Explore Quotes by Jeff Dunham

I've never been truly hammered... Never. Not even in college. I was too busy driving or flying away on weekends doing shows around Texas and the country.

The magic in performing as an entertaining ventriloquist happens when the characters come to life and the interaction between the separate personalities on stage becomes 'real.' Then don't forget that the act has to be funny, and to me, being funny and entertaining any given audience is more important than anything.

I was a shy little kid, and getting up in front of people and making them laugh and being able to carry on a dialogue rather than a monologue was something that was pretty interesting to me because you could set yourself up - you could ask a question and then answer it.

I taught myself computer. Then Macintosh came along, and it became a really bad addiction. If I wasn't in show business, I'd have pocket protectors growing out of my chest. I do everything on it. It's kinda sick.

Growing up, I thought it would be great if I could do big theaters. Now we're doing arenas.

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.

I'm a geek to the bone.

My mother and my father have always supported me. Now in their eighties, they actually clamor onto the tour bus with me once or twice a year so they can watch the performances and hear the crowds. Traveling with eighty-something-year-olds on a tour bus... there has to be some sort of reality show in that.

In 1980, when I graduated from high school, my goal was to be on 'The Tonight Show' with Johnny Carson at least once before our ten-year class reunion. Our class reunion was in June of 1990, and I was on 'The Tonight Show' in April 1990, so I made it by a few months.

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.

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.

I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a cheap version of the doll. Achmed started out just being this little plastic toy from the store.

What I do for a living is whimsical and fun and ridiculous. I'm supposed to make people laugh. We all have that child in us. For many people, that child gets pushed into a corner. But if you want to be creative, that little kid can never go away.

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

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.

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

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.

I had a happy, dramafree youth, growing up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Dallas, Texas. The only thing that was slightly unusual compared to most of my friends was that I was an only child... I don't think that's why my parents gave me a dummy, at least they've never copped to it.

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.

It's amazing how these little guys can say things that a mortal human could never get away with. There's some sort of unspoken license... when outlandish things come out of an inanimate object, somehow it equals humor.

We just got a tour bus. I didn't know tour buses could be this nice. It's just me, Brian Haner the guitar guy, the tour manager and a writer. We laugh ourselves silly. Apparently we're going to have a road dog, a miniature pincher. It's the smallest they've ever seen. How masculine am I going to look, working with dolls and a miniature dog?