Jeff Dunham Quotes

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Jeff Dunham

Profession : Comedian

Birth : April 18, 1962

When I was in third grade I taught myself ventriloquism... What's hard is to learn to be an entertainer and make people laugh. I was a few years out of college before I felt I had enough material. Then in 1988 I moved to L.A. and started to do some shows at comedy clubs.

Jeff Dunham

Stand-up comedy is tough right now. Anybody can come to a concert, tape you, and put you up on the Internet. You either fight it or embrace it.

Jeff Dunham

I'm a geek to the bone.

Jeff Dunham

Growing up doing those Kiwanis Clubs, doing those Cub Scout banquets, doing those church shows, I learned to find that sensibility that most people could laugh at - that all ages and demographics could laugh at.

Jeff Dunham

I try to make the majority of my audience laugh. That's my audience. They'll laugh at the dead terrorist.

Jeff Dunham

But the mechanics of learning to 'throw your voice' are pretty simple. Anyone with a tongue, an upper palate, teeth, and a normal speaking voice can learn ventriloquism.

Jeff Dunham

The only way a ventriloquist speaks differently is that he forgoes using his or her lips, and learns to reproduce sounds using the tongue, upper palate, and teeth only. Those 'difficult' letters are B, F, M, P, V, W, and Y.

Jeff Dunham

A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.

Jeff Dunham

I try to make the majority of my audience laugh.

Jeff Dunham

My goal in any show is to make people laugh. That's the No. 1 thing. Everything else pales in comparison to that.

Jeff Dunham

There are not that many ventriloquists out there who build their own characters. I love that because they are uniquely mine.

Jeff Dunham

I'm guilty of being fascinated by gadgets and toys and technology, but any penny that I spend, I try to make it be a part of what I do for a living. Because then you are forwarding. You are forwarding that art, forwarding that career ahead.

Jeff Dunham

I think there's a lot of, unfortunately, unfunny ventriloquists out there, so they've got a bad rap. It came after Edgar Bergen because everybody had a little cheeky boy dummy like Charlie McCarthy, and everybody decided to become a ventriloquist because Bergen had popularized it. He brought it back from the doldrums of vaudeville.

Jeff Dunham

I'm a pretty good ventriloquist, but it's the entertainment value and the laughs that keep people sitting there and wanting more.

Jeff Dunham

I'm not trying to teach anybody anything, I'm not trying to say anything, I have no political motive whatsoever. My motive is just the big laugh.

Jeff Dunham

My parents never discouraged me. There were a couple times when my dad criticized a couple things that I did, but it was nothing. So through the bad shows, I never wanted to quit.

Jeff Dunham

All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.

Jeff Dunham

I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that.

Jeff Dunham

Math? Forget about it. If I add four plus eight plus six, I have to count on my fingers. I guess I'm hooked up differently.

Jeff Dunham

It's a survival thing. I don't do anything to be artistic or just because I like it.

Jeff Dunham