Ventriloquist Spotlights

Al Baker

Magic's longtime Dean moonlit as a ventriloquist, and in 1921 his figure Dennis nearly got him arrested for kidnapping.

Alexandre Vattemare

A one-man cast of dozens who filled theaters from Paris to Philadelphia without a single dummy, then walked away from the stage to build the world's first system for sharing library books…

Angela Martin

A child ventriloquist from Astoria, Queens, discovered on the same talent show that found Connie Francis. She spent the rest of her career becoming a singer, and Broadway and Hollywood both…

Arthur Worsley

Fifty-two years on the biggest stages in the business, and the man barely opened his mouth.

Augustus Rapp

Sixty years on the small-town circuit that never made it into the magic magazines, fifty of them with one wooden partner, and a memoir he didn't get around to writing until he was…

Barbara Bailey

She quit the act to get married and raise two daughters. Then she reconditioned Jerry and went right back to work. Eighty four years, one partner, the same small Tennessee town.

Bob Bradford

Great Lester called him one of the best ventriloquists he ever coached. Then Bradford turned his back on show business for the gospel, and it took his own daughter fifteen years after his…

Bob Evans

A traveling Chicago ventriloquist who filled some of the biggest rooms in town, then made time backstage for a schoolboy who had nowhere else to learn this business from.

Bob King

Frank Marshall built him the smallest working dummy in the world to get him away from Detroit's rowdiest drunks. A few years later that same small size got Bob through a torpedoed ship and…

Bob McAllister

He won a dummy for good grades, then spent a decade owning New York's Sunday mornings before walking away to teach magic and skate around Manhattan.

Bob Munstedt

A Swiss immigrant kid who carried a puppet named Alex Smallwood through a war in the Pacific, marked an X on his suitcase where Bob Hope sat down to watch, then spent the next fifty years…

Bob Neller

Credited as the first ventriloquist ever to perform on American television, and the pupil the Great Lester himself called his best.

Cecil Carpenter

He tried it straight for years and got nothing. Then he started getting it wrong on purpose, and for ten years running nobody at the convention laughed harder for anybody.

Cy Leonard

A homemade PA system, a McElroy figure named Happy, and a career that ran from a Toronto living room to Canada's first television broadcast, then all the way to the Arctic Circle.

Don Knotts

A West Virginia kid taught himself ventriloquism with a sock on his hand and a dummy named Danny. Then he took Danny to war and made sure the two of them never came home together.

Edgar Bergen

Edgar Bergen turned a plain wooden dummy named Charlie McCarthy into a bona fide radio-era celebrity, despite admittedly visible lip movement.

Erich Everty

A German ventriloquist who spent three decades touring Europe with two figures on his knee, whittled a third one out of firewood to keep his fellow prisoners of war laughing, and died the…

Eugenio Balder

A Basque-born Madrid ventriloquist who shaved off the mustache the whole trade hid behind, built his own figures himself in a half-basement workshop, and left one of them holding a…

Felipe Moreno

Born Felipe Moreno Centeno in Peñaranda de Bracamonte, Spain, in 1888. He taught his little brother the trade, then spent the rest of his life proving you didn't have to leave Spain to be…

Francisco Sanz

A Valencian who toured the Spanish-speaking world with a full company of life-size automata, built himself a comfortable fortune doing it, and then disappeared from a history written almost…

Frank Travis

The Society Ventriloquist. Seven figures at a table, a wife he taught the trade, and a mouth movement he called his own secret to the very end.

Fred Ball

A ventriloquist kid from small-town Illinois worked the country-music circuit before Honolulu turned him into Professor Fun, the graduation-capped magician a generation of island kids grew…

Fred Russell

He walked onto a London stage with one figure instead of a whole company of them, sat down, and built the act every ventriloquist since has been running variations on.

George Tizzard

An Englishman who built his second act at a writing desk on West 76th Street, selling ventriloquists their punch lines by the dozen and picking a fight in print over which letters a dummy…

Grace De Wintress

An English girl ventriloquist who worked more than one dummy at a time and quick-changed her own costume and theirs in front of the house, toured American vaudeville for a decade under half…

Gus Ramage

A World War I chaplain who spent the next fifty years preaching, chasing down truant kids for the county, and running a wisecracking dummy named Johnny Jabbers through reform schools and…

Harry Kennedy

He wrote the songs Brooklyn hummed on picnics, ran three theaters, and for fourteen years after he died, the trade still measured new acts against him.

Howard A. Olson

Chicago's own vaudeville ventriloquist, working the boards under the name The Great Chesterfield decades before his son ever picked up a figure of his own.

James Wallis

A Broken Bow, Oklahoma kid who impersonated his way to the Vegas Hilton, then spent his last weeks giving his life's figure to a stranger he'd only ever known by email.

Jay Marshall

He turned an Army glove into a rabbit named Lefty, then rode him to the Ed Sullivan stage fourteen times and a headline spot at the Palace nine more.

Jimmy Nelson

Jimmy Nelson turned a botched jaw-snap into a decade of Nestlé commercials, making Danny O'Day and Farfel the Dog household names in mid-century America.

Jimmy Weldon

The soldier who came home from the war with a duck's voice in his throat, and rode it from local radio into Saturday morning cartoons, then onto stages telling grown-ups to believe in…

John W. Cooper

America's Polite Ventriloquist. Five characters, one barber's chair, and hands too busy cutting hair to run the dummies, so his feet did it instead.

Johnson Clark

England's Sportsman Ventriloquist put a squire and his yokel on a farmyard set built just to justify one clever phone-voice gag.

Jonathan Harrington

A hardware-store kid who taught himself to throw his voice, then spent fifty-five years on the road before America had a word for what he did for a living.

Jules Vernon

A vaudeville ventriloquist who ran seven characters at once, then lost his sight mid-performance and kept the act running for years without one soul in the crowd catching on.

Mark Wade

Executive Director Emeritus of the Vent Haven ConVENTion after 23 years, author of the standard kidshow texts now taught in 26 countries, and the man who started at twelve because he saw…

Marshall Montgomery

He ate a full dinner, drank his glass, smoked, and whistled with a handkerchief stuffed in his own mouth, and never once let the dummy on his knee stop talking. That was the whole act, and…

Maurice Hurling

Vice-President of an American brotherhood, writing in from an English seaside town. He built the British side of this family by hand: a column, a library, a convention, and in the end, his…

Max Terhune

The General Motors toolmaker who left a steady job at forty one and rode into forty five Hollywood westerns with a wooden partner named Elmer.

Monsieur Brunard

A Brooklyn-voiced dummy, a beard grown on purpose, and a nightclub bit so convincing it fooled actual Frenchmen.

Neville King

A real old man he met outside a pub in Sheffield became "Old Boy," and Old Boy carried him through eleven years of national television and a lifetime working England's clubs.

Paco Miller

Born Edmundo Jijón Serrano in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Famous, for nearly fifty years, as the man who never went anywhere without Don Roque.

Patrick Gallagher

A Dublin voice thrower whose best bit crossed the Atlantic without him, and whose own grandson turned up as a character in James Joyce.

Paul Stadelman

He talked his way into his first booking without knowing a lick of ventriloquism, then spent thirty years making sure nobody after him had to bluff the way he did.

Paul Winchell

Paul Winchell paired television-era ventriloquism with Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff, then became one of animation's most prolific character voices.

Peter Brough

Educating Archie was the number one show on British radio for a decade, built around a trick nobody in the audience could actually see him do.

Peter Rich

He spent sixty years telling the whole trade exactly how the business worked, in print, under his own name, in the club's own paper.

Rev. James M. Fischmann

A Nazarene minister who pastored small New England congregations for decades, worked the New Hampshire welfare office, chaplained a nursing home, and kept a ventriloquist figure as part of…

Richard Potter

America's first native-born stage magician and ventriloquist, and by every modern account, the first Black celebrity this nation produced.

Rickie Layne

A toy from a magic shop, a Yiddish accent, and a promise from Nat King Cole that put a nine year old's dummy on Ed Sullivan's stage forty eight times.

Robert Lamouret

A talking duck in a sailor suit carried a Paris stage act across two oceans and onto Ed Sullivan's stage.

Ron Blaskett

Australia's first television ventriloquist. Fifty six years with one wooden partner named Gerry Gee, built by a Chicago carver he knew only through the mail.

Rudy Vallee

America's favorite crooner kept custom figures in his own act, and by this archive's own count became the McElroy Brothers' biggest single customer on record.

Shari Lewis

The most decorated ventriloquist in television history: twelve Emmys, a Peabody, and a sock with a personality bigger than most people's.

Signor Blitz

Let's be straight about him from the first line: he was a magician, one of the best of his century. This archive claims him anyway, for the voice underneath the tricks and the birds that…

Stanley Burns

He cured his own stutter with a borrowed dummy, learned distant voice from the Great Lester, then spent thirty years making sure this art's whole history got written down before it…

Terri Rogers

Elegant on one side of the stage, gleefully vulgar on the other through her partner Shorty Harris, and busy on her days off inventing illusions for David Copperfield. She did every bit of…

The Great Lester

The vaudeville headliner who taught Edgar Bergen to throw his voice, and gave American ventriloquism its first real school.

Tom Coram

He taught a figure named Jerry to cry, wink, spit, smoke, blink, and walk, dressed the two of them as soldiers for a war-mad music hall crowd, and left a stage name so much bigger than his…

Tom Farrell

A drugstore loyalty scheme won him his first figure at fourteen. Seventy years and a twenty-two year layoff later, thank-you notes from a class of fifth graders convinced him it was still…

Tommy Atkins

A General Electric receptionist who talked her way into her own television show, then flew 200,000 miles selling appliances with a puppet on her lap, then spent thirty years as the toughest…

W.S. Berger

A Cincinnati tile man who never worked a stage for a living, and who accidentally built the only home this art has ever had.

Walter Lambert

A music hall drag act that fooled full houses for twenty minutes at a stretch, a dummy with real human teeth that survived the Blitz, and an oil painting two years in the making that ended…

Will B. Wood

He toured three continents billed as the Kellar of South America, patented an illusion the whole trade copied, and vanished into the Gulf of Mexico with his own figures still packed in the…

William Edward Love

One man, one voice, a whole cast of characters, and by his own choice, not one single figure to hide behind.