Hey, dummy, ventriloquism is cool

From wire reports

Dallas is full of dummies.

But that's a good thing, and some are inspiring nine-figure success stories.

Terry Fator, Jeff Dunham and Jay Johnson are leading a national revival in the ancient art form of ventriloquism. All three grew up in the Dallas area.

They say their brand of comedy has reinvented itself despite a prejudice that has long been the bane of ventriloquists. It's a form that harks back to the ancient Greeks, who called it gastromancy, as though the dead had returned to share secrets from beyond the grave. In the Middle Ages, it was even equated with witchcraft.

Fator, 43, captured the $1 million grand prize on "America's Got Talent" a year ago. Johnson, 58, who starred on the TV show "Soap" three decades ago as a schizophrenic ventriloquist, won a Tony award last June for his autobiographical Broadway show, "The Two and Only."

Dunham's recent Comedy Central special - a first for a ventriloquist - was one of the highest-rated specials on the network, and his DVD has sold a half million copies.

Dunham, 46, began working as a ventriloquist when he was 8, when he built his first puppet from a blueprint he found in a book. (When he was 13, his tax return was audited by the Internal Revenue Service.) A graduate of Baylor University, he's now a fixture on the Comedy Central cable network and plays to sold-out crowds all over the country.

That includes his show Sunday at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk. He has the 20th most-popular concert tour in the United States, averaging about $166,026 in box office gross per city. He's just behind Kid Rock, and the only other comedians in the Top 20 are Larry the Cable Guy (16) and Katt Williams (18).

Such adulation makes it hard not to notice the sea change in audience perceptions.

"This past fall," says Dunham, "David Letterman devoted an entire week to ventriloquists, booking a different one each night. The ratings were so huge and the reaction so great, he did it again two months later, with five more ventriloquists."

"Ventriloquism is such a simple form of comedy, but it always works," says Eric Stangel, a head writer on Letterman's show. "You know you're going to have a big guy with a smaller guy saying things he shouldn't say, but it's still funny. It was not the kind of thing you see on other shows."

Dunham has no doubt contributed to the popularity by unleashing an arsenal of wild dummies, including Achmed the Dead Terrorist, which spread humor on Comedy Central, drawing in the audience that ventriloquism has needed most - kids - (though he admits with a nervous laugh that his show is "PG-13, bordering on R").

Every year since 1975, Dunham has attended a ventriloquists' convention, the Vent Haven ConVENTion, in Fort Mitchell, Ky., where this year's gathering will meet from July 16 to 19.

Not so long ago, Dunham sat around a table with the convention's board members, lamenting the fact that the art form they loved appeared to be dying a slow death.

It was popular during vaudeville and enjoyed a revival on radio (yes, radio) because of Edgar Bergen, who in Dunham's words "became the (Jerry) Seinfeld of his era. His radio show was No. 1 for years. He did it by focusing on the characters and the jokes.... He was hilarious. But if Bergen had come along later, when television was popular, he would not have made it like he did. By being on radio, it took away the 'Ta-da!' factor of, 'Hey, I'm not moving my lips!' "

But the golden age of television helped put ventriloquism into overdrive. During the 1950s and '60s, Paul Winchell elevated his profile on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and other hit shows, "making ventriloquism so cool for kids," says Dunham. Boys especially, he says, grew up wanting their own Knucklehead Smiff or Jerry Mahoney, dummies otherwise known as Winchell's alter egos.

"The problem was, since Bergen and Winchell, there hadn't been anybody to make it cool," says Dunham. "Jay Johnson played a ventriloquist on 'Soap,' " a television series starring Billy Crystal that ran from 1977 to 1981, "but as great as Jay is, he was playing a schizophrenic, so the hip factor was not exactly there."

With ventriloquism re-emerging on Broadway, Comedy Central and "America's Got Talent," a mass audience suddenly "has a whole different take on it," Dunham contends. The annual ventriloquists' convention has been reborn, he says, as a celebration of what ventriloquism can and should be. Its members can't help but notice that sales of puppets, not to mention Dunham's DVDs, have surged.

As for this trio of charismatic headliners helping to spearhead its renaissance all being from Dallas, Dunham laughs. "I think it's pretty much like getting a full house in poker: What are the odds?"

The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal contributed to this report.