Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/WARNER BROSĭunham claims to have become more sensitive to criticism of late “because it’s gotten so much worse”. Kapow! … the Batmobile in Batman, which Dunham now owns and drives. “You wanna punch in the face,” he told one radio host in 2015. Trump, he thought, had the business acumen to take the US forward while most people only favoured Clinton because they thought it was “time” for a woman to be president. Unusually for an American comedian, Dunham backed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and lampooned Hillary Clinton. “The way I create characters is to react to whatever is going on in the world and come up with something, someone, that I think other people will laugh at, or identify with.”ĭoes he ever worry he might offend people? Dunham insists he only ever offends a “teeny bit” of people, adding that whatever he is doing to offend those “3 or 4%”, is what the other 96% are “laughing at the hardest”. Achmed appears as a charred skeleton wearing a turban, with bushy eyebrows, red eyes and a thick black beard. And I know where he is – Osama bin Laden’s dead and he’s hiding out in my suitcase with all my other guys.’”ĭunham handcrafts all the puppets. But I will make fun of that guy, that idiot. “We didn’t know if he was dead or alive, so I thought, ‘You can’t make fun of 9/11, that will never be funny. The jihadi character came about, Dunham says, after the attack on the World Trade Center and the initially fruitless search for Osama bin Laden. In it, the crowd roar with laughter when the puppet curses: “God damn it! I mean – Allah damn it! Silence, I kill you!” What will they make, I wonder, of Dunham’s most notorious character: Achmed the dead terrorist, as his jihadi suicide bomber dummy is more properly known? A video clip – Meet Achmed – has notched up 16m views on YouTube.
But if you have one idiot out of a group behaving incredibly badly, then that person deserves to be made fun of.”īritish audiences will this month get a chance to decide for themselves, as Dunham arrives to play a couple of arena gigs, in Birmingham and London. I mean, if a group of people believe or think one thing, that’s their right. “Never make fun of big groups of people,” says Dunham. They are the ones guffawing, for example, when the one-legged José Jalapeño puppet declares he can’t show his green card because he’s left it in his other leg. What the characters do is give you a licence to go a little further than you would as a human being, simply because they’re not real.”ĭunham’s audiences, judging by the myriad clips online, are mostly comprised of white Americans. “People accuse me of using the puppets as a vehicle to shoot off about my own beliefs,” says Dunham, “or to tell terrible jokes that I believe in. The crowd roar with laughter when Achmed curses: 'God damn it! I mean – Allah damn it!' Meanwhile, Seamus derides alcoholism and Achmed jokes about virgins in paradise and chides his gay son. The two trot out lewd comments about women and ridicule foreign accents. Alter egos There’s Walter, a retired, grumpy old man whose catchphrase is: “Shut the hell up!” And Peanut, a furry purple creature from a small Micronesian island who is hyperactively annoying. Dunham’s characters revel in smirking at liberals and carving up political correctness. We were always the sideshow, the little guys, the cheap, easy entertainment.” There’s a new generation catching on, Dunham says: “We were the guys they shoved out on stage with the closed curtain while the headliners got ready.
Two of the last three winners of America’s Got Talent have been ventriloquists.
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Not since Edgar Bergen – the ventriloquist turned movie star of the 1940s – has the art form been so popular.
It’s not something that could have happened to Keith Harris and Orville the Duck.
No mean feat for a man who throws his voice for a living. So big is Dunham that last September he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His videos have amassed 1bn views on YouTube and his shows on NBC, Comedy Central and Netflix regularly top the ratings. ‘Ventriloquists were always the sideshow, the little guys, the cheap easy entertainment’ … Dunham with Peanut.