Posts Tagged ‘Jeff Dunham’

How to Be a Working Comic: An Insider’s Guide to a Career in Stand-Up Comedy

From Library Journal

Schwensen, former talent coordinator for A&E’s An Evening at the Improv, reminds us that comedy is a business and provides specific and useful advice on basic issues such as headshots, resumes, and agents. While Schwensen sensibly advises novices to be original and to work steadily at stage time, Jay Sankey’s Zen and the Art of Stand-Up Comedy (LJ 5/1/98) offers much more on the craft of performance. Nearly half of this book is devoted to brief interviews with 12 top comedians (e.g., Drew Carey, Rhonda Shear, and Rene Hicks). While Jeff Dunham observes that “comedy has taken such a nose-dive,” Schwensen does not otherwise acknowledge that comedians face a shrinking stand-up industry. For strong performing arts collections.?Norman Oder, “Library Journal”Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This truly funny book about being funny is also a serious guide to the business of laughter and how to make it pay off. New Yor… Read more…

Jeff Dunham – Arguing With Myself

Arguing With Myself, a recorded live performance of ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, portrays a comedian whose revival of an old-fashioned art has made ventriloquism more relevant to modern societal concerns. Starring his six main characters, from Bubba Jay, a Nascar-obsessed hick, to Peanut, a flamboyant gay monkey, Dunham?s puppets have dirty but relatively inoffensive senses of humor that mock the American Dream. One can easily see why Jay Leno champions Dunham, as his skits contain a similar sly sarcasm disguised as wholesome teasing aimed at men indebted to their ugly wives, for example, or people who live their lives working in cubicles. At times, though, Dunham?s humor seems to lose its ironic distance, especially as he interacts with puppets like Jose Jalapeño, a Cuban chile pepper, or Sweet Daddy D, a Black pimp, both reliant on the antiquated humor once popularized in cartoons by racial caricature. Since the entire audience in the film is white, it is difficult … Read more…

Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity

Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s second live-performance DVD, Spark of Insanity, is much funnier than his first, Arguing With Myself, perhaps because his new puppets allow him to cover more controversial territory beyond skits about family beefs and office humor. Though some puppets reappear, like the beloved Peanut, a purple monkey who loves wordplay, new characters emerge as the stars of this hour-long stand-up show. A tense laughter ripples through the audience, for example, when Dunham announces his wish to talk with a terrorist as he brings out Achmed the Dead Terrorist, a turban-sporting skeleton who’s refrain is “I will kill you!” Previous show star, Jose Jalapeño, a Mexican chili pepper on a stick, returns for a discussion about whether the puppet has a green card. If his racial jokes rode a line slightly too Caucasian to clarify his point of view before, Dunham has achieved real satire in Spark of Insanity, showing his audience how ridiculous it is to create stereoty… Read more…