy brand beyond even ventriloquism.
An opening sequence finds Dunham, his wife and toddler sons in the front seat of a station wagon, ready for a road trip with Walter and the other puppets in the back. They’re talking, but Dunham’s lips are sealed. Because scenes like this transform his act into something more resembling the Muppets, where he wants us to suspend our disbelief and treat the puppets as real characters. It’s a conceit he previously tried and failed to pull off with a Comedy Central series.
“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” Walter asks from the back seat. Not the special, mind you, but the road trip to Dublin.
Why Ireland?
Dunham tells his audience he chose them because a DNA test informed him he’s mostly Irish by heritage. Whether that’s true or not, the disclosure serves as an opportunity for him to introduce his newest puppet, an Irish diaper-wearing baby named Seamus. Dunham, himself adopted, claims he’s paying it forward by adopting Seamus. Imagine his surprise, then, when the baby talks like a salty curmudgeon, drinks beer and whiskey, and justifies all of the heavy drinking because of the size of his “winky.” OK, so maybe not that much of a surprise that Dunham leans right into every easy stereotype about the Irish.
By filming his act across the pond, Dunham also gives himself an easier time making light of the 2016 presidential election back in the States, and the political, racial and sexual tensions in the United States, by relating to them to a group of outsiders for whom, as his puppet Walter says, just watch “for the comedy.”
Both Walter and Seamus are Trump fans.
Seamus likes the current president because of his propensity for p-grabbing, and mistakes Hillary Clinton for a man. Walter went further, joking with Dunham that “the real loser” of the election was Bill Clinton. Why? “Because now, Hillary is home every single night.” And poor Dunham, Walter adds, who’ll probably lose his José Jalapeno on a stick puppet thanks to Trump’s emphasis on deportation. That’s not all. Walter continues: “The racial stuff is worse than ever. I don’t know if it is here, but it is there,” he says. “Can you even use your African-American character, Sweet Daddy Dee, anymore?” Walter manages to get in a dig at Black Lives Matter, and tells Dunham he just wants to say the word black, and call himself white. “All I know is there’s black, brown, red, yellow, white. I don’t care. Just mow my lawn.” Even the white-trash redneck can mow Walter’s lawn. “And don’t call me racist.” Why not? “Because calling someone racist is racist. I’m actually an I-don’t-give-a-craprican.”
Whether it’s Walter or Dunham himself who’s the libertarian doesn’t seem to matter. Or does it? As Walter explains to Dunham after one joke that would offend his wife: “If you say it, it’s a lawsuit. If I say it, it’s comedy.”
Other vents rely on special skills. Singing. Remote voice throwing. Putting masks on audience volunteers. Not Dunham. He relies on the characters he has meticulously created, and simple but effective off-color jokes. He has found a formula that works and translates around the world, so why mess with it? Dunham plays straight man to one outrageous caricature after another, delivering comfort-food comedy and dick joke euphemisms to the masses.
Even if the tagline on his Netflix special is necessarily misleading, suggesting “it’s actually dummies that say the darndest things.”
We all know Dunham wrote the jokes and told the jokes, and if you forget to look at the puppets, you can still see his lips moving, too. His audiences, though, readily accept the act.
They want to see his usual suspects deliver the goods, regardless of good sense: Walter putting down Jeff Dunham for being adopted, for marrying a woman 18 years younger than him, and suggesting that Walter himself might be Dunham’s biological father (complete with a post-fact world video sketch that has a disco ball, smoke and a shag-carpeted van in the “summer of love” that wasn’t 1961). Bubba J jokingly wishes Dunham’s toddler twins were conjoined and thinks the type of bed gives you that type of kid. Achmed gets mad about the lack of skin on his bones and the overabundance of virgins making him crazy.
But whenever Dunham asks the audience that simple question near the start of his show: “Are you ready for the little people in the boxes?” They respond as energetically and enthusiastically as Peanut. “YAY!”
To them, this’ll never get old.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
