Jeff Dunham 'Unhinged' And 'I'm No Dummy' DVD: Ventriloquism Rules
Comedy Central will air Jeff Dunham’s latest special Unhinged in Hollywood on Sunday night, which is excuse enough for me to review the new, two-disc, super-sized DVD release of I’m No Dummy, one of the best documentaries ever made about ventriloquism, featuring Dunham, Jay Johnson, Terry Fator, and other significant practitioners of this wonderful art.
Dummy works as both a history of ventriloquism as told by its practitioners and as full-scale profiles of Dunham, Johnson, and Lynn Trefzger. If you rummage around on YouTube, can find clips of classic performers like Edgar Bergan, Senor Wences, Jimmy Nelson, Paul Winchell, and vents more obscure, but Dummy does a good job of gathering many of the best bits from 20th-century ventriloquism.
What the documentary captures most incisively is the feeling every practitioner of ventriloquism seems to possess in varying degrees: That what they’re doing is a scorned, ignored, or even disliked form of entertainment. Jay Johnson is his occupation’s most articulate historian; in I’m No Dummy he shares his appreciation of the craft of throwing one’s voice, as well as the craftsmanship that went into making some of the wooden — now plastic — traditional figures, and the way TV shows and movies almost invariably portray ventriloquism as something creepy, unsettling, and, at worst, evil.
When director Bryan W. Simon made Dummy in 2009, Terry Fator wasn’t the America’s Got Talent-winning, Las Vegas superstar that he is now. On the bonus disc, Fator graciously obliged with a new interview, acknowledging humbly that he understood being left out of the film, since he hadn’t “been discovered” in 2009 (though he’d been performing since he was a teen). This itself suggests the modest demands ventriloquists make of the world for themselves. It’s hard to imagine, say, Amy Schumer agreeing to be a bonus-extra because someone declined six years ago to put her in a documentary about comedians.
The vent world got a boost in visibility this year with Paul Zerdin winning America’s Got Talent, and 2016 will see the 40th anniversary of the Vent Haven ConVENTion in Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky, the world’s largest ventriloquist convention.
As for Dunham’s Unhinged special, I reviewed it here when it first aired a few months ago on NBC. It’s solid stuff, well worth checking out in its Comedy Central premiere tonight. But do yourself a favor and get the I’m No Dummy DVD — it could make you more of a convert to vent.
Jeff Dunham: Unhinged In Hollywood airs on Comedy Central Sunday night at 8 and 9 p.m. ET. I’m No Dummy is now available on DVD.
