153: Dolls
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As a species, something drives us to want to make inanimate things seem alive. Their statues, where the whole idea seems to be to create a simulation of soft skin and sheer billowing cloth out of rock, literally out of a rock, as if to prove this too can be human. There is just something about that moment when Pinocchio stops being a few strung together pieces of wood and starts to seem like he's really a little boy. This week I caught a guy named Ron Lucas, a ventriloquist, who's best known for being able to make anything talk, a banana, a box of breakfast cereal, a sock, to ask him what he makes of all this. His dummies are named Buffalo Billy in Scorch. When I'm on stage talking to my puppets, I believe they're real. I believe to the point as an actor believes in his character. Charles Ludwig of the Ridiculous Theater had a dummy called Walter and wrote at one point about Walter. He sometimes says unexpected things. Does that happen with you with Billy or Scorch? It has happened to me. There's a couple of moments too. I started to get through a breakthrough as a comedian. I was working a series of comedy clubs and someone asked me if I would do a military club and I said, "Yeah, sure, not knowing what I was getting into." I worked for the enlisted men and they were just really into what I was doing, but then I went over to the officers club and these guys were wild. I guess it's part of the responsibility of command is that when you get to hang out just with other officers you can let yourself go. But performing, I couldn't do my script. I couldn't do the show. I had plans, so I just started doing question and answer stuff, Don Rickles, ethnic kind of jokes, nothing that would really hurt anybody, but I was picking on everybody equally. I had to preface that before I got to work. So one guy was an officer and he was from Puerto Rico. I said, "Hey, where are you from?" The guy said Puerto Rico and the dummy goes, "How many Puerto Ricans does it take to screw in a light bulb?" And I said, "I'm thinking to myself, 'Why did I have him say that? I don't have an answer.'" Then, in a wink, the dummy came up with an answer. One funny enough to make an audience laugh in an officer's nightclub, but I have to say, not so funny that I want to alienate our lovely multicultural audience. Why is it so pleasurable for something inanimate to suddenly become alive through a voice coming out of it? It is fascinating to hold a fork in your hand and wonder what it would say. I found myself doing that not too long ago around a table with some other ventriloquists. What did it say? Which is exactly the point. Every object Ranglukus makes speak. He pretends as a person. This is exactly what we're doing as a species all the time, turning things into people. And it begins when we're children, playing with dolls. That's true for men and women.
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