Don't tell Dave Carr the art of ventriloquism is dead.

By Jay Kirk
Jay Kirk is a writer who lives in Philadelphia

His gig has been canceled, so Dave Carr is entertaining the Llanerch Diner in Upper Darby for free. The vinyl seats are lumpy, and the decor is brown - root-beer-colored tile on the walls, caramel colored booths - with the exception with the leftover Easter decorations, bursts of hot-pink tinsel that flutter underneath the ceiling fans. On the top shelf of the pie cooler, behind glass, is a menagerie of ceramic bunnies.

Carr, a barrel of a guy, sports an immaculate handlebar mustache and dresses in black down to his loafers. Slowly, he unlaces the flowered toaster cozy that hoods the small figure in his lap. Mind you, what Carr's about to do would have gotten him burned at the stake 300 years ago.

Three girls in the booth behind him don't notice the dummy. Two are junior high schoolers and the oldest must be 16. They're with their mom, drinking milk shakes and eating french fries. Carr, 48, a 16-year resident of Upper Darby, is sipping coffee and piecing together his life as a ventriloquist.

The dummy, Andy Red Head, who's not quite as tall as the bar stools along the counter, blinks as if he's adjusting to the light. Propped on Dave's knee, he's dressed in a blue double-knit polyester leisure suit that at one time must have contrasted nicely with the red of his mop-top wig. But the wig (circa 1971) is faded now and his freckled fiberglass face is much redder than anything close to a healthy skin tone. He looks flushed with gin.

Andy pays only half attention to Carr, who's talking about his early performing days in the mid-'70s while he was based at an Army missile unit in Germany. His parents had Andy shipped overseas so he could make some pocket money performing at officers' birthday parties. That would have been the original Andy that Carr got when he was 16. The Andy with him tonight is a second-generation clone.

In 1977, when he met his wife, Mary, she liked Andy so much that the dummy accompanied them on their first dates. Twenty-three years later she and their two daughters "just sort of put up with it," Carr says. His son is more tolerant.

Carr is well aware that people perceive ventriloquism as a dead art form, if they perceive it at all. But he is passionate about its future.

"As long as there's the ventriloquist conventions and as long as there's at least a couple thousand ventriloquists left in the world, we'll keep it from being a dying art. I want to perpetuate it. Which is one of the reasons I want my son to get into it. If we can get just one kid who's interested. . . ." His zeal trails off. "I've got to encourage him slowly but surely. . . ."

As Carr speaks about his son's future, Andy glares malevolently at the bunnies in the cooler. When the waitress passes the table, Andy turns and wags his eyebrows. His slot-jaw mouth drops as if to say something salacious.

It's odd. Despite the fact that Carr manipulates the doll's brain stem, the head stick, he really doesn't seem aware of Andy. Andy appears to move autonomously. Carr says it's second nature. The doll is a subconscious extension. His alter ego telling tepid jokes. (Well, listen Andy, I want to know a little about your girlfriend. Really? Yes. What about her? Well, her characteristics. She bites her nails. Oh c'mon, Andy, lots of girls bite their nails. Toenails? Oh, for heaven's sake. Nyaaggh!)

Carr and Andy were supposed to perform tonight at a shopping mall in Delaware, but the show got bumped for a baseball card swap meet. He'd already driven four hours in the service of ventriloquism today before showing up here.

"I do edutainment," Carr says. "I'm an edutainer." Technically Carr works for Creative Safety Products, a nonprofit organization that dispatches animators to middle schools in the mid-Atlantic region to conduct safety and drug- and alcohol-awareness programs. He was hired in 1998 as backup for a talking robot. When the robot started malfunctioning Carr got more work, and now the robot is the backup. He gets a 401(k) and a company van plus the standard-issue dummy, Officer Phil. (Andy performs adult-oriented material at venues such as the Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia.) Carr and Officer Phil edutain 260 schools a year.

Predictably, Carr says he loves to make people laugh. But what he calls his favorite part of ventriloquism sounds, at first, almost fetishistic. "I love making people laugh with an inanimate object. That fascinates me. See, they're laughing at a joke that my puppet made, but I'm the one who actually made the joke. I get a kick out of that small, minor deception."

Most vents perform at birthday parties, trade shows and bar mitzvahs. Others land gigs at nightclubs and on cruise ships. Only the luckiest, like Carr, manage to make it a full-time career. Before he one-upped the robot he worked a seven-day-a-week delivery route for Lance crackers in Chester.

"You do have to be careful in this business," Carr warns. "Some vents forget the difference between reality and make-believe."

Edgar Bergen, for instance, left Charlie McCarthy $10,000 in his will. Another dummy was listed as an accomplice in a domestic abuse suit. Carr admits to sometimes talking to Andy in the car as he works out new routines, but he says it doesn't go any deeper than that. "When I'm done, the dummy's in the suitcase and that's it."



Ventriloquism, its practitioners say, is a sort of controlled psychosis. The vent has to think for two people. Technically, of course, the trick is to conjure a voice without moving your lips. The science depends on a bit of nimble chicanery of the tongue and apt substitution of difficult consonants (B, F, M, P, V and W) by diverting the airflow by way of the mouth's other articulators: the teeth, lips and velum. The consonant B becomes a D; P becomes TH. Artificial pockets of air are used to voice the W in a trick known as a glide. But mastering the mouth contortions is only half the trick. The rest is artful diversion.

For a long time ventriloquism belonged to the occult. According to Valentine Vox, the author of I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism, the earliest ventriloquists were necromancers, who spoke for the dead. They spoke through stones, trees, farm animals and the occasional severed head. Oracles, like Pythia of Delphi and Eurycles of Athens, most likely used ventriloquism as their prophetic medium, Vox writes. Throughout the Middle Ages, the source of these disembodied voices was believed to be a demon living in the ventriloquist's belly (venter: belly; loqui: to speak), so ventriloquists often suffered the same fate as witches.

Ironically, one of the biggest venues for these performers nowadays is "gospel vent." Big with evangelists, gospel vent is used to illuminate Sunday school and adult worship services alike. The catalog from Maher Studios, the preeminent supplier for ventriloquists worldwide, offers dozens of Christian-oriented dialogue books such as Gospel Ad-Vent-Ures and Vent Daze for Church Daze.

Ventriloquism didn't shed its reputation as a "devil's art" until the mid-18th century, when someone thought to dignify the voices with the use of puppets. A talking doll, after all, is much less frightening than a talking severed head.

In 1846 an Englishman named Fred Russell, the father of modern ventriloquism, became the first man known to seat a puppet on his knee. From there, ventriloquism went on to burn brightly during the vaudeville era. But with the advent of movies in the 1920s, it nearly died until Edgar Bergen hit the scene. (Historical footnote: The first transatlantic image transmitted on television in 1925 was of a ventriloquial head named Bill.)

Bergen started in vaudeville but rose to true fame as a radio entertainer in the 1930s, which allowed him to sacrifice some of the technical mastery of his art (he moved his lips) for originality. During Bergen's heyday, thousands of American children bought Charlie McCarthy dolls and sent away for the toy Ventrillo: "The Wonder Voice Thrower."

"Bergen was like a method actor," Carr says. "He had a brilliant mind and he mastered a second character in Charlie McCarthy. He's our patriarch. Everybody loved him and everybody thinks he's one of the best ventriloquist showmen the world has ever seen - and I would love to steal his jokes." Actually, Carr admits, he does. "But I pay for the books."


"Hi, there!" Carr is standing over the neighboring booth like a sommelier; the doll's tiny feet dangling off his arm. "How's the food?" A few diners look up at the sound of this raspy castrato. A startled mom smiles and nods that it's good.

"It isn't making you sick, is it?"

"Andy, be nice," Carr says. He leans toward the youngest girl, who hides as best she can behind her milk shake. "What's your name, sweetheart?"

"Ally."

"Ally, this is Andy."

Andy's eyelids click. "Hi ya, Ally, are you talking to a dummy?"

"C'mon," Carr says, "behave yourself." He asks the next girl her name.

"Stephanie."

"Really?" Andy's eyebrows bob. "You're cute. Do you like me?"

She considers for a second and nods.

"Oh," Andy squeals. "You like me, too. Gee! Are you married?"

Carr shouts. "Oh, stop it!" Andy sticks out his tongue. Furious, Carr pinches it. "What is this?"

Andy's eyes cross. "My noethz?"

"I don't think so. Put it away."

The tongue clicks back like a cuckoo clock.

"You've got a nice family," Andy says with a note of compunction. "But where's dad? Daddy's not here."

The teenage girl pipes up: "We don't have a Dad. I mean, we have one, but, I mean . . ."

Andy's head jumps out of its neck hole. "Can I be your daddy?"

"Andy, that's enough!"

Carr retreats and flops Andy up on the counter. "Hi, ya," Andy says to a counter patron. "Whatcha eatin' there, garbage?" The man shrugs off the dummy with a backhanded wave, so Carr and Andy trot to the next booth and start their give-and-take patter for an elderly couple. The man especially goes for Andy's schtick and nearly chokes on his bun when the dummy begins to woo his wife (Are you from Tennessee? Well, you're the only 10 I see!). When the waitress brings the couple's order, Andy bids adieu, popping his head up and down and rattling his eyebrows - "Gotta go! Ha!" - and returns to the booth.

Carr is out of breath and his brow is damp.

"This really gets my juices going," he pants. What Carr and Andy have just staged is known in the biz as a walk-around. Tonight, he is more than a guy paid to exhort kids to stay off drugs. He is half-puppeteer, half-performance artist.

Since it seems the moment has passed, Carr wraps Andy's head back in the toaster cozy and stuffs him in his suitcase. Asked if he could throw his voice, say, into one of the pies in the cooler the way a necromancer might have done, Carr looks at the pies skeptically.

Throwing your voice, he explains, is a misnomer. The illusion depends as much on optical misdirection as auditory trickery because the human ear can't pinpoint the source of sound beyond four feet. That's why ventriloquism has lent itself so well to practical jokes. According to Vox, one ventriloquial wag, James Burns, tricked a fishmonger in 1789 by picking up a mackerel and inquiring if it were fresh.

"I vow to God that it were in the water only yesterday," the fishmonger said. Allegedly, the fish retorted, "It's a damn lie. I've not seen water for a week."


Game for fun and filled with bravado, Carr suggests a visit to the QVC Outlet in Drexel Hill. Once there, he leaves the doll in the car.

Inside, Carr warms up on a teddy bear and a ceramic shepherdess. Then he finds his target - what looks like a music box, but is actually a set of deluxe collector's marbles. He takes it to the jewelry counter, where a clerk is pinning earrings to a velour mount. He begins to fidget with the box conspicuously, as if appraising it. He stands back with his hands on his hips, tweaks his chin, and then with the stealth of a bomb defuser, leans forward to lift the lid.

"Hello!?" The lid drops. He cracks it open half an inch.

"Hello? Hey, let me outta here!"

Carr glances around with a panicked look. "Somebody! You gotta help me!"

The clerk is watching Carr with crossed arms. She looks at the box, then at Carr. Her expression indicates that she has severe doubts about his mental health. "Are we going to play with some marbles?" she asks witheringly.

Driving back to Upper Darby, there is an air of disappointment, like the aftermath of a stupid high school prank. Carr didn't trick anyone into believing that marbles talk. This night will not be remembered for reviving the decayed art form of ventriloquism.

Then Andy pipes up: "Tonight I'm in love."

"You're in love?" Carr asks.

"Yeah, I'm in love."

Ahh, Carr coos.

"Love means turning the lights down low."

"Oh, yes, I know."

"Smooching."

"Yes, that's right."

"Sitting in the loving room. . . ."

"Loving room? That's living."

"You said it," Andy retorts, "that's living, bubby!"

"Andy, why you little. . . ."

It is mildly shocking to see Carr sitting there, smirking. The only thing on his knee is his hand. Andy is in the suitcase, presumably staring into the darkness of a toaster cozy.

Jay Kirk's e-mail address is mrjaykirk@att.net