Ventriloquism for Fun and Profit

Chapter 1

So You Want to Be a Ventriloquist

You’re a ventriloquist, people often say to me, but if you had it to do all over again would you still become a ventriloquist today?

My answer is, No!

That probably sounds like a strange beginning for a book which I hope will encourage many of you to learn ventriloquism. So perhaps I had better explain.

Ventriloquism has given me years of fun and pleasure; it’s allowed me to travel and to meet everybody from Presidents to pushcart peddlers; it’s given me many of the wonderful things of life; and I wouldn’t give it up for any other profession you can name. Still, I say I probably wouldn’t become a ventriloquist if I was starting out my career today.

You see, these are days of high-powered hit-’em-in-the-eye advertising techniques. Cigarettes dance the tarantella on your television screen. Illuminated blimps herald gasoline in the night sky. And a gorgeous girl on a magazine cover extols the virtues of Shultzenheimer’s Nuts & Bolts Company. When I was a youngster in New York City it was different. The magazines used to be filled with dozens of little half-inch ads which you clipped out, enclosed ten cents, and mailed to the company. In return they would send you a free sample of their product. The kids in my neighborhood used to spend half their time sending in those little coupons and the other half waiting for the mailman to bring them the samples. Why I, myself, had a complete supply of wrinkle removing oil, cream for baldness, Little Gem embalming fluid, and perfume to attract girls. Girls? In those days I used to run away from them. It didn’t make any difference whether the stuff was any good or whether we could use it. We got it practically for free, and that’s all that mattered. Except how soon Mom was going to pour it all down the plumbing.

Just as my career as a sample-getter was rolling into high gear, I was suddenly stricken with infantile paralysis. But rather than hinder this career it helped it. For almost a year I lay in bed with my legs crippled with polio. Now I had more time than ever to trek through the magazines with pen and scissors. One day I came upon an ad which caught my eye by saying:

Be The Life Of The Party

Throw Your Voice

Learn Ventriloquism

Send 10¢ for Booklet

Well, it wasn’t a toothpaste nor a bunion killer, but it was something for me to get in the mail. So I sent for the booklet. When it came, I read it.

As the months went slowly by, the doctor began to notice a change in me. The crippling effects of my polio were becoming less and my interest in ventriloquism was on the increase. I read and re-read the booklet many times until I got so I could recite one of the old nursery rhymes without moving my lips. The only trouble was it usually sounded something like, Heter Hiter ticked a heck of squiggled stekkers.

But that little half-inch magazine ad was my introduction to ventriloquism. The booklet, now tattered and thumb-worn, was the beginning. In recent years, however, those little ads have for the most part disappeared from our magazines. I never see any about ventriloquism. That’s why I say I’d probably never become a ventriloquist today, and my side-kick Jerry Mahoney would probably still be a twig deep in the Redwood Forest.

These pages are going to begin where that little booklet left off. Based on the experience and knowledge I’ve gained over the years I’m going to try to teach you the basic rudiments of ventriloquism, and show you how you can get fun or profit, or both, out of this most ancient of arts.

To get you off on an optimistic note let me say right here at the beginning that anybody can learn ventriloquism. There’s no mysterious witchcraft to it. When I first started out a ventriloquist, hoping to discourage me, told me that ventriloquism was a gift of the gods; that you had to be born with a strange abnormal voice box to do it. Don’t believe it. That’s so much malarky! If you can talk, then all you need is to understand the basic principles of ventriloquism and practice them.

My own daughter, April, is a pretty good little ventriloquist and she’s never studied anything about it nor does she possess some weird voice box. Being constantly exposed to dummies and their paraphernalia, it was only natural that she should try to learn it. But other than occasionally correcting some obvious error, when I hear it, I’ve never given her any instruction. Simply by observing and overhearing me she picked up the technique by herself. She’s far from perfect but she’s an accomplished ventriloquist for her effort. So, please don’t start out with any fears or phobias that learning ventriloquism is impossible for you.

There’s another misunderstanding which should be cleared up here at the outset. Many people are not exactly certain just what ventriloquism really is. On television they’ve seen and heard all types of puppets, marionettes, and dummies talk, but they’re not sure which one, or all, or none, uses ventriloquism. Generally you find that ventriloquism is only used with a dummy. When you see the dummy sitting on the knee of the person who is manipulating him that person is using ventriloquism to make it appear that the dummy is talking.

Whereas, puppets are maneuvered by the fingers and marionettes are controlled by a series of strings. And both the puppeteer and the master of the marionettes remain out of sight of the audience during their performance. The puppets are put through a slit in the curtain or up on a stage overhead. Marionettes, meanwhile, are lowered down onto their stage from above. The reasons those who handle puppets and marionettes remain out of view are two in number. First, unlike dummies, the puppets and marionettes are usually small little creatures which must give the impression of being real and life-like. Showing them together with a life-size person would completely destroy this illusion. Secondly, working off-stage, so to speak, allows the puppeteer to create voices without using ventriloquism. That is, he can talk for the puppets without bothering to control his lip movements.

By this I don’t mean to imply that those who work with puppets and marionettes don’t know ventriloquism. Many of them may be quite skilled at it; I don’t know. My point is that you have to use ventriloquism with a dummy, but you don’t necessarily need it to work puppets and marionettes.

However, it doesn’t surprise me to find that this difference among puppets, marionettes and dummies is somewhat confusing to people. I’ve even confused them with real people. That’s a fact, not a joke. Some years ago when I was in England, I was invited to go to The Palladium, London’s famous vaudeville theatre. One of the acts on the bill was Walter Lambert, whom I had never seen nor knew anything about. When the curtain went up, the act turned out to be a sketch in a hospital room. There was the usual male patient in the bed attended by the pretty young nurse. The patient kept getting big laughs from the audience by the many things he said and did. And I remarked to myself, This fellow Lambert is a pretty funny comedian. It turned out he was much more than that. At the end of the act it was disclosed that Walter Lambert was really the nurse dressed up in a uniform, and the patient in the bed was a life-size dummy. Lambert was a ventriloquist!

Each of you probably has some different reason for wanting to learn ventriloquism. In this book, as you see by the title, I’ve broken it into two broad categories of fun and profit. Having had a taste of both it’s hard to say which gives the most satisfaction. As a ventriloquist you can have fun by the carload. No matter whether you’re playing Scrabble or milking a cow, you can have the dummy with you to kibitz and keep your friends greatly amused. If you’re sitting in a room with a group of people you can make them believe there’s somebody talking in the celler or the attic. Fun can be had making such inanimate objects as mops, statues and skeletons talk. You can even make real live people talk. One ventriloquist, for instance, went to the christening of his friends’ baby. As the minister anointed the baby’s head with the water, a baby-like voice piped up and said, This is a fine idea, but ooooh that water’s cold! The godparents almost dropped the baby, while the ventriloquist chuckled to himself.

Your ventriloquism might also help you out of a serious situation as it did once for me. I was driving along the highway one day in my car and I happened to have Jerry sitting alongside me. Suddenly a motorcycle policeman roared up alongside and signalled for me to pull over. Like all drivers my first words were, What have I done, Officer?

This is a 40-mile zone, he said, and you were doing 45!

At this Jerry leaned over and said, That’s nuttin’, Officer. You shoulda seen us back up the road. We was hitting 60!

That broke the ice. The officer started to laugh, I laughed, and Jerry continued to kid around with the policeman. The result was that the officer gave me a severe reprimand instead of a ticket. And Jerry and I drove on carefully obeying the traffic rules as we normally do.

On the other side of the coin—where you’re earning your living as a ventriloquist, many incidents also happen, which, while catastrophic at the moment often seem funny when you think back on them. Many such incidents have happened to me on television in full view of the millions in the home audience. I remember one time we had a sketch which was set in a candy store. Halfway through the scene Jerry and I were having a contest to see who could get the highest score on a pinball machine. I was pulling the string and Jerry was yakkity-yakking like crazy. Suddenly I noticed that his mouth wasn’t moving. I was panicked. The string had broken! In front of the TV cameras the show must go on. You can’t stop for anything less than the studio caving in. So for the rest of the show Jerry never faced the audience. He continued to talk but he was leaning over the pinball machine, or crying on my shoulder all the time. The audience never suspected there was anything wrong.

Another time, Jerry and I were supposed to be big game hunters deep in the heart of Africa. Some cannibals captured us and put us in a big pot. They were going to make a stew out of us. As usual Jerry was lending them a hand by telling them to put in so many carrots, a pinch of this and a dash of that. Finally it came time for the cannibal chief to pour the water in the pot. I had already been on stage in front of those hot TV lights for twenty-five minutes and was dripping with perspiration. The prop man handed the chief a bucket of water; he came into the scene and poured it over Jerry and me. It was ICE WATER! And I fainted dead away right there in the pot! I might add that Jerry did too. What happened during the five or ten seconds I was out I’ll never know. The cannibal actors ad libbed until I came to, and we finished the sketch. The audience was never the wiser.

Grim