Being away from home on Valentine’s Day is no problem for comedian/ventriloquist Jeff Dunham. At least not any more.
“My wife and I got married a year ago October, and she travels with me everywhere I go,” he says. “My kids are off at college. So who’s complaining?
“And if she wasn’t there, there’s still the guys in the box. And there have been many, many times in the past few decades that it was just me and the guys in the box.
“The absolute worst is New Year’s Eve, because everybody out there is with a date, somebody they love, and I don’t know how many times I’ve spent standing onstage, ringing in the new year, with my dolls.”
Dunham and his cast of out-of-the-box characters - including Walter the Grumpy Retiree, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, beer-fueled redneck Bubba J, Peanut the Woozle, the peppery Jose Jalapeno on a Stick and Peanut’s own diminutive dummy, Little Jeff - will be spending this Valentine’s Day at North Little Rock’s Verizon Arena, a stop on his “Disorderly Conduct” tour. The show starts at 8 p.m.
Dunham and his puppets have been popping into central Arkansas about every two years or so. He also performed at Verizon in March 2012 and July 2010.
Dunham has translated his onstage popularity into six highly successful specials on TV’s Comedy Central, and he has been recently branching out into other forms of “voice art” as Mole in the animated film The Nut Job, currently on screens across the country.
He says he’s constantly adjusting and tailoring his live show - “holidays, where we are, what happened in the news that day or that week. The worst thing a performer can do is just get up on stage and hit ‘play.’ You have to know your crowd, you have to know what’s going on in the world, and respond accordingly.”
The extreme example, he says, is doing comedy in the wake of horrible tragedy, and specifically in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: “How do you go on stage after that and what do you say?”
The answer for Dunham was the birth of Achmed, about a year after the attacks.
“There’s nothing funny about Sept. 11, but both Leno and Letterman and some other late-night hosts were making jokes about bin Laden, where is he, why haven’t we gotten him, so that was fodder for the cannon. And I thought, ‘I know where Osama bin Laden is - he’s dead and in my suitcase with my guys.”’
He walked a fine line as he wrote about 10 minutes of jokes to go with the new character. “The first generation of Achmed was the dead Osama. And I thought, if I’m going to do this routine, I’m going to have to pretend that there’s relatives of the victims [in the audience], and what are they OK with, and what kind of material would make them laugh and help them keep moving forward.
“And so I decided that I’m not going to be a chicken and do this on the West Coast; I’m going to go right where it happened. The first show I did with him was at a comedy club in New York, eight miles from Ground Zero, and it couldn’t have gone better.”
Dunham says he patted himself on the back for coming up with the right material - and the right character, because he made him “this bumbling idiot, as many of us would like to imagine that terrorists actually are.”
For example, the guy on a plane to Detroit in 2009 with a bomb in his underwear. Dunham agrees you just can’t write material like that.
“Comedians live for that stuff - Justin Bieber getting arrested for the drag-racing and that chick in the car and for being drunk and high and all that. Come on. ‘Dear God, thank you for a good comedy day. Nobody got hurt and this is awesome.’”
Achmed has proved popular outside the live show. Dunham recently released a brand new game app called Achmed’s Bombsweeper, a specialized take on the classic video game - the player tries to defuse bombs to prevent Achmed from building a super weapon.
A clip of Achmed is among the top five YouTube video favorites. And he’ll make his movie debut in a direct-to-video animated film, Achmed Saves America, which comes out March 18.
Dunham says it’s no longer harder to do his act in an 18,000-seat arena, versus a 200-seat nightclub.
“If you had asked me that 30 years ago, the answer would have been ‘yes.’ But now, with the technology and the giant video screens and these amazing projectors we have and incredible sound systems we have, it’s not the Beatles 50 years ago doing the show in a stadium with screaming people and a little electro-voice setup.
“The technology brings the intimacy of a comedy club to a giant place as much as we can. Because people want to see and they want to hear. Especially with my act.”
Dunham, of course, spent much of his early career in comedy clubs. He made several appearances at what was then known as the Comedy House in west Little Rock in the early and mid-1990s, when he had just added cantankerous old Walter to an act that originally featured only Peanut.
“My wife and I have been together for six years now, and we have yet to darken the door of a comedy club and go sit in an audience,” he says, a little ruefully.
“Sometimes it hurts for me to do that, because I forget how hard it is to be a new or unknown comic, where the people are literally sitting there and going, ‘We don’t know who you are, but you’d better make us laugh.’”Jeff Dunham
8 p.m. Friday, Verizon Arena, East Broadway and Interstate 30, North Little Rock
Tickets: $55.85
(800) 745-3000
ticketmaster.com
Style, Pages 25 on 02/11/2014