Among professional comics, Jeff Dunham is in a class by himself.
He’s far-and-away the most successful ventriloquist working today (can you name another?). But he also has a unique style that mixes observational humor and potty jokes with questionable racial material. And it’s all about as deep as you’d expect from bunch of dummies.
The tight-lipped comedian opened this year’s Illinois State Fair Grandstand concerts on Friday with an 80-minute performance before several thousand fans. Dunham is the first comedian to headline a Grandstand show in years (Bill Engvall opened for Clint Black in 2004).
He got in a few good zingers at the fairground setting.
“What is this, a show on a budget?” said Walter, Dunham’s grouchy old man puppet. “There’s not a roof, there’s no chairs — your career is zooming.
“They’re standing in dirt, for God’s sake,” Walter said, referring to the people standing on the track. “What are we, opening up for a drag race?”
Walter, unhappily married for more than 40 years, cracked a few jokes about Dunham’s divorce from his wife nearly three years ago.
“You can leave your toilet seat up all the time?” Walter asked with envy. “I’d hot glue mine open.”
Dunham is a master at quickly shifting between characters — during the finale he had three going at once. But the best parts of the show came from his skillful manipulation of the puppets’ faces.
I don’t know how it looked from hundreds of feet back in the Grandstand, where the majority of the audience was seated, but from my vantage on the track near the stage, a raise of the eyebrows or a shift of the eyes gave the puppets a surprisingly substantial stage presence.
Most of his familiar characters were in the show: Arthur, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, Peanut and Jose Jalepeno on a Stick. There were two that are relatively new to his act: Achmed Jr. and a mini-me version of Dunham that Peanut called “Little Ugly Jeff.” Despite the drunken pleas of a guy near me on the track, Bubba J apparently called in sick.
Joke-wise, Dunham’s observational humor was not breaking a lot of new ground.
He had an extended bit in which Peanut complained about how hard it can be to get automatic-flush toilets to work and wondered whether we really need bathroom attendants to hand us towels (and have the nerve to expect a tip in return).
Peanut, a purple and white monster with a shock of neon green hair — he’s referred to as a “Muppet reject” at one point in the show — was the character that gave voice to some of Dunham’s most questionable material.
The low point was a bit about the difficulty of ordering Chinese food over the phone, complete with the word “hello” pronounced “hair-oh” and fake Mandarin along the lines of “ching chong dong.”
That was hilarious — when I was in elementary school and didn’t know better.
The biggest problem with this material isn’t that it’s offensive (though it is). The problem is that it’s not very funny and doesn’t have much to say.
Racial comedy’s highest purpose is to call out mock the audience’s prejudices.
If you’ve ever seen, for example, a black comedian performing for a largely white audience, you’ve probably experienced the moment where you’re not sure whether it’s OK to laugh at a joke about a negative racial stereotype.
It’s all right, the comic says, we’ve all got biases. You can laugh, as long as you know you’re kind of a jerk for doing so.
It’s only by recognizing and mocking our biases that we can ever hope to overcome them.
With Dunham, however, there’s no comeuppance for the dummies mouthing the ching-chong-dong routines — or Achmed’s “I kill you!” and “72 virgins” wisecracks.
Does Dunham think we’ve gone too far with political correctness? Should we just relax and learn to take a joke? Or does he put these lines in the mouths of his dummies so we see they’re not fit for polite, modern conversation?
It’s hard to say — Dunham never really takes a stand.
“We all know this is all you,” Peanut said to Dunham. The most honest line of the show, from the mouth of a dummy.
Brian Mackey can be reached at 747-9587.
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