DVD review by Steve Bennett

Out just in time for Christmas comes best-selling ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s Halloween themed special. What timing...

Delivered from an impressive haunted house set – which strangely conjures up images of Noel’s House Party for those old enough to remember – the DVD is broken into chapters by some imaginative horror-movie spoofs to introduce his puppets, who are all decked out in fancy dress for the occasion.

But the spookiest aspect of the whole production is the audience – scarily primed to laugh uproariously at sentences that aren’t even jokes, and holler loudly at the suggestion of meeting the old characters.

In a stand-up preamble he recalls the big old American cars of his youth, getting laughs for mere statements: ‘I was was an only kid in the back seat. These back seats were 8ft wide (big laugh) one big long bench, I could run back and forth on the bench (laugh). On the floor, the only thing in the way was a hump. You’d trip over the hump if you didn’t see it (laugh with smattering of applause).’ And you thought comedy was difficult...

Steve Martin said he had to quit stand-up because when he became famous he felt creatively spent, performing familiar routines he couldn’t experiment with to over-zealous crowds whose interruptions, whoops and shouts threw him.

Yet Dunham seems to revel in this; even the ‘creatively spent’ bit. For these are the same old puppets with the same old jokes as seen on all his previous DVDs. And, as has often been pointed out, there’s a unpleasant undercurrent to some of the gags in which a millionaire white man targets women, the poor, Asians, blacks and Muslims. Jeff Dunham is surely the Mitt Romney of comedy.

At best it’s just lazy – how many times do we have to hear American comics get laughs just from saying Asians are bad drivers – at worst, downright unpleasant. Redneck Bubba J gets a huge cheer for a joke that foreigners should 'go back to where they came from' – and it’s fairly clear the glee in this Georgia audience is not from mocking the stupidity of the character.

Much of the rest of the comedy does not aim any higher. Peanut, a purple muppet, gets more mileage out of the double entendre of ‘nut’ than you would ever think possible – and repeatedly calls the catchphrase ‘oowa-oowa’ with all the wit and charm of a 3am stag party stumbling out of a kebab shop.

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the whole show as comically lame; there’s some appeal in the childish trading of insults between him and all his dolls; the introductory monologue includes a couple of cutesily amusing stories about his dog – and even if some of the topics are tired, he can come up with a funny line from time to time. The idea that the thing Achmed, the dead terrorist puppet who shot Dunham to fame, is most afraid of is women, for example, is nicely done.

But generally art is out the window, as fans only want to see Dunham do what cranky pensioner character Walter calls: ‘playing dress-up with your dolls’. He gives them what they want: catchphrases, double entendres and jokes they kind of know already. It’s commercially lucrative, but only occasionally funny.

Oh, and in what surely has to be unique for a stand-up show, this DVD has a ‘personal trainer and nutrition consultant’ listed in the credits.

Published: 14 Nov 2012