Planet Puppet

A half-nude, three-foot figure called me to a table just beside the vending machines. His T-shirt and shoes were miniature; his legs — kielbasa-shaped, cotton-stuffed — were fixed to a flat pubis. “I’m Dicky!” he squeaked.

I wagged my pen in front of his tight little face. “Dicky,” I repeated. He nodded. His plastic eyes stared back with the cool, lightly mocking look I sometimes saw in medieval portraits of Christ. Dicky was not exactly soothing, not exactly ugly — what was he, evil? Holy? Sexy?

“I love you,” I tried. “I love you, Dicky.”

It was right then, right as Dicky’s jaw flung open, that his ventriloquist — his father, his frère, his semblable; the standard abbreviation going forward is vent — sneezed. At that second, Dicky did too. The vent trumpeted into his tissue and held it in front of his wooden child, who did the same, loudly and juicily. After I bent back down to kiss Dicky’s cheek, he flapped his arms, murmured “Mother!,” and sank limply to the table.

Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists — where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.

The human delegation was only slightly less mixed. Many attendees were entertainers — clowns, cruise-ship performers, Santa impersonators, balloon artists (known in the trade as “twisters”), theme-park proprietors, theme-park employees, and (hugely overindexed) magicians — clapping one another on the back and nodding like Marines celebrating dockage on home soil. Most of the males were adult men. Most of the females were prepubescent. T-shirts read I  My Wife and I  Your Wife and I’m Not Old — I’m Classic! but these credos hardly needed spelling out. Neither hate nor time was supposed to have purchase in this Holiday Inn, because this was the ConVENTion’s welcome reception, where the cream of ventdom was swarming the warm and ferny lobby to relive the lives and re-die the deaths of the vaudeville era in the pursuit of snapping consciousness in two.

*   *   *

“I’ll retire to Florida, fish, shoot some golf, play a little bridge, whatever. I’ve been calling the shots for sixty-some years, and God help me, I’ll call them for another twenty.”

The man with the chef’s hat and meatball puppet was barely registering his acquaintance, who was gesturing toward heaven with a puppet in the shape of an ear of corn. That was Job, the unlucky cob. The man in the chef’s hat bore Meatball, a loud Italian American meatball who calmed hospital patients and veterans through a nest of spaghetti. Just past the gurgle of the lobby fountain was Barbie Q. Chicken, a 4-year-old bird who was both Broadway prima donna and antibullying activist. Beside the wall of potted plants was Danny, an underweight and barefoot hillbilly from the mountains of West Virginia, and further beyond him was Herman the Worm (pronounced “Hoiman Da Woim”), a cross-eyed caterpillar made out of a dryer vent hose. Beep, a monkey, was kitty-corner, behind me were Doodle the toad and the handsomely breasted showgirl Miss Trixie, and now approaching with tensed biceps was Rocco, the muscular pit bull from Staten Island. Each was, and I understand that this sounds stupid, tremendously human: some had that sort of vaporizing charisma; some, one could tell, had the limper, more sheepish personalities of those whose lives are defined by long stretches of extreme silence. As the lobby mushroomed with figures of felt, wood, and PVC tubing, they formed a great chorus of flopsy and glabrous creatures that would not shut up.

First-timers formed lines against the marble — our official title was “red dotters,” after the distinguishing round stickers on our name tags — with a special nudity. We were welcomed, accosted, tenderly harassed. Being nipped on the nose by a puppet feels a lot like being bitten by dirty laundry. Children jeered and fought fruitless proxy wars with their companions; several human couples — their own puppets seated beside them like shrunken duplicates, only to be doubled again in the fountain pool — laid their heads against one another in honeymoonish swoon.

Men, eager to know what brought me to ventriloquism, showed me photos of daughters, wives, dogs, farms. Men, who were not full-timing entertainers, were retired dental hygienists, hairdressers, firefighters, ranchers. Retired anythings. For four days out of a pointless year they could surrender to a ritual that has been in institution since 1975, the routine of which made it unshocking that someone would show up after a year having acquired or relieved themselves of weight, alcohol, God, spouse, YouTube channel, gig, sleep-apnea device.

“Hell,” announced a vent holding a Santa wearing pajamas. “You’re bald now?”

The man with the corn puppet sighed and lowered the vegetable behind his back. “I saw a photo of myself on Facebook after a kid’s show,” he said, patting the crown of his head with his free hand. “They got me from behind. I had my wife shear off what was left.”

Murmurs snaked through the crowd: one of the larger wooden puppets in the center of the room was being released from its burlap head sack. Rocco — again, the dog with biceps — pointed me in his direction. “That’s a real McElroy — the Cadillac of hard puppets,” he whispered. Two men stood by with their phone cameras on flash; one vent with a fat Viking puppet pretended to fall faint to the floor.

A cop from Long Island gave a low whistle at the princely dummy. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said to me, smiling and gesturing broadly toward the din. I agreed. There was so much warmth, so much camaraderie, so much strange puppet-to-puppet antagonism in the air, and — I added with special emphasis — I just loved that Meatball.

The officer looked at me sternly. “The meatball guy?” he said, louder. “I gave him the phrase ‘Don’t touch the balls’ and he’s been using that for years. That bastard’s here?”

*   *   *

Northern Kentucky was never exactly a likely mecca for the ventriloquial arts. In the 1920s, barrooms across the nation boomed with the surrealist showbiz acts of American vaudeville. From Midwestern saloons and small-town beer halls to New York’s glitzy Palace Theater, most cities welcomed troupes where magicians charmed, plate spinners spun, contortionists contorted, and ventriloquists — like the aforementioned McElroys and their fabulous dummies, native to Cincinnati — threw their voices across club circuits that sold the business of analog enchantment. When the theaters darkened in the Depressive ’30s, televised variety shows shuttled ventriloquism safely to the entertainment capitals of Los Angeles and New York, though the rise of more sophisticated special effects began to render dummies anachronistic as early as the mid-’60s. By the early ’70s, when vent-prominent programs like The Ed Sullivan Show had sunsetted to make way for sitcoms, the ventriloquist-and-dummy act was already approaching something like near-obsolescence.

A tile salesman, one William Shakespeare Berger, homed his collection of dummies in his garage in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Before his passing, in 1972, he donated his entire estate to establish Vent Haven, the world’s only museum devoted to ventriloquiana. The Vent Haven ConVENTion, now in its forty-ninth year, is presently six miles away from the original site of Berger’s family home, and functions as ventriloquism’s true earthly haven: its seat of philanthropy, shelter, and quasi-religious pilgrimage.

In the first hours of ConVENTion 2024, Vent Haven’s new executive director, a man named Jimmy Vee, stood before us. This was his inaugural year at the helm — the former exec, Mark Wade, who had been billing himself as the King of Kid Show Ventriloquism since the ’90s, was now 74, and had taken a comfortable aristocratic pose in a chair against the wall. Jimmy, who was yelling, risible, and (this is a neutral statement of fact, but readily abused as a punch line across the next few days) markedly shorter than average height, was master and commander in the ballroom, radiating manic, peachy, even utopic optimism for the form’s future.

“Red DOTS! Hello and WELCOME to your ORIENTATION! Now, there are no BAD seats in the house,” he boomed, among the puce carpentry that banked the stage and curtains, which were also puce. Vent Haven’s insignia, a two-foot ring encircling a portrait of Jacko, a monkey puppet in a bellhop’s velvet jacket and pillbox hat, was fixed above the stage like a cross in a chancel. “Mark, our last director, always said every seat is a good seat. And that’s TRUE!”

Most of my brethren were children, at least a dozen, each of them flanked by at least a single set of parents. A child with a dragon puppet rocketed his arm up, hand still lodged in the dragon’s back.

“I wanted to say, if you got a quote-unquote ‘bad seat,’” the boy announced, eunuch voiced, “then you’ve just gotta find the best in it.”

“That’s RIGHT! He’s exactly right!” went Jimmy, screaming with pleasure. “Absolutely! YES!”

Towering beside Jimmy was a man named Ken, author of the how-to manual Creating a Character: The Off-Road, Uncensored Version (published 2012, 48hrbooks.com), hundreds of copies of which were arranged in small mounds for us outside the conference room. (From his text: “Three laughs per minute is what you want to start with, and then build your laughs per minute — your ‘L.P.M.’ — up from there.”)

“I don’t want to kill anyone’s enthusiasm,” Ken said, taking the mic, “but for you folks just starting out here, it’s not the puppet, OK?” (From the text: “If you don’t want to work hard, get out of the ventriloquist game. Go into magic or clowning; they take no talent or much skill.”)

Ken was one of a dominant type of wizened personality at the ConVENTion: a tired-wristed, sixtyish male who jobbed inside cruise ships and conference rooms, who ran the performance circuit of smart-talk-in-the-afternoon-style shows in the ’90s, and now sells expertise to a tapering audience.

“I cut a hole in a tennis ball, put googly eyes on it, and it took me all over the world. I’ve been to fifty-nine countries with it. Get this into your head and get out there — it’s not the puppet! And it’s all in the book!” (The copy from his DVD reads, “TAKE Ken HOME with you . . . PLEASE!!”)

*   *   *

Men and women behind me were grunting, lowing like cattle. We were all grunting, lowing like cattle. This was Vent 101, a workshop designed to coach red dotters through the basic tactics of the art. Together, we were unveiling the core of the ventriloquial mystery by practicing the letter B with our teeth clamped together.

The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures, biblical if not Delphic in provenance. I can only describe it as cousinish to learning the violin and getting very good at whistling at the same time. Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls, regardless of whether they’re the standard, wooden manikin type (called “hard puppets”) or the squishier, usually more zoological ones (our “soft sculptures”), while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. These little hummingbird motions, behind their cage of clenched, unmoving teeth, continue the joke inherent in the word ventriloquist, from the Latin venter (“belly”); loqui (“to speak”); “belly-breathing,” or the illusion of voice from elsewhere.

There is no real “throwing” of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet — there are five of them — inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken, or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.

Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like “I like to hike” is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas “I prefer puppetry” is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (“I trefer tuttetry.”)

Tonight’s tutelage was hosted by a man named Dan. His road-to-ventriloquial-Damascus moment was in 1965, care of a life-changing encounter at a Phoenix amusement park with Curly Q, a dummy belonging to the visiting Miss America pageant winner of that year. “I just about collapsed when I saw him. I was 5 years old,” he told us proudly. “But what about you all? Why vent? What’s your reason? And can you all hear me OK?”

Some wanted to do it because they’d joined a church ministry; many wanted to be able to tell stories to their grandchildren. One man raised his hand and announced that he’d always dreamt of a career in stand-up comedy, but felt too nervous to stand solitary onstage. Dan nodded understandingly. “When I’m up there without my puppet, I feel kind of exposed. And when I have one of my characters with me, I can relax a little bit more, and I can feel like I’m sharing the failure with somebody else if that’s what happens. I don’t take the full burden.”

We moved through the hard letters noisily. A few of the more gifted and seasoned in the back of the room were capable of showing me an elegant, dummy-free trick called “bifurcating,” where a ventriloquist speaks with lip movements that completely mismatch the sentence spoken. This has the terrific effect of looking like a flesh-and-blood human speaking with a laggy network connection, or someone being dubbed in a foreign-language film in real time.

The Other Four Difficult Letters, As Annotated by Dan:

• F: The user-friendly “eth” skips over the tooth-and-lip problem of f. (Dan: “Now, the word ‘friend’ was hard for me in the beginning, so I always said ‘buddy.’ Just made things easier.”)
• B: Typically, the lips curl, mash, and birth b. G gets around this manfully: we say g, but think b. (We gargled our way through the ventriloquist’s hallmark malapropism: “I’d like a gottle of geer.”)
• M: A relentlessly labial letter. N is more than good enough, probably the easiest to pretend to say. (Dan: “Another help in fooling your audience is if the ventriloquist has already said the word. Maybe you’d say ‘I love magic tricks.’ Then, your dummy could say something like ‘Nagic tricks are ny favorite, too.’”)
• V: Reroute this into “th.” (“I found I could do it better when my puppet Orson was flirting with a lady in the audience. Say her name was ‘Victoria.’ I could go” — and here he went into a nasal, singsong pitch — “Thhhhhicktorrria!”)

*   *   *

Behind the velvet curtains, Vinnie, the law enforcement officer who had beef with Meatball, was preparing four ventriloquists for the inaugural evening show. His arms, sized and shaped like petite country hams, were wrapping cables and wires, clipping microphones to collars, and shuttling his performers into sweaty file. “If you do anything out of line,” Jimmy Vee announced to the audience at the top of the evening, “don’t be surprised if Vinnie taps you on the shoulder, and, you know, threatens your life.”

Verbally, it turns out that the ventriloquial diet is surprisingly lean. Jokes are tight and quick burning, largely because long-form bloviating is wasted on the microscopic attention spans of children under 10, or drunk audiences at timed open mics. Instead, low-stakes flirtation with any visible woman, disgust toward any visible male, and jokes with infuriatingly corny payoffs — what civilians now call “dad jokes” — are the meat and potatoes of the act. An exchange between Jeff , 28, a veteran vent who’d been coming to the ConVENTion for at least a decade , and Tony Bronchitis,  his Galápagos turtle with a voice like Joe Pesci’s ,  went like this:

“OK, OK, I’ve got one for you. Did you know that Albert Einstein was a serial killer?” Tony asks.

Jeff shrugs. “I wasn’t aware.”

“I have no evidence, really,” goes Tony, “but he’s got his theories, and I have mine.” He bounces gleefully as the crowd boos. “It is a groaner, it really is.”

Nigel, who can be found most weekdays performing near the entrance to the American Eagle Outfitters flagship location in Times Square, approached the stage with a suitcase. His child was Miss Cindy Hot Chocolate: a rude little girl with a high, squeaky voice I would most quickly associate with someone’s awful niece.

“I’m trying to work on my performance,” he says desperately to her.

“You’re not that good no more,” she says. “Look at you, you’re stressed.”

All throughout the night, the mood onstage was pugnacious grading into the homicidal. Antagonisms — alarmingly relentless, restless antagonisms — were exchanged with puppets that were cruel, podunk, irascible, wily, horny, whiny, stubborn, dumb, deaf, preadolescent, or old. Maegan, a brunette vent as facially acrobatic as a young Lucille Ball, tangled with her dolly, Jody, in a fascinating argument about whether or not Maegan was “believable as a ventriloquist.” Tony and Jeff were embattled over the phrase “you suck.” Nigel looked helplessly at the audience as Miss Cindy mopped the floor with him.

“You seem distracted,” she says.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” he responds, visibly sweating.

Cindy points at the audience. “This ugly man’s falling asleep.”

“There’s a lot of people here. Please make me look good.”

“That’s impossible,” she says.

Here was the puppet master’s pas de deux: between id and superego, between the ecstatic lunacy in which we spend our

Author Of article : Mina Tavakoli / n+1

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