Picture it.
It’s 1979 at the Vent Haven ventriloquism ConVENTion in Erlanger, Kentucky. I’m 8-years-old and I’m surrounded by kids my own age who — like me — are aspiring “vents.” The experience is magical, full of performances by professionals who make the whole thing look easy.
Even at this age, I know that Northern Kentucky is ground zero for American vents. The Vent Haven Museum — the world’s only ventriloquism museum — has been hosting this international event since 1975, with around 500-600 attendees each year.
Vent Haven is located in Fort Mitchell, just 15 minutes south of downtown Cincinnati. Founder William Shakespeare Berger was a Cincinnati businessman and amateur vent who acquired a collection of more than 500 dummies from 1910 until his death in 1972.
[PHOTOS: Inside the Vent Haven Museum]
The museum, made up of four small buildings on Berger’s former home, has doubled in size through donations of vent materials since its 1973 opening. It now boasts 900 (and counting) ventriloquist puppets, some more than 150 years old, as well as an exhaustive collection of ephemera — photos, scripts, posters, recordings and more than 20,000 letters — and archives documenting the art form. A recent capital campaign will enable the museum to break ground this September on a larger, more climate-controlled building.
The 45th ConVENTion took place July 14-17 at a Holiday Inn near CVG, with the annual tradition being less convention, more family reunion (last year was canceled due to COVID). From sunrise to sunset, attendees experienced master class seminars from the most brilliant ventriloquists in the country like Jeff Dunham, Jay Johnson, Tom Crowl and Liz Von Seggen. The evening performances could have been straight out of any Las Vegas venue.
Filmmakers and authors Bryan W. Simon and Marjorie Engesser also brought their new book, I’m No Dummy Everyday: 365 Days of Ventriloquial Oddities, Curiosities, and Fun Facts, with proceeds benefiting Vent Haven. In 2010, Simon produced the movie I’m No Dummy, the only feature-length documentary about ventriloquists, and went on in 2018 to follow that up with I’m No Dummy II.
It’s thrilling that so many professional ventriloquists and aspiring performers come together to lift each other up and improve skills. During the 1979 convention, I’d already had several months of practice with the help of vaudeville star Edgar Bergen’s record and developed a character with my own dummy. At one point during the event, I found myself practically shoulder to shoulder with a young Jeff Dunham, who had started going to the ConVENTions with his father a few years before.
Similarly, I was at my first ConVENTion because of my father. Dad is a super-fan of vaudeville and slapstick comedy, so this event was right up his alley. After all, for my seventh birthday the year before, my parents gave me my very own Simon Sez ventriloquist dummy (I later dropped the Sez) from Sears.
Part of this birthday gift was Bergen’s obligatory record Laugh and Learn: Lessons in Ventriloquism. Bergen and his two dummy partners — the elegant Charlie McCarthy and the goofy Mortimer Snerd — turned ventriloquism into American entertainment on The Ed Sullivan Show. My Simon Sez was a Howdy Doody-ized version of Charlie McCarthy. I had put a red cowboy shirt on him and began my vent journey.
Alongside Cincinnati-style chili, ventriloquism came of age in the United States during the vaudeville boom of the 1920s. Many vents performed during burlesque shows at Cincinnati’s Empress Theatre, where you could get a late-night coney or 3-Way after a show.
Some of the most elaborate and now most-coveted ventriloquist dummies were made here in Greater Cincinnati during the Great Depression. Figures made in Harrison, Ohio, by brothers George and Glenn McElroy are considered to be the Stradivariuses of ventriloquist dummies. Using typewriter and piano key mechanisms, the brothers — two young engineers — crafted what are now the most prized dummies in the field. They’re known for their complex movements like slanting eyebrows, wagging ears, thrusting tongues, winking eyes and even spitting and smoking tubes.
The Vent Haven Museum has nine of them. Globally renowned ventriloquist and comedian Dunham owns one called Skinny Dugan. The McElroys only made about 40 figures, so they rarely come up at auction or into the public eye, which makes them even more coveted.
From the 1940s through the 1970s, variety shows were the portals for many ventriloquists. Ed Sullivan introduced audiences to a number of vent/puppet duos: Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Señor Wences and Johnny, Jimmy Nelson and Danny O’Day, Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney. Through the television, audiences heard Farfel the dog punctuate the “Nestle makes the very best” jingle with a deep, loud “Chocolate.” And the phrase “S’alright” from Señor Wences’ dummy head Pedro became cemented into popular culture everywhere.
“Ventriloquism is a fabulous illusion. A good ventriloquist is the most believable thing in the world,” says Lisa Sweasy, director and curator of the Vent Haven Museum. “I like to watch a vent that has this distinct alter ego or character that they’re doing. To me, it’s a monologue that has to be perceived as a dialogue or else it’s no good.”
Part of the brilliance of an act is developing an entertaining dialogue between puppet and vent. And it’s important for the puppet’s voice to be different than the vent’s voice. The most common voices are nasal, like Lambchop’s; breathy, like Jessica Rabbit’s; goofy, like Mortimer Snerd’s; or guttural, like Yoda’s, Oscar the Grouch’s or even Miss Piggy’s. Choosing a voice that brings a puppet to life and is sustainable, believable and appealing is the ultimate challenge of venting.
Ventriloquist Steve Taylor says that one of the most important aspects of a good act is the vent parody, in which the character makes fun of the ventriloquist and the entire concept. A dummy often refers to the hand in its body with lines like, “I thought I was constipated, but then I realized where your hand was.”
“Voice, breath and puppets. That’s what we are,” says Jay Johnson, a regular returning presenter at the ConVENTion in Erlanger. “You have to fall in love with rehearsal and possess your act.”
Johnson is the only Tony Award-winning vent thus far, with the 2007 win for his one-man-show Jay Johnson: The Two & Only! He brought ventriloquism back into the spotlight with his role as Chuck Campbell on the progressive 1970s sitcom Soap, indulging his character’s dummy Bob.
Today, television shows like America’s Got Talent are launching pads for gifted vents, proving that it’s far from a dying art. Three ventriloquists have become AGT champions since the show launched in 2006.
Megan Piphus, a graduate of Princeton High School in Sharonville, brought her vent act to Season 8 in 2013. Although she didn’t win, she went on to join the cast of Sesame Street as the voice of Gabrielle in 2020.
Ventriloquism continues to be embraced, as the crowded 2021 ConVENTion shows.
And the community continues to grow. This year, I met a woman from Lexington who had been a vent since she was 8. A former banker, she now teaches grade schoolers about how to manage their money with her goofy guy and gossipy church lady puppets.
Another attendee has been an amateur vent for his children and family for nearly 30 years. And I sat next to a New Jersey orthopedic surgeon who has been venting for children’s education for more than 20 years.
But what makes the ConVENTion really special is how accessible world-class vents are to aspiring performers and younger attendees. Jeff Dunham has been coming since 1975, when he was an eager adolescent vent. In Erlanger this year, he gave audiences a preview of his new character URL (pronounced “Earl”), a snarky, social media-addicted millennial living in his parents’ basement.
The ConVENTion also organizes Junior Vent University and a junior open mic night, and it’s astounding how good the youngsters are. The youngest performer, Brickell Miller, was 6 years old.
Many ventriloquists including Dunham, Lynn Trefzger and Willie Tyler have described themselves as shy kids. Jay Johnson has said he used ventriloquism to save himself from a dyslexic childhood.
This year, I saw kids who were the same age as I was at my first convention. One was with his mother, and he already had six personalities that he performed with for friends and relatives.
The joy I’d felt as a kid many years ago returned as I made my way through the event.
I returned home from that initial ConVENTion inspired to create a great act that I could perform for friends at recess and during show and tell. My acts won the laughs of classmates, boosting my awkward adolescent confidence. My dummy poked fun at the school, teachers, even classmates in a non-threatening way that wouldn’t land me in detention. And although I didn’t make it to world-class vent venues in Las Vegas in the ensuing years, Sister Carlene’s third-grade class at St. Bartholomew Consolidated School saw some great performances.
Eventually, I packed my dummy Simon away in his box, only bringing him out for special performances and later for nieces and nephews. His plastic mechanism eventually broke, sending Simon the way of the Toy Story toys — into a recycling bin. But I kept his cowboy shirt for another character I might find in the future to revive the old act.
But today, as an adult, I’m thinking about my dad while I attend the 2021 ConVENTion. I’ve been nostalgic lately as I approach a milestone birthday, and this journey fueled that flame.
During Liz Von Seggen’s “Introduction to Vent” session, I felt my muscle memory coming back. Although a tad rusty, I remembered most of the tricks for masking those hard-to-hide bilabial consonants like p and b, which require the use of both lips.
Maybe ventriloquism is the ultimate form of therapy — being beside ourselves in difficult conversations, articulating our inner voices, saying things we wouldn’t normally say out loud and being able to laugh at our quirks. Vents are educators, mediators and certainly laugh makers.
But maybe vents are also our modern-day shamans. I know I came out of the ConVENTion feeling 100% lighter and I’ll be back next year for even more.
For more on Vent Haven — including how to visit the museum — as well as details about the 2022 Vent Haven ConVENTion, visit venthaven.org.
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This article appears in Aug 18-31, 2021.