Stuff You Should Know - How Ventriloquism Works

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

Ventriloquism – where a skilled performer “throws” their voice, making it seem like a dummy on their knee is talking – has taken a long, circuitous road from early prophets, to witches, then finally to the stage. Get to the bottom of this uncanny trick. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, Maine and Greater New England. Hello. We're coming to see you guys in Portland, and we can't wait, we would love to see you there. Yep, we'll be at the state theater on August 30th,

and if you're interested, you can get tickets and information at sysklive.com. There's some lobster at us. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. ["How Stuff Works"] Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan

over there, and there's Jerry, which by the way, we should say, Jerry, say hey to everybody. That's right, Jerry's back. Oh, I think we scared everyone. I like joked on short stuff for one of the recent episodes that she was gone. She's gone for a couple of episodes. She's been back now. I know.

But people took it to mean like Jerry was just gone. Really? Yeah. So some people were a little freaked out by that. So Jerry's not going anywhere, anyone. She doesn't want to as far as we know, and we're not gonna let her even if she does. That's right. So Jerry's here. And you're here too. How are you doing?

I'm great. Neither one of us are moving our lips. No. That's how good we are. We've done this whole conversation without any, I mean, it's astounding what we can do. Just a couple of events. We're basically like Edgar Bergen. Yeah.

That's a deep cut, Chuck. Vent, by the way, everyone. We're probably gonna say a lot. That is short for ventriloquist. Yes. And ventriloquism can be a mouthful. So I'm not gonna, I'm gonna try and say it as little as possible.

Ventriloquism can be is it can. A mouthful and bellyful. And a mouthful. All right, good one. I had very mixed feelings about all of this. Why? Well, first of all, I think in a, was it this that I talked about practicing ventriloquism

when I was a kid? I don't recall that. I feel like it may have been movie crush then, but I definitely at one point on one of the shows mentioned that at one point when I was a child, I had a record of ventriloquism record. Really? Like train yourself.

Oh, cool. And very briefly, I thought it was something I wanted to do. Right. And I practiced it. Did you have your little bow tie? No, didn't have an act yet. Didn't have a costume, but I had a dummy. Right.

And I got a record. You had like a ventriloquist dummy? Yeah. Wow. Not a, you know, not an advanced one that looks like a cyborg when you turn it around. Sure, but I mean like you had a dummy, you could sit on your knee and make the mouth open.

Wow. Yes. I always wanted one of those. You had my dummy. And it didn't last long. Why not? No, I don't know. I think I have a history in my childhood

of starting things like that. And then being like, man. That plus the instructor on the record was really mean. I can't even remember which one it was. I think it was from like the 60s or something, probably. Mean 60s record instructor? Yeah, but then I also watched the movie, you know, Dumbstruck.

I love that movie. And it's just, it just filled me with a lot of mixed feelings. So. Because it was sad. Sure. But also uplifting. Sure.

But also sad. Yeah. But also uplifting. Yeah. If you haven't seen the documentary Dumbstruck, you were missing out. It is a. It's good.

Nice lo-fi documentary that's really easy to underestimate. Yeah. And I think what I appreciated about it is they took five stories of five and Triloquists and each of them were at different points in their careers from the kid just starting out to the lady who wants nothing more than to be on the cruise ship,

to the guy who was actively on the cruise ship to the point where he killed his marriage. Yeah. Well, he's a spoiled. To the lady, you know, the other lady who just, she had all kinds of problems in life. Wilma. Yeah, but it was also very uplifting

in that her community rallied around her and helped her out. Yeah. To the big guy. Terry Fader. Terry Fader who, you know, is, is it net worth if you believe those sites of like 150 million bucks?

Well, he signed a hundred million dollar deal. Eight years ago. With the Mirage. Yeah. That was for five years. So he's still there. Right, okay. So he'd hopefully negotiated an even better deal

four years ago. So I just want to make sure for people who aren't aware of Terry Fader and that deal. If you'll go back to the beginning, we said we were talking about ventriloquists. Yeah. Ventriloquism. Terry Fader is a ventriloquist

and he signed the largest dollar deal in the history of Las Vegas as a ventriloquist. Yeah, at the time. But yeah, they captured that perfectly in that documentary, Domstruck. Yeah, just all the various components. And then my whole, I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but like many times I don't find them funny.

You're crazy. And that's at the root of it is like the jokes weren't funny to me. Well, it's, it's really, they kind of stick to that vaudeville tradition in a lot of ways. And then. Yeah, about bad jokes.

Yes. But then you see the people in the audience just eating it up, these old cruisers. Sure. Just like it's the best thing in these old Vegas types that they'd ever seen. Right. So far be it for me to yuck a yum,

but those, my emotions were all over the map while I was watching it. Okay. Well, I half regret suggesting this article. I'm sorry. It was interesting. At the same time, I find this delicious. So let's talk about ancient Greece in Egypt.

So just to make sure everybody understands what we're talking about, Chuck, ventriloquism is where you make it appear like a dummy is sitting on your knee and that words are coming out of that dummy's mouth. All right, but it doesn't have to be on your knee. No, and it doesn't necessarily even have to be a dummy. In fact, the earliest ones in Greece,

like you were saying, even before that ancient Egypt around the Middle East, there was accounts of ventriloquism, but they didn't say, you should have seen this ventriloquist I saw last night. He was great. They said, you need to go see this medicine man or the soothsayer or the spiritualist

because this guy can talk to the spirits in the tree or in a rock or in his stomach. And that's how ventriloquism originally got its start. It was a spiritual practice that was essentially. Scam artists. Yeah, I guess that's a way to put it, but I mean like they were prophets and religious figures and this is one of the things they did.

Yeah, and I don't even think we broke down really at its root. What we're talking about in its simplest terms is speaking without moving your lips. Basically, but there's a little more mustard to it. Right, but if you're speaking while moving your lips, then you are a puppeteer. That's the distinction.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, you're trying to make it appear as if something else is speaking instead of you. Right. Whereas a puppeteer will just stand behind a curtain. Sure, they don't care. And move their mouth like there's no tomorrow. Yeah, but the extra mustard I mentioned is that,

and this is frequently the case when somebody's not using a dummy, a ventriloquist not only doesn't move their mouth, they can adjust their voice to make it sound like their voice is coming from some other place away from them, what's commonly called is throwing their voice, and we'll talk about that later. Right, but isn't that just a,

I mean, they're really not throwing their voice. That's just a mental trick. Yes. Okay. Well, yes, but- It's not like they can do something with their voice to make it sound like it's coming from a different place. No, they can't.

Well, that's not the way I read it, was it was just a mental trick of believing that's happening. No. Like you can't literally make your voice sound like it's coming from a different place. So this is it, we'll just talk about it now, okay, fine. If you are talking to a ventriloquist

and they make it, they throw their voice to make it sound like somebody is under the bridge that you two are standing on. If you went under the bridge, you would not hear that voice coming from under the bridge. They can't throw their voice. It's a terrible term for it, but they can adjust their voice, they can modulate the volume,

they can make it sound muffled, they can make it sound echoey, they can make it sound like it's underwater, they can make it sound like it's close or far away, so that that's one component of the illusion of ventriloquism is they can make it sound like you would expect it to sound if it were a voice underwater under a bridge

or something like that. I think, I thought you were talking about space and time where it's really just a vocal quality. It is, and then combined with some other magic that they do, some other sleight of hand and misdirection and all that, which again, we'll talk about later. Yeah, but the thing is too though, when you see a ventriloquist quote throwing their voice,

they're generally throwing it to a dummy that's about nine inches from their own voice. Yeah, typically. So it's not something, you know. No, but the original ventriloquists didn't use dummies. So they were much more adept at throwing their voice. Gotcha. See?

So when you went to see one of these belly prophets or whatever, and they made it seem like they were speaking with a tree, they were talking to a tree and the tree was talking back, it sounded to the person standing by them that the tree was talking for a number of reasons. Gotcha. Which we'll talk about later.

That's very interesting. I think so too. So BCE, you could keep talking about belly prophets. I guess we should explain what that is. It was literally like sometimes they would talk to something inside their own stomach and their stomach was talking back. And that's where the name actually comes from.

If you talk about the Latin of the Greek words for belly prophet or belly talker, it's ventriloquism, ventriloquism, and L-O-Q-U-I is speak, speaking from the belly. That's where it comes from. Isn't that bizarre? Yeah, but it wasn't, obviously it wasn't an act at this point, like a entertainment act.

In fact, it was disparaged as of the devil. And of course, when Christianity came through town and the Spanish Inquisition, it was not a good time to be a voice thrower. No, even from like the earliest days of Christianity, it was considered a form of necromancy, which was fostered and enabled by the devil. So if you were a ventriloquist or that kind of spiritualist,

you were basically Satan's minion. That's how ventriloquism was originally seen. And there were probably a lot of people who were killed over the centuries because in part they were ventriloquists. That's right, but it eventually would become entertainment once everyone kind of got a little more rational. It was like, it's not the devil, it's not Satan.

And it really transitioned to performance, but they still weren't using the dummies at this point. No, they weren't, but I wanna hit on that rational thing. Ventriloquism was kind of rooted out as something that could be explained through rationalism during the Enlightenment, that Enlightenment thinkers kind of pounced on and said, here's how this works.

So remember that superstitious belief that you had, that somebody could commune with the spirits. This is how they did that. So stop believing that. So that was kind of a tool of Enlightenment thinkers explaining ventriloquism. Just keeping away all the magic tricks. Basically, that's what they did.

In fact, there was a guy named Johann Baptista La Chapelle who wrote a 572-page book exploring ventriloquism and explaining how it worked. Yeah, but as far as the entertainment aspect, pre-dummy, the kind of the first person named was a 16th century valet to French king Francis I. His name was Louis Brabant. And he would entertain the court there.

And the way it sort of came across to me was much like a jester could poke fun at people that they normally wouldn't allow to poke fun of. This is what this guy would do. But he would just do it without moving his lips and everyone thought it was hysterical. That's the whole comic tradition of ventriloquism. The dummy or the imaginary character,

if there wasn't a dummy, can say things that the ventriloquist himself or herself could never get away with. But somehow society's been like, it's fine if this inanimate object says it. Even though it's really this guy saying it, we've all decided it's fine that they say it. Yeah, I haven't.

I'm not part of that society. I wish you guys could see Chuck right now. He's just been scowling like this whole episode. He's not scowling, but if that guy with the big racist act, I'm not one of those people that's going, it's really just the dummy. I'm going, no, that guy's a terrible comedian. Is that what all this is about?

Jeff Dunham is a ventriloquist? No, no, no. But I'm certainly not a part of society thinking like that cute little dummy saying terrible things. Sure. Okay. But that is the longstanding tradition of the comedy behind ventriloquism.

Yeah, yeah. And not necessarily like racist stuff or anything like that, but just zingers and stinging comments that normally the ventriloquist would not be able to get away with. Well, and not only that, I got the feeling from watching that documentary

that it's a little bit of a therapy for people Oh, I guess. who don't feel like they can say the things they really want to say. So they'll say them through the dummy. Yeah, it was remarkable. And in dumbstruck, they say most ventriloquists or at least the people who go to this convention

that is covered in the documentary are shy people. Yeah, doesn't surprise me. And it's like they're the dummies, their alter ego. Get a little. It's interesting. A little deep. For sure. For sure.

That's just the kindest way I can say it. Again, I'm not yucking the um, because people are getting a lot out of it, it looks like. Yeah. Anytime you have conventions like that, it's just an interesting slice of life they're hanging out together. Yes.

Any and all conventions for sure. Yeah. Ventriloquist convention in particular. Yeah, and it always, it's good because I feel like a lot of times these are people that may feel like they're outsiders and that they have a family when they hook up with these communities.

I see there's something great about ventriloquism you can love. I mean, heck, I'm the one who tried it as a kid. I was certainly into it. Do you remember the name of your dummy? I don't think I named him. And I didn't go buy him. I think it just happened upon my house at some point.

Oh, he just showed up at your house that didn't creep you out at all. Well, it must have been my brother that bought it. You hope. It was enough for me to get a used record and give it a shot for two weeks. Got you. It really seared into your memory too,

that two weeks. Yeah, it was, you know, I tried pretty hard for a couple of weeks. And just couldn't get it, huh? And now you hate all vents. I got it enough. I don't hate vents at all. I'm just not someone going,

this is a dummy saying those things, not a person. I got you, I got you. But this is how it went on for a while in Europe at least. People talked like that? Well, there were people in courts all over Europe, basically transitioning from the gesture to a ventriloquist. Right, because the Enlightenment said,

look at this weird trick that all these spiritual, like soothsayers have used over the centuries, over the millennia. You can do it too. Here's how they did it. Let's all stop believing in it. And somehow, astoundingly, it ended up becoming a performance art.

It went from a spiritual trick to performance art that people came to appreciate. But it wasn't until the 1750s that the, I guess they call them dummies. You could also call them puppets. I've seen other people call them dolls. Yeah. But it seems like dummy is the proper term.

But an Austrian dude named Baron Domingan started using a little doll with a little nutcracker mouth. And he could move that jaw, that lower jaw. And all of a sudden, it started to catch on. At first though, they were using tons and tons of these dolls lined up in a row. Yeah, they went from using none to tons of them. Yeah, and it got pretty unwieldy.

And then I think everyone sort of realized what you should really do is get a dummy, give that dummy a personality, and then let that be your act. Right, and it was one guy in particular who kind of started that event named Fred Russell, who was British in the late 19th century. And I mean, the fashion was to have

as many as 30 dummies on stage. And you would act out like a scene, like a courtroom scene or something. And the event would use their feet to control everything with pneumatics. And they would jump from character to character. It must have been amazing to see. But Fred Russell was like,

I don't feel like carting all these people around. I'm just gonna stick to one dummy, which was innovative. But even more innovative was that he created a character for that dummy. Rather than just like having the dummy say whatever was needed for the sketch, he would write sketches around the character, his dummy costar Joe.

And so he basically is known as the father of modern ventriloquism. Yeah, and that really established the thing where you sell the audience in the fact that there are two people performing. And it's a buddy comedy act, but one of them has his hand in the butt of another. Yeah, and the guy who has his hand in the butt

of the other is the straight man. And the guy who has the hand in his butt is the wisecracker. That's right. That's the way though. I don't think any ventriloquist has ever done it the opposite. Someone should try that.

Surely. I can't believe no one has. I'm sure someone has. I hope so. I wanna hear about him. Should we take a break? I think we should, man. All right, let's take a break

and we'll talk about Murphy Brown right after this. Let's have a break, guys! and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

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and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Chuck, I want to say for me and everybody who listens to stuff you should know,

we're very proud of you for going through this experience of talking about ventriloquism and your past with it. The fact that I never got very far in my ventriloquism career. Yeah. That's right.

It's just a small, painful moment in my childhood. Right. But you're working it out, man. It's worth it. You know, the other thing I did was I got a record that taught my bird how to talk.

Oh, yeah? Did it work? Yeah. She could go, hello, Dolly? No. Uh-huh. And she could say hello, obviously.

And I told her to do a jungle call. What is that? Oh, gotcha. And then she would whistle, do a wolf whistle like a cat call. Uh-huh. So you'd walk into the room and go, woo-hoo.

Nice. And then what else? I think it whistled Dixie, maybe. You should have done a ventriloquism routine with your bird. Dolly, she was pretty great. Cockatiel. Nice.

Not cockatoo. No, cockatiel is the one with the big head. Yeah, the little smaller things that fly around your house and poop on everything. Oh, cockatoo is bigger. Yeah.

Okay. That's the big white guy that I think Beretta had. The Froot Loops guy. No, that's a toucan. Gotcha. So Candace Bergen is Murphy Brown. Right.

She is also the daughter of Edgar Bergen. Who was totally insane. He was not insane. He was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. Yeah, for decades. For a long, long time.

Not just one of the most popular ventriloquists. Like you said, one of the most popular entertainers. That's right. And he did something that one would think is not even possible, which is to have a ventriloquism act on the radio.

Yeah. But that's, I mean, that's a good point. Tom, she wrote this article for us. And he says like that really points out like the sea change that Fred Russell brought about where he was writing jokes based around this character. Yeah.

That Edgar Bergen created this character of Charlie McCarthy and also Mortimer Snerd. Sure. And the characters and the jokes and the dialogue and the fact that he could jump back and forth between himself and these characters.

Yeah. That's what people cared about. Because Edgar Bergen was actually not very good at not moving his lips. Well, radio is perfect for him. Exactly. But he was huge on the radio for like 20 years from this ventriloquism routine.

He was a ventriloquist on the radio for 20 years. That's right. And he, I don't think he began the tradition, but he certainly reinforced the tradition of going deep with the fact that these are little people to them. Yeah.

Like he's certainly not the first or last to give them their own bedrooms, their own beds. Yeah. To, you know, sometimes they're buried with their dummy. He left $10,000 to Charlie McCarthy and as well he left zero to Candace.

Yeah. I mean, what do you do with that? Yeah, she did a lot with it. Well, what does the doll literally do with that? Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant what does Candace Bergen do with that. Where's that din grand today? You, I don't know.

Who knows where that money went, but I know Candace Bergen didn't get it. Yeah. But she grew up sitting on her father's knee and Charlie McCarthy would be on the other knee and he'd make them talk to each other. Like he'd squeeze the back of her neck when he wanted her to talk or whatever

or open her mouth because he would talk for her. She had a strange childhood for sure. Was there resentment and stuff, do you know? I think a little, yeah. Yeah. I can imagine. If not a lot. Well, you were talking about the fact

that the strength of the joke, though, had to be why he was so popular on the radio and that's what they point, one of them makes in that dumpstruck videos, like it's got to be funny. No matter how good you are with the lips. Right. If it's not funny and I kept thinking,

like, all right, when is one of these people going to be funny? Even the big famous ones. Yeah. No, I mean, like there's, even the almost to a ventriloquist, even the blue ones, the not as family friendly ones, are still pretty family friendly, really. Yeah, except for a few people that really just want to shock.

Really, one just comes to mind as far as I could tell, Otto and George, Otto Peterson, I believe is his name. Yeah. And his dummy George had a just absolutely filthy ventriloquist routine. And Otto was the straight man in George. He was the just a total foul mouthed, basically guy from Jersey is what he was doing.

But he apparently, those two hosted the adult video awards, two years in a row. And after the second year, they're like, you can't come back. You've offended all of the porn actors and they don't want you to come back. Well, and then the Jeff Dunham guy you mentioned, we might as well say that this guy sells out arenas doing characters like Ahmed, the dead terrorist,

and Mexican immigrants and all these stereotypes, but he does it through a puppet. So it's fine. So it's fine. So you know, he has the Guinness record for the stand-up comedian who sold the most tickets in ever. Isn't that just mind boggling? Yeah, I think he should be reclassified though,

because some real stand-up comedian in second place probably deserves that award. I'm sure Kevin Hart's like WTF. Yeah, it's probably him, right? Right. So you've got Jeff Dunham in the World Record book. You've got Terry Fader with the $100 million Mirage deal.

Selling out every single day. And then there's a show called America's Got Talent. Oh, yeah. One, two, three, including Terry Fader. Ventriloquist have won that show. Yeah. Three Ventriloquists. So there's like a weird ventriloquism

renaissance going on right now. Yeah, and Fader and I think, who is the other one? Darcy Lynn? Yeah, Darcy Lynn Farmer are notable. She was just 12 years old. Yeah, she's good. They are notable for being good singers, and they will have their dummy sing songs.

And I think that's generally what seems to knock people out is when this beautiful voice comes out of that felt mouth. Yeah, you know. Like Terry Fader's dummy does a rendition of Eddie James That Last. Yeah. It's really something to hear and see. It's amazing.

Yeah. So it's weird because you've got Edgar Bergen from the 30s to the late 50s. It was a huge heyday of ventriloquism. Yeah. And then you've got this kind of resurgence in the 2000, 2010s. But in between, it's not like it ever really went away. Some of the most recognizable ventriloquism dummies,

like Lambchop, Lester the dummy. Yeah, Madame. Jerry Mahoney, Madame. All those came in between those two times. Yeah, and they existed on the gong show and the sunny and share show. And they would make these appearances in the boom of the 70s variety show.

Sure. So it's not like it ever went away. And it makes you wonder if ventriloquism ever really will go away because, I don't think it will. For one, as everyone to a person can agree, it's astoundingly hilarious. The jokes are.

And then secondly, to see a truly good ventriloquist perform, it's something to see. It is thrilling. Is it? To an extent, yes. I think that the one thing I can say that impresses me is when it's really fast back and forth. Right.

Between the two. Because that is just physically impressive to me to be able to do that and to do the hand movements and sink it out and time it out really well. Right, exactly. Or if you're like the great Lester to drink while your vent dummy is talking. Yeah, I looked into that trick.

It's really making a sound. He's not talking. The dummy isn't. Well, what they're doing is they're not drinking. They have trick glasses. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow, they fooled me.

So we talked about the ventriloquism museum because we were talking about dumbstruck. But there is a museum. It's a converted house in the suburbs in a subdivision, I think, in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky right across from Cincinnati. And there are, I think, a thousand dummies where this is like where they live now.

It's a nightmare room is what it is. Have you seen it? Oh, it's in that documentary. Right, okay. And there's pictures of it all over, but it's a bit of a nightmare room. Yeah. But it's really cool, especially if you're a ventriloquist

because as part of this saying like here, please, you know, take care of my dummy after I die, the dummies will be kept in good condition. They will be kept clean. Washed behind the ears, all that stuff. Shined up. But no one, no one will animate them. It's just part of it.

No. Not even the curator of the museum can touch these things. You can handle them, the curator can. But to animate them, make them talk, is a gross violation of the dummy vent relationship that was created over the years. Yeah, no other hand shall be up the butt. Right.

Except for its original owner. But I think that's fantastic. Yeah, you don't want to disrespect someone's dummy like that. No. And the Smithsonian article kind of put it in perspective. They said like, nobody's just going to come along and pick up Chuck Berry's guitar Lucille and start strumming on it or whatever.

Where was that from, Smithsonian? Because BB King has Lucille. Oh, well, they got it wrong. Oops, I got it wrong too. It was a Smithsonian magazine article. That's weird, that's Smithsonian. Thanks again, Smithsonian. What was it?

Wrong again, gay guy to Springfield. When I said earlier that that room is a nightmare, I wasn't disparaging dummies or ventriloquism. There is a long standing sort of thing in pop culture that dummies will come alive at night and kill you. They're decidedly creepy when they're just laying there on a couch or something. It doesn't help that when they're not being animated

that they're referred to as dead. Yeah, they're just laying there floppy eyes open, mouth agape, and it's just creepy looking. We got to read this quote from the writer. Who wrote this? Oh, Lauren Cantor. It's here. When draped across a table or chair away from the performer,

the doll's floppy limbs resemble that of a dead body, but the eyes remain open and the mouth is fixed with a terrifying smile as if the body is a poorly embalmed child corpse. Yeah, it's decidedly creepy. So much so that it's been, I mean, most recently in Toy Story 4. Have you seen that yet?

There's Benson. Benson is a dummy that's every time played up like it's every time he appears, it's like a horror movie. It gives a horror movie sting and he's in the dramatic lighting. In that movie Magic, I remember when I was a kid with Anthony Hopkins in 1978. Did you ever see Dead Silence? No, but I just remember seeing that Magic trailer

when I was seven and thinking it was the scariest looking thing I'd ever seen. It was a pretty scary one. Although, I'll bet you dollars to donuts. It's probably not scary at all, is it? I saw it recently. Oh, yeah? It's fairly scary.

Okay. The scariest ventriloquism TV show or movie of all time is an Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode called The Glass Eye. Good one? Just go watch it. Oh, yeah? Go find it on Netflix, on Prime, on Hulu.

I don't care. Just go find The Glass Eye. I think it's season three of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and thank me later. It will give you chills. I'm getting chills right now. I was talking about it. It was genuinely scary.

I have to check that out. Just beautifully done. Well, and it sort of sets itself up that way and that you have an animate thing that you bring to life and all you have to do in the story is cross it in some way either by forgetting about it, leaving it behind, or getting a new one. Right.

Jealousy is a big thing. Jealousy and then that thing comes to life and kills you in your sleep. Yeah. It's all waiting to be. But first it starts by killing your friends and loved ones. Oh, sure. You're the last to go.

Right, exactly. You just wake up and your wife's gone. Your dummy's in there smiling. Right. The window's open. That's right. Oh, man. I got to see that now, The Glass Eye.

I think we should take a break and then we'll come back and finally talk about throwing your voice. Are you okay with that? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we've kind of hinted at it a little bit. We've given a lot of it away, but we're going to talk about throwing your voice. And again, to just come right out and say it. No matter what you read on the internet, no matter what you've heard from your friend, uh, Jimmy, from the dummy that talks to you at night while you're trying to sleep, who cares? You cannot throw your voice.

It's impossible to make your voice come from a different location. But you can make your voice sound like it's coming from a different location if you're really good at it. And that's throwing your voice. Yeah, and part of the trick is a visual illusion that happens when someone is standing there watching a human being, uh, with a puppet, and the puppet's talking, and you see that with your eyeballs. You are, uh, your brain is tricked into just believing.

But again, that's when, you know, the dummy is only a foot away anyway. And if you're an audience member 200 feet away, it's not much of a leap. So it's actually your brain doing something. It's not you saying, I'm going to decide, I decided I'm going to just go all in with this ventriloquist. Your brain probably helps though. Yeah, it does. Your brain's actually being tricked because there's something appropriately called the

ventriloquist effect, where if your eyes and your ears are telling you two slightly different things, your brain overrides your ears and goes with your eyes. Eyes win always. So if your eyes are telling your brain, hey, I think that voice is coming from that dummy because the dummy's lips are moving in time with the sound, the brain's going to be like, oh, okay, it's coming out of the dummy. Even though your ears are like, no, it's coming a little to the right of the dummy. Your brain says, shut up ears and actually overrides what your ears are sending it and

merges it with what your eyes are sending it so that you subjectively experience the sound coming out of the dummy. And it sounds bizarre, but if you stop and think about it, if you're watching TV, and you've just got that little speaker built into the bottom of the TV, it's not like the sound of people talking appears to be coming out of the speaker in the bottom of the TV. It seems like it's coming out of the people's lips. Same exact thing.

That's the ventriloquist effect. Yeah, slightly different with movies because they actually put speakers behind the movie screen to help with that effect because the movie screen's so large. Right. But even if you're just using some janky TV that just has that terrible speaker built into the bottom or the right side or something, it's not like you're like, I can't even follow this. What other TVs?

What else is out there that I don't know about? Don't the eldest have speakers? No, you could have home speakers connected to your TV. Oh, right. Some speakers might have the, some TV might have the speaker in the top left rather than the bottom right. It's all over the place. It's a free-for-all.

Gotcha. Another thing that really helps this effect too, and this is what you want to do anyway if you want to get act, is you want to really give that dummy a distinct personality from your own. Right. It should sound very different. A lot of times it's a different accent. You just really want to put a distance between who you are and how you talk and who that

dummy is and how they talk. Yeah, because when you talk like that the first couple of times the dummy speaks, not only is it delivering some of the funniest jokes you'll ever hear in your life, it's also simultaneously training the audience that this is what the dummy sounds like. Right. So when you combine the ventriloquist effect that your brain is overriding what your ears are telling it, with the ventriloquist looking at the dummy while the dummy's talking, it's like, look everybody, this is where our attention should be focused because this is who's talking.

Right. And then the dummy has its own personality. Those things together are the magic of ventriloquism. That's what makes ventriloquism work, that's how we come to see an inanimate object like a dummy speaking like a hilarious yokel. I'm wondering what the deal is with why they're not funny to me. I don't know, man. I think that dummy may have killed like your family dog or something and you just block

that out. I think I'm a discerning comedy fan. And what the deal is is they're not, there's never been a great comedian that was like, man, I am a smoking hot comedian. So let me get a dummy up here. It's sort of like prop comedy, I guess, in its most basic form. Speaking of prop comedy, shout out to Kara Topp who is still around. He's got his own Vegas residency.

Do you know that? I didn't, but it doesn't surprise me. I saw him one day on the street. In Vegas? No, down in Florida. No, just walking around. I shouted Kara Topp. No, he's on his moped.

I shouted Kara Topp and he turned around and sped off. Of course he did, because you threw a rubber chicken at him. No, I just shouted Kara Topp. He said, what could you do with this? So I kind of take offense to that because I like to consider myself pretty discerning comedy-wise. You are. That's why I'm shocked that you, do you sit around and watch this and you're legitimately

laughing at how funny it is? No, never. But I am impressed with the skill and the stage craft. Oh, well that's a different thing than saying it's very funny jokes. No, I don't know if I've ever had a ventriloquist dummy make me laugh. Okay. I guess I see what you're saying now. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of how you really feel about the jokes.

You know, also, shout out to... Shade out. That's a new term. Yeah, it is, but it works. Shout out to... What is it? Nate Bregazzi? Oh, sure.

I finally saw that guy special. You've been talking him up. He lived up to the hype man. He's great. He is hilarious. He's coming to Atlanta in, I think, December again. Well, let's go. You want to go?

Yeah, let's go. All right. We can go backstage maybe. Oh, that'd be great. You might remember me. That'd be really cool. Give me backstage check. I'll try.

We'll both bring our ventriloquist dummies and we'll heckle him. With the dummies? Yeah. Well, we wouldn't ever say that. Here's the thing. I love puppets and puppeteering. I'm like a kid in a candy store when it comes to stuff like that. Have you been to the Center for Puppetry Arts? I'm a member.

Oh, yeah, we had our TV show premiere there. Yeah, I love it. So there's, I don't know, something happens between puppets, comedy, and the weird Venn diagram that is ventriloquism, where I just, I can't go there. Maybe do you not like zingers and one-liners, Henny Youngman type stuff? Because that's what a lot of ventriloquist jokes are. It's a lot of, it is very old school. They're not, I'd like to maybe see something a little more modern, like a...

Jeff Dunham. Like an Evening West type of comedy. I see. You want to see a young... Storytelling. Oh, what's the guy's name? Oh my God, what is his name? This is not making for good podcasts.

It's a lot to edit it out. Is it a comedian? Oh. You want to see Neil Hamburger doing ventriloquism, don't you? That would be pretty great. That would be astounding. Is he still around? I don't know.

I mean, he had that movie a couple of years back. I'm sure he's still around. All right, so let's talk about how to do this. Because this is the stuff that really, as a kid, I would sit around in the mirror with that dumb record on practicing my B's, F's, M's, P's, V's and W's. Yes, because you can't really say those letters with your mouth closed. Because when you're talking as a ventriloquist with your mouth closed, your teeth are shut and it's just the tip of your tongue moving back and forth.

Your tongue is actually retracted to the back of your mouth. So it's astounding that just that small handful of letters are the ones that are hard to pronounce. It is, but if you look at that other long list, anyone with no training whatsoever can probably get in front of a mirror and not move their lips and go A-C-D-E-G-H-I-J-K-L-N-O-Q-R-S-T-U-X-Z. So you're training paid off. This was the moment you were training for it, Chuck. But when it comes to those other ones, and the one I really remember was B's and N's. So you swap out D's for B's.

So instead of saying the word boy, B-O-I, you say doi. Right, but you don't say doi, you say doi. Boy, dois and girls. Yeah, exactly. And that's the trick is the context, when you hear dois and girls, your brain wants to hear boys and girls. And your brain wants to hear, what's another one here? Boy, do I want to borrow? That one part when the guy at Peter Piper picked a pickle peppers.

He did it really like, these are the ones that are really good at it. You just can't see. Right, and that's the thing. You and I are what I should say, I'm not very good at it. I'm not either. But ventriloquists are. And if this sounds really weird, all you have to do is say, well, I've seen ventriloquists before and I've never noticed. And they would say exactly, because that's how good we are.

Start listening a little bit for P's and T's. Instead of saying the word Peter, you would say teeter. Take the tech of tickled teppers, which sounds ridiculous. But the practice, practice, practice part, you know, and even in that documentary, you know, some of them were better than others. Even within that movie. So you could see a master at work like Dan Horne or the Vegas guy. Terry fader. Terry fader.

And Dan Horne, I do need to shout out that everyone remarked about his articulation. What do they call it though? Just like how you move the puppet, basically, not even the mouth stuff. The handwork. Yeah, the handwork and the manipulation is just off the charts for him. He really brings it to life. He was the cruise ship one, right? Yeah, yeah.

He was really, really good. But then you would see someone else like the beauty contestant who, Kimberly, he really wanted to be on the cruise ship performing. And she was okay, but you could, you know, you could hear those T's sometimes. Oh, yeah. And you could hear those B's or D's for B's. I didn't notice. Well, I was really, I had the headphones in and I was really picking it apart. I got you.

And I think it's like a magician. Some people go there and watch the magic act. And some people see there and try and figure out what they're doing. I think some people go and they just check out and they're like, this is the funniest dang thing I've ever seen. And other people just stare at the lips with their arms crossed, waiting to catch them. It's a weird thing. There's actually a scene like that in Dead Silence, that horror movie where a boy's like, I can see your lips move and that boy pays dearly for it. Who's in that? Who's the lead? No one you've heard of.

Oh, okay. Although, oh, what's Donnie Wahlberg, isn't it? He plays a cop. Almost a hapless cop who kind of alternates between like a tough guy and a guy who can get pushed to the floor easily by a man who's 50 pounds lighter than him. I thought this was an old movie. 2007. Oh, okay. Semi-recently.

It's worth seeing. It actually is super scary in a few parts. Dead Silence. Dead Silence. It's a little hokey, but it's a cult. I want to say a cult classic. Not yet. It's a cult favorite.

How about that? Give it a few years. It's got a cult already. It's got a cult following. I don't know if it's a cult classic. We should read the rest of these though, just in case people do want to practice. Oh, sure. D's for B's.

For F, you use E-T-H as your substitution. M's become N's, like I said. Nuffins instead of muffins. Right. T's, like we said, become P's. D's become T-H-E-E. Like V for victory. Yeah.

Again, sounds ridiculous coming out of our mouths. Right. But we're talking like, imagine if you played up like an accent or it's a little kid who has like buck teeth or something like that. Right. Then it's explained. It makes sense. Those are all tricks of the trade.

Exactly. And another trick of the trade is to not use those words much. Right. Rewrite the sentence. Yeah. Rewrite it. Rewrite just a kid. Sure.

Like the Elmer Fudd rule. Which was? Well, remember Elmer Fudd could like, he, I guess, stuttered, I guess. And then would just abandon whatever word he's trying to say. That was Porky Pig. Oh, it was Porky Pig. You're right. Porky Pig, there's another thing about Porky Pig.

Remember when we were talking about Donald Duck? How Donald Duck wore a shirt with no pants? Right. That's actually called Porky Pig in it. A shirt with no pants? Yeah. Some walking around with just a shirt on, which I've said before. I know this because I've mentioned it in an episode before.

It's the most horrific look a man could ever don. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And somebody wrote in and said, that's actually called Porky Pig in it. And I'm like, that's classic and disturbing. Do people do that? I mean, just like, you know. If you're getting dressed, maybe. Sure, right.

But who puts on their shirt before their underwear? There's some weirdos out there who do. Or I guess a lot of people don't wear underwear. There you go. You just figured it out. I just remember the scene in Animal House when Donald Sutherland has on that. Right. Cardigan sweater.

Yes. And he goes and gets like a box of cereal off of the shelf. Porky Pig in it. And his sweater raises up and you see his butt. Yeah. It's disturbing. Oh man. Not a good look.

There's one other thing I want to say. We need to get technical here because we've been real silly. Yeah. But ventriloquists, when they are speaking, they talk in a resonant voice. So it's got a real hum to it. And there's a lot of air involved that they push through their nose and their closed teeth. At the same time. Yeah.

Breathing is very important. So they get a real resonant voice. Yeah. Which is one way that they can project it. They can make it sound like it's further away by modulating their voice. Right. Yeah, yeah. And there's the ventriloquist called Paul Zardin.

He won America's Got Talent 2. And he's taken it old school. Yeah. Where he goes out like some of the old ventriloquists who worked before dummies did. And fools hapless bystanders into thinking somebody's crying out from a dumpster. Right. And needs help or something like that. He's also the guy, I think, that was on America's Got Talent that does a mask on a real human.

Right. He got Howie Mandel up there. Yeah. And the lady came out and would put a mask on Howie Mandel. Right. And knowing how Howie Mandel is about germs, I could see him just like this person's putting a mask on his face. Yeah. And he's just kind of like, okay.

But then there's either a remote controller or something behind him where he moves the mouth. So Howie Mandel just has to sit there. Right. He does the ventriloquist bit with Howie Mandel's moving mouth. Yeah, as the dummy. It's pretty hilarious. It is. Well, if you want to know more about ventriloquism, go practice.

Go figure it out. You can do it. We know you can. And since I said you can do it, it's time for Listener Mail. Hey, guys. My name's Nathan. I'm 28 years old. I'm a systems engineer in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Here's how you pronounce it. You did. Did you see that? Yeah. He has a fiance named Abby. He'll get married next August. Oh, congrats. He's been listening to us for six months and he's hooked.

So he says this, I just finished the eyewitness testimony episode and finally have something to write in. About the movie 12 Angry Men. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. It was made in the 1950s about a jury comprised of 12 angry men. The movie covers a lot about prejudice, prejudice, morality and everything else that goes along with courtroom dramas. But one of the penultimate scenes regarding eyewitness testimony is regarding eyewitness testimony. Don't want to give it anything away, but it really shows how someone can be completely confident in something they've seen.

But what might not be really what happened when you look at the details. Without knowing it, the movie challenges memory versus reality and how we're all victims to emotion. Pretty good for a movie about a bunch of white dudes in the 1950s. I totally suggest it as a must watch, especially with a current climate of political affairs. Oh, don't mention that. Keep up the good work, guys. Welcome back, Jerry. Hey, how'd that guy know?

And that's from Nathan. Did you add that? No. Wow. Well, welcome back, Jerry. Guy's good. He's heard this episode before. Well, she'd been back before this, so you're late, Nathan.

Okay. It was Nathan. Nathan. Nathan, thanks a lot and thank you for teaching us how to pronounce Wakeshi. And hello to Abby. Good luck on that wedding. Yeah, Mazel Tov, guys. Send us the extra bread maker or whatever you get that you don't want.

Okay? I'll take your bread maker. All right, let's do it. We'll split custody. If you want to get in touch with Chuck, me, or Jerry, or Frank, the chair, too, even, you can go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and follow our social links under the social medias and find us there. You can also send us a good old-fashioned email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.