Planet Puppet

A half-nude, three-foot figure called me to a table just beside the vending machines. His T-shirt and shoes were miniature; his legs  —  kielbasa-shaped, cotton-stuffed  —  were fixed to a flat pubis. “I’m Dicky!” he squeaked.

I wagged my pen in front of his tight little face. “Dicky,” I repeated. He nodded. His plastic eyes stared back with the cool, lightly mocking look I sometimes saw in medieval portraits of Christ. Dicky was not exactly soothing, not exactly ugly  —  what was he, evil? Holy? Sexy?

“I love you,” I tried. “I love you, Dicky.”

It was right then, right as Dicky’s jaw flung open, that his ventriloquist  —  his father, his frère, his semblable; the standard abbreviation going forward is vent  —  sneezed. At that second, Dicky did too. The vent trumpeted into his tissue and held it in front of his wooden child, who did the same, loudly and juicily. After I bent back down to kiss Dicky’s cheek, he flapped his arms, murmured “Mother!,” and sank limply to the table.

Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky. Side by side by side, we stood near the entrance of the Vent Haven Ventriloquist ConVENTion — the annual international hajj for ventriloquists  —  where dummies condomed nearly every right arm. Dummies were rising from zippered suitcases, lifted from velvet-lined trunks, coffined on banquettes with protective canvas bags on their heads, like prisoners expecting execution. Dummies congested every visible cranny of the Erlanger Holiday Inn in a huge interspecies fiesta of dwarves, worms, baboons, children, et cetera.

The human delegation was only slightly less mixed. Many attendees were entertainers  —  clowns, cruise-ship performers, Santa impersonators, balloon artists (known in the trade as “twisters”), theme-park proprietors, theme-park employees, and (hugely overindexed) magicians  —  clapping one another on the back and nodding like Marines celebrating dockage on home soil. Most of the males were adult men. Most of the females were prepubescent. T-shirts read I ♥ My Wife and I ♥ Your Wife and I’m Not Old — I’m Classic! But these credos hardly needed spelling out. Neither hate nor time was supposed to have purchase in this Holiday Inn, because this was the ConVENTion’s welcome reception, where the cream of ventdom was swarming the warm and ferny lobby to relive the lives and re-die the deaths of the vaudeville era in the pursuit of snapping consciousness in two.

*   *   *

“I’ll retire to Florida, fish, shoot some golf, play a little bridge, whatever. I’ve been calling the shots for 60-some years, and God help me, I’ll call them for another 20.”

The man with the chef’s hat and meatball puppet was barely registering his acquaintance, who was gesturing toward heaven with a puppet in the shape of an ear of corn. That was Job, the unlucky cob. The man in the chef’s hat bore Meatball, a loud Italian American meatball who calmed hospital patients and veterans through a nest of spaghetti. Just past the gurgle of the lobby fountain was Barbie Q. Chicken, a 4-year-old bird who was both Broadway prima donna and antibullying activist. Beside the wall of potted plants was Danny, an underweight and barefoot hillbilly from the mountains of West Virginia, and further beyond him was Herman the Worm (pronounced “Hoiman Da Woim”), a cross-eyed caterpillar made out of a dryer vent hose. Beep, a monkey, was kitty-corner, behind me were Doodle the toad and the handsomely breasted showgirl Miss Trixie, and now approaching with tensed biceps was Rocco, the muscular pit bull from Staten Island. Each was, and I understand that this sounds stupid, tremendously human: some had that sort of vaporizing charisma; some, one could tell, had the limper, more sheepish personalities of those whose lives are defined by long stretches of extreme silence. As the lobby mushroomed with figures of felt, wood and PVC tubing, they formed a great chorus of flopsy and glabrous creatures that would not shut up.

First-timers formed lines against the marble  —  our official title was “red dotters,” after the distinguishing round stickers on our name tags  —  with a special nudity. We were welcomed, accosted, tenderly harassed. Being nipped on the nose by a puppet feels a lot like being bitten by dirty laundry. Children jeered and fought fruitless proxy wars with their companions; several human couples  —  their own puppets seated beside them like shrunken duplicates, only to be doubled again in the fountain pool  —  laid their heads against one another in honeymoonish swoon.

Men, eager to know what brought me to ventriloquism, showed me photos of daughters, wives, dogs, farms. Men, who were not full-time entertainers, were retired dental hygienists, hairdressers, firefighters, ranchers. Retired anythings. For four days out of a pointless year they could surrender to a ritual that has been in institution since 1975, the routine of which made it unshocking that someone would show up after a year having acquired or relieved themselves of weight, alcohol, God, spouse, YouTube channel, gig, sleep-apnea device.

“Hell,” announced a vent holding a Santa wearing pajamas. “You’re bald now?”

The man with the corn puppet sighed and lowered the vegetable behind his back. “I saw a photo of myself on Facebook after a kid’s show,” he said, patting the crown of his head with his free hand. “They got me from behind. I had my wife shear off what was left.”

Murmurs snaked through the crowd: one of the larger wooden puppets in the center of the room was being released from its burlap head sack. Rocco  —  again, the dog with biceps  —  pointed me in his direction. “That’s a real McElroy  —  the Cadillac of hard puppets,” he whispered. Two men stood by with their phone cameras on flash; one vent with a fat Viking puppet pretended to fall faint to the floor.

A cop from Long Island gave a low whistle at the princely dummy. “It’s a beautiful thing,” he said to me, smiling and gesturing broadly toward the din. I agreed. There was so much warmth, so much camaraderie, so much strange puppet-to-puppet antagonism in the air, and  —  I added with special emphasis  —  I just loved that Meatball.

The officer looked at me sternly. “The meatball guy?” he said, louder. “I gave him the phrase ‘Don’t touch the balls’ and he’s been using that for years. That bastard’s here?”

*   *   *

Northern Kentucky was never exactly a likely mecca for the ventriloquial arts. In the 1920s, barrooms across the nation boomed with the surrealist showbiz acts of American vaudeville. From Midwestern saloons and small-town beer halls to New York’s glitzy Palace Theater, most cities welcomed troupes where magicians charmed, plate spinners spun, contortionists contorted, and ventriloquists  —  like the aforementioned McElroys and their fabulous dummies, native to Cincinnati  —  threw their voices across club circuits that sold the business of analog enchantment. When the theaters darkened in the Depressive ’30s, televised variety shows shuttled ventriloquism safely to the entertainment capitals of Los Angeles and New York, though the rise of more sophisticated special effects began to render dummies anachronistic as early as the mid-’60s. By the early ’70s, when vent-prominent programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show” had sunsetted to make way for sitcoms, the ventriloquist-and-dummy act was already approaching something like near-obsolescence.

A tile salesman, one William Shakespeare Berger, homed his collection of dummies in his garage in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Before his passing, in 1972, he donated his estate to establish Vent Haven, the world’s only museum devoted to ventriloquiana. The Vent Haven ConVENTion, now in its 49th year, is presently six miles away from the original site of Berger’s family home and functions as ventriloquism’s true earthly haven: its seat of philanthropy, shelter and quasi-religious pilgrimage.

In the first hours of ConVENTion 2024, Vent Haven’s new executive director, a man named Jimmy Vee, stood before us. This was his inaugural year at the helm  —  the former exec, Mark Wade, who had been billing himself as the King of Kid Show Ventriloquism since the ’90s, was now 74, and had taken a comfortable aristocratic pose in a chair against the wall. Jimmy, who was yelling, risible and (this is a neutral statement of fact, but readily abused as a punch line across the next few days) markedly shorter than average height, was master and commander in the ballroom, radiating manic, peachy, even utopic optimism for the form’s future.

“Red DOTS! Hello and WELCOME to your ORIENTATION! Now, there are no BAD seats in the house,” he boomed, among the puce carpentry that banked the stage and curtains, which were also puce. Vent Haven’s insignia, a two-foot ring encircling a portrait of Jacko, a monkey puppet in a bellhop’s velvet jacket and pillbox hat, was fixed above the stage like a cross in a chancel. “Mark, our last director, always said every seat is a good seat. And that’s TRUE!”

Most of my brethren were children, at least a dozen, each of them flanked by at least a single set of parents. A child with a dragon puppet rocketed his arm up, hand still lodged in the dragon’s back.

“I wanted to say, if you got a quote-unquote ‘bad seat,’” the boy announced, eunuch voiced, “then you’ve just gotta find the best in it.”

“That’s RIGHT! He’s exactly right!” went Jimmy, screaming with pleasure. “Absolutely! YES!”

Towering beside Jimmy was a man named Ken, author of the how-to manual “Creating a Character: The Off-Road, Uncensored Version” published in 2012, hundreds of copies of which were arranged in small mounds for us outside the conference room. (From his text: “Three laughs per minute is what you want to start with, and then build your laughs per minute  —  your ‘L.P.M.’  —  up from there.”)

“I don’t want to kill anyone’s enthusiasm,” Ken said, taking the mic, “but for you folks just starting out here, it’s not the puppet, OK?” (From the text: “If you don’t want to work hard, get out of the ventriloquist game. Go into magic or clowning; they take no talent or much skill.”)

Ken was one of a dominant type of wizened personality at the ConVENTion: a tired-wristed, 60ish male who jobbed inside cruise ships and conference rooms, who ran the performance circuit of smart-talk-in-the-afternoon-style shows in the ’90s, and now sells expertise to a tapering audience.

“I cut a hole in a tennis ball, put googly eyes on it, and it took me all over the world. I’ve been to 59 countries with it. Get this into your head and get out there  —  it’s not the puppet! And it’s all in the book!” (The copy from his DVD reads, “TAKE Ken HOME with you  …  PLEASE!!”)

*   *   *

Men and women behind me were grunting, lowing like cattle. We were all grunting, lowing like cattle. This was Vent 101, a workshop designed to coach red dotters through the basic tactics of the art. Together, we were unveiling the core of the ventriloquial mystery by practicing the letter B with our teeth clamped together.

The general act of learning ventriloquism is tedious, because the puppet is an instrument, and only one half of the theater routine. It is an ancient art, a maze of gestures and shadow gestures, biblical if not Delphic in provenance. I can only describe it as cousinish to learning the violin and getting very good at whistling at the same time. Nimble fingers tweak at little pinches and squeeze-boxes stuck inside the cavities of the ventriloquial dolls, regardless of whether they’re the standard, wooden manikin type (called “hard puppets”) or the squishier, usually more zoological ones (our “soft sculptures”), while the tongue operates flawlessly under confinement. These little hummingbird motions, behind their cage of clenched, unmoving teeth, continue the joke inherent in the word ventriloquist, from the Latin venter (“belly”); loqui (“to speak”); “belly-breathing,” or the illusion of voice from elsewhere.

There is no real “throwing” of the voice, alas; the ear’s deficits are made up for by the eye, which focuses on the puppet’s moving jaw, forming the suggestion that whatever’s being said by you is said by your companion. The most problematic letters of the alphabet  —  there are five of them  —  inspire too much frottage between lips, which explains why puppets often have jeery, whiny, heavily accented, broken or otherwise goofy voices: these are coping mechanisms, rerouted into hallmarks of the form.

Take the letter p, an annoying plosive. Under the standard ventriloquial straitjacketry of (1) a relaxed jaw, (2) slightly open but stiffened lips, and (3) a closed set of teeth, a phrase like “I like to hike” is shockingly easy to pronounce, whereas “I prefer puppetry” is humbling. To dodge the automatic, upper-to-lower-lip kiss involved in expressing the letter p, ventriloquists hump the back of the tongue against the soft palate and vault air right through the back. In practice, this sounds much like the letter t. The ventriloquist thinks p, says their muffled t, and does this ad nauseam until the letter is strong and clear. (“I trefer tuttetry.”)

Tonight’s tutelage was hosted by a man named Dan. His road-to-ventriloquial-Damascus moment was in 1965, care of a life-changing encounter at a Phoenix amusement park with Curly Q, a dummy belonging to the visiting Miss America pageant winner of that year. “I just about collapsed when I saw him. I was 5 years old,” he told us proudly. “But what about you all? Why vent? What’s your reason? And can you all hear me OK?”

Some wanted to do it because they had joined a church ministry; many wanted to be able to tell stories to their grandchildren. One man raised his hand and announced that he had always dreamt of a career in stand-up comedy, but felt too nervous to stand solitary onstage. Dan nodded understandingly. “When I’m up there without my puppet, I feel kind of exposed. And when I have one of my characters with me, I can relax a little bit more, and I can feel like I’m sharing the failure with somebody else if that’s what happens. I don’t take the full burden.”

We moved through the hard letters noisily. A few of the more gifted and seasoned in the back of the room were capable of showing me an elegant, dummy-free trick called “bifurcating,” where a ventriloquist speaks with lip movements that completely mismatch the sentence spoken. This has the terrific effect of looking like a flesh-and-blood human speaking with a laggy network connection, or someone being dubbed in a foreign-language film in real time.

The other four difficult letters, as annotated by Dan:

• F: The user-friendly “eth” skips over the tooth-and-lip problem of f. (Dan: “Now, the word ‘friend’ was hard for me in the beginning, so I always said ‘buddy.’ Just made things easier.”)
• B: Typically, the lips curl, mash and birth b. G gets around this manfully: we say g, but think b. (We gargled our way through the ventriloquist’s hallmark malapropism: “I’d like a gottle of geer.”)
• M: A relentlessly labial letter. N is more than good enough, probably the easiest to pretend to say. (Dan: “Another help in fooling your audience is if the ventriloquist has already said the word. Maybe you’d say ‘I love magic tricks.’ Then, your dummy could say something like ‘Nagic tricks are ny favorite, too.’”)
• V: Reroute this into “th.” (“I found I could do it better when my puppet Orson was flirting with a lady in the audience. Say her name was ‘Victoria.’ I could go”  —  and here he went into a nasal, singsong pitch  —  “Thhhhhicktorrria!”)

*   *   *

Behind the velvet curtains, Vinnie, the law enforcement officer who had beef with Meatball, was preparing four ventriloquists for the inaugural evening show. His arms, sized and shaped like petite country hams, were wrapping cables and wires, clipping microphones to collars and shuttling his performers into sweaty file. “If you do anything out of line,” Jimmy Vee announced to the audience at the top of the evening, “don’t be surprised if Vinnie taps you on the shoulder, and, you know, threatens your life.”

Verbally, it turns out that the ventriloquial diet is surprisingly lean. Jokes are tight and quick burning, largely because long-form bloviating is wasted on the microscopic attention spans of children under 10, or drunk audiences at timed open mics. Instead, low-stakes flirtation with any visible woman, disgust toward any visible male, and jokes with infuriatingly corny payoffs  —  what civilians now call “dad jokes”  —  are the meat-and-potatoes of the act. An exchange between Jeff , 28, a veteran vent who had been coming to the ConVENTion for at least a decade , and Tony Bronchitis,  his Galápagos turtle with a voice like Joe Pesci’s ,  went like this:

“OK, OK, I’ve got one for you. Did you know that Albert Einstein was a serial killer?” Tony asks.

Jeff shrugs. “I wasn’t aware.”

“I have no evidence, really,” goes Tony, “but he’s got his theories, and I have mine.” He bounces gleefully as the crowd boos. “It is a groaner, it really is.”

Nigel, who can be found most weekdays performing near the entrance to the American Eagle Outfitters flagship location in Times Square, approached the stage with a suitcase. His child was Miss Cindy Hot Chocolate: a rude little girl with a high, squeaky voice I would most quickly associate with someone’s awful niece.

“I’m trying to work on my performance,” he says desperately to her.

“You’re not that good no more,” she says. “Look at you, you’re stressed.”

Throughout the night, the mood onstage was pugnacious grading into the homicidal. Antagonisms  —  alarmingly relentless, restless antagonisms  —  were exchanged with puppets that were cruel, podunk, irascible, wily, horny, whiny, stubborn, dumb, deaf, preadolescent or old. Maegan, a brunette vent as facially acrobatic as a young Lucille Ball, tangled with her dolly, Jody, in a fascinating argument about whether or not Maegan was “believable as a ventriloquist.” Tony and Jeff were embattled over the phrase “you suck.” Nigel looked helplessly at the audience as Miss Cindy mopped the floor with him.

“You seem distracted,” she says.

“It’s a lot of pressure,” he responds, visibly sweating.

Cindy points at the audience. “This ugly man’s falling asleep.”

“There’s a lot of people here. Please make me look good.”

“That’s impossible,” she says.

Here was the puppet master’s pas de deux: between id and superego, between the ecstatic lunacy in which we spend our childhoods and the self-doubt in which we spend most of the years thereafter. These private flailings were almost movingly psychotherapeutic to witness, as the puppet  —  which worked like a conduit, or a crowbar  —  cracked open the shadow districts typically locked up in the unconscious, turning them into patter.

Like an angel from stage right came Ed. Ed, 85, retired from the trade but back for the evening, sauntered on like he poured the concrete, hung the Sheetrock, signed the lease for and shook hands with everyone involved in the creation of this Holiday Inn. “We’ve just got a word from the front desk,” he announced in a suit, tie and cummerbund. “There’s a ventriloquist from Oklahoma who will not be here tonight, and he’s 111,” he said, reading from a note card. “Oh”  —  he looked back at the audience  —  “I mean, he’s ill.”

Ed killed. Ed murdered. Ed was to ventriloquism what crime is to jail: Ed was the reason. “He never had his name in ‘Who’s Who’,” he announced, unveiling his dummy from a leather trunk, “but he did have his name in ‘What’s That?’! Ladies and gentlemen: Hugo Higgins!”

Ed and Hugo were a reminder of the vaudeville pleasure of the act, if not quite the whole metaphysical thing where man and object fused together in one perfect flow state. They were a paean to ventriloquy’s ancient design. Hugo was a low-cost special effect, specifically engineered to charm, and the combination of Ed’s dopey majesty, Hugo’s creaturehood and the dinky, dazzling mixture they made  —  it got the joke off every time. Ex.:

Ed: “You like girls, I gather?”

Hugo: “No, I like girls that I gather.”

Audience: [Laughter, cheering, ovation]

“It’s been my life’s pleasure to do this with you all,” Ed said, setting Hugo on the cushioned perch of a nearby stool. “I always liked to end my shows with a poem, so I’d like to do so right now. It’s called ‘The Touch of the Master’s Hand.’”

The ballad was a short fable involving a scene at an auction house. An auctioneer, trying to rush past the sale of an old and worthless violin, suddenly saw the price of the instrument rocket after a maestro rose to coax out its music. Ed delivered the clinching stanza directly into the stage lights — 

The Master comes, and the foolish crowd

Never can quite understand:

The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought,

By the touch of the Master’s hand.

 —  while Hugo, who waited mutely beside him, stared at the audience in what I would not consider total silence.

*   *   *

Night. The rigor-mortised bodies of miniature men and barnyard animals settled in the plastic chairs of the hospitality room, a windowless territory in the southern horn of the Holiday Inn that functioned as Vent Haven’s tiny Xanadu. Here, shelves groaned with Golden Oreos and value-size Lay’s, though the true milk of paradise lived in the mahogany-paneled open bar, staffed by men and women eager to know if you wanted anything, or more of anything, or if you wanted a thing of Fireball with whatever.

For the next six or so hours, as the room grew deafening, the general shit-shooting and shot-ripping was punctuated by an endless battle of coltish one-upmanship. It was a multinarrative space, mostly about jobs and what-happened-to-yous and various remorses of the aging body, but the jerky rhythm of the standard stand-up joke (setup statement 1 → setup statement 2, creating an anticipated pattern that deepened setup 1 → punch line, subverting the expected pattern) zagged through each conversation as inevitably as a rule of grammar.

“So,” went one, “I’ve got a buddy whose wife wanted to do some weight-loss surgery  —  lap-band, gastric bypass, I don’t know what you call it  —  but her insurance wouldn’t cover it. You know what they do cover? Sex change operations. Turns out you can’t have a thin wife, but you can have a chubby hubby.”

“So,” went another, “the way I see it, we’re furries from here”   — and here he measured the distance between his elbow and his fingers  —  “to here.” He started laughing. “Furries are funny as shit, man. Imagine if one of them was your priest? But I’d know my priest’s legs or arms anywhere. I was an altar boy.”

“Anyway,” went a third, “I want to share something Jimmy said to me earlier. He said, ‘Get out of my way,’ and I thought it was very moving, because I moved.”

One tomato-eyed vent approached me, eyeballing the tag on my chest. “Media,” he announced, squinting at the index card labeled “Media” on a lanyard around my neck. “I thought I smelled something.” Another man, setting down his Bud Light, began catching a swarm of invisible fleas above my head. Another joined to swat him in the forehead.

There was a mysterious sweetness  —  and a little weird sorrow  —  in openly acknowledging that some sort of outsider presence at the ConVENTion could be a meaningful cause for concern. One withering Vice special from years ago, two documentaries and the unshakable cloud of what some vents called “antidummy propaganda” in movies legion with murderous puppets (“Magic,” 1978; “Dead Silence,” 2007; et al.) made it an entirely reasonable  —  if not foregone  —  conclusion that most of the non-venting population considered ventriloquism a sort of quirky scourge. Add that to Vent Haven’s other obvious hermetic ingredients  —  its standing as the last sacred place for an outmoded art form, its good-natured but radical disjuncture with modernity  —  and the presence of any interloper on these grounds understandably threatened a new stench in a long lineage of spoilage.

A man named Dylan stood near the bar, palming a bourbon. Dylan was in fact once one of the focal points of “Dumbstruck,” a 2010 Elon Musk-produced documentary that follows the successes and failures of four members of this very ConVENTion. The documentary is  —  I now understand  —  not not a fair representation of the capriciousness of fame in the art form, but it certainly condescends to, even relishes, a deep streak of tragicomedy in tracking the various downfalls of its human characters. Aside from one Las Vegas headliner act, the documentary’s subjects all suffer some breed of genuinely shattering, life-altering indignity on screen (estrangement from family, a grueling divorce, one histrionically disappointed dad), mostly, if not entirely, engined by their passion for puppetry. It did not exactly boost morale.

Dylan, now rattling off his favorite whiskey bars in Erlanger, was dummyless. In the film, he’s 13  —  cherubic, creamy cheeked, fatally earnest  —  chasing stardom with his happy puppet sidekick, Reggie, a ludic pimp. Reggie was big of hat, purple velvet of suit, thickly dreaded, Black  —  stumbling across this Kentuckian child and his Bush-era minstrelsy routine must have felt, for the documentary team, like hitting the jackpot on the narrative slot machine. “It’s all behind me now, though,” he shrugged. “I’m positive. At least, I try to be.”

No longer does he vent. Reggie rests in a closet at home. Dylan comes to the ConVENTion every year  —  all 15 of them since the film’s release  —  to rejoin the friends who visit annually, to tote his beautiful wife to the open bar, to help break down equipment and set pieces. “I adore that character, though. I wish I had the courage to bring him back out.”

I felt embarrassed, vaguely, but the feeling passed quickly. “Well,” I asked, “does coming so religiously to Vent Haven now”  —  what with all the dummies, the brotherhood, the successes and travails he watched, now at a remove  —  “does it feel like you’re learning something different coming here, still?”

Dylan thought for a moment. “As time goes on, I get the feeling that this might die. That’s what makes it more special for me. In the future, nobody’s going to understand what this actually was. The future’s not going to remember it. But I will.”

Together, we watched as an especially old and beloved vent announced his retreat to bed. As he lumbered away, a man seated in the corner on the beer cooler gestured toward the empty door. “He’s going to go upstairs and fart,” he said solemnly. “And tomorrow? That fart’s going to turn into shit.”

*   *   *

Erlanger’s afternoon sun was roaring outside the hotel property. The Junior Open Mic, a squirmy lunchtime circus of envy, flair, ambition, stage makeup and children under 13, was not just  —  as the generous woman with the 12-piece Monsterella Stix beside me explained  —  a little league talent show. This was where we would find out who had the combination of natural and supernatural affinity to become ventriloquism’s new hero. Here, we would witness those who had learned lip and breath control while still within the brain’s crucial childhood window of plasticity. We would see who had been granted the God-given facility to vent, sing, maintain pace, orate through a detached third party, split their brain in half, make us laugh and still not have finished middle school. Here was, in short, where we would find any conceivable hope for the art’s future.

In the front of the stage, three judges sat like sentries, each offering good-natured advice to a 13-year-old from Tennessee. Her leisurewear-wearing parents held their breath as their ‘tween ventriloquist  —  an actor, a singer, a puppet maker and puppet artist (star-seeking children like these seemed to be as common as barbecue in Nashville)  —  delivered the 1946 Irving Berlin showtune, “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” with her squirrel puppet, Sandy.

“If Broadway was looking for somebody, I see you clearly onstage there,” said one judge. “Is that something you want to do  —  be on Broadway?”

She approached the mic. “I did want to for a long time, but I believe I’ve since changed my path,” she responded primly.

“Oh, OK. You can also do cruise ships!”

It broke your heart a little bit, to see these insultingly talented kids smash out Truman-era duets and ragtime standards, with the knowledge that there were crowns and pageant banners on display in their rooms, framed on their mantels, populating their elaborate résumés. They were destined for fame that would likely fork away from Vent Haven and the community that roared each time their puppets delivered a line that may as well have been from an out-of-print joke handbook. Against the ConVENTion’s superannuated, with their embittered pleasure in being outcast from time, the children produced an especially jerky juxtaposition.

A 12-year-old wearing a spangly fuchsia dress gave her matronly grandmother doll a weebly voice (“These days, my back goes out more than I do!” et cetera) to counteract her own candied-cherry one.

“You look terrific,” said one judge, mopping his ample brow. “When you came out it was like: Wow, stunning.”

“Yes, I love the package, and I think the dress fits you very well,” went another, dabbing his own brow. “It separates Granny and you. You’ll go far with this. You have this very”  —  he paused sententiously  —  “sweet demeanor.”

The crowd cooed when a 10-year-old boy, also from Tennessee, shuffled onstage with a dummy on each hand. One dummy, Egor, was made to look like the Marty Feldman version of the stock crookback in “Young Frankenstein,” while the other was a farmer named Dwayne. The boy had an odd and beautifully rough-cut voice: raspy when speaking, soft and a little high through the hick, stony and throaty when through the hunchback.

No sensible chuckling took place during Egor and Dwayne’s performance. The crowd, which somehow felt double its size, shrieked, choked, nearly self-soiled at every utterance made by either of the two. One woman behind me fell heroically out of her chair at the punch line of a climactic zinger. (Egor: “Master, I have an idea!” Dwayne: “You’ve got an idea, or a hunch?”) The boy’s grandfather, a ventriloquist himself, beamed among the sobbing women, vindicated by the power of his genetic payload.

“The only concern I would have for a young man your age is that you have to be very careful with that kind of deep voice. You’ve got to watch out for nodes in your vocal cords,” said one judge. “Keep an eye on that,” he nodded in the direction of the boy’s parents. “But, folks, we are looking at the next Jeff Dunham. I want everyone to make note.”

The comparison to Dunham was no small honor. You may be aware of Jeff Dunham if you were awake in the late ’00s and had access to Comedy Central, although the Dallas native still maxes out arena seating capacities with Achmed the Dead Terrorist (a morose jihadist), Jose Jalapeño (a pepper with a mustache and sombrero), Peanut (fey, simian thing) and Walter (a crotchety fart). His comedy  —  which spans from racially transgressive catchphrases (like Achmed’s, which is “Silence! I kill you!” delivered Middle Easternly) to the sort of truth bombs that shake the foundation of free speech (like when Dunham wishes Walter “Happy Holidays” and Walter responds: “I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!”)  —  has awarded him, at one point, the ranking of third-highest-paid comedian in the country, and a yet-unbested Guinness World Record in 2014 for “most tickets sold for a stand-up comedy tour.” (He’s also still around: he recently finished a victory lap across North American megadomes and stadiums in his Still Not Canceled tour, which prominently featured a Gen Z puppet that looks at his phone a lot.)

Irrespective, then, of your or my relationship to the artist, Dunham remains one of a palmful of Vent Haven’s prodigal sons  —  raised right here at the ConVENTion, a surreal megacelebrity homegrown from these small fields  —  permanently adored, messianic and with no exaggeration sacred, at least here in this room.

“I want us all to remember this moment,” continued the judge. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re watching a master in the making here.”

*   *   *

Burt was one of those Hollywood types restored from the ’70s: head to toe in a kelly-green sweatsuit, a pavé chain, a gold piece on each pinky and a voice like Jerry Stiller’s in the middle of an argument. Burt was human, pacing the stage, and looked like he was about to cry.

Before us was a black-and-white video featuring a man named Paul Winchell and his tiny dummy, Jerry Mahoney. Little Jerry was a street urchin  —  his cinnamon hair combed for church, houndstooth microtux worn reluctantly  —  but a wisecracker, a sort of bat-wielding Brooklynite that Winchell, a Rockwellian father, sternly loved in his lap.

Winchell was a genuine lulu of the form, and a kind of ventriloquial da Vinci. One of the original inventors of the artificial heart, a patent holder for a portable blood-plasma defroster, invisible garter belt, retractable fountain pen and an innovative method for breeding tilapia, Winchell, with Mahoney, also functionally shaped the medium of children’s programming.

Burt, who powerhouse-produced much of the daytime television of the ’80s and ’90s, roamed the stage like a jungle cat. Burt and Winch  —  as he called him  —  were joined by the sort of friendship that first came from admiration, then grew into a sort of mutual pethood. “I want to welcome you to a few of the  —  and I’ll use the word ‘magical’ here  —  magical things that he was capable of.”

On-screen, Winch and Jerry, as part of a Christmas special from 1953, sat before a series of handbells.

“Now, just watch the hands,” Burt went. “We don’t know how he did this, but we do know one thing: it was live. He knew no other way.”

Winch and Jerry were in the middle of something impossible. Spellbindingly  —  sweetly, snowily  —  they operated the bells in a rhythm that was not only synchronized to the delicate flutter of the music, but the squall above them, the windy midcentury chorale and one another. The shivering trees, the swaying branches, Mahoney’s right arm, Winch’s left arm, the 10 bells before them  —  all were unified, adamantine. Winch’s dimples clung to a deep tissue in his cheek.

All this swirled into something like high math or low wizardry, and to savor the  —  and I will use the word  —  magic here did not require any suspension of disbelief. For the first time since I’d arrived, the delicious oneness of ventriloquism  —  an idea I assumed was a conspiracy, or that I was immune to and would never understand  —  was before me. Winchell seemed to pose a counterargument against the idea that the solitary body we were given was all we needed. Mahoney was Winch, and Winch, Mahoney.

“Jerry Mahoney is representative of the child that lives inside of us,” Burt continued, bringing a tissue to the corners of his mouth, his eyes. “No one cared that Jerry was a puppet. Nobody cared that there was a strip of leather under his skin, that his eyes weren’t lined up all the time. He had a sense of sophistication. Truth.”

Given the quantity of Jerry Mahoney replicas seated on the laps of the audience before me, I had the sense that this was not a rare attitude, this Winch-love. But it felt like a secret on the brink of vanishment. Custody battles between Winchell and his producers, who withheld rights to a vast terra of some of his most boggling and magnetic performances, had resulted in a partial legacy, mostly eroded.

“All those live tapes from ‘Winchell-Mahoney Time’?!”Burt shouted, pointing both hands upward toward the roof. “Forget about them! Poof! Gone! Dunzo! What the hell can you do?”

*   *   *

Night again. Nigel, who performed with Cindy Hot Chocolate, was standing near the entrance of the dealers’ rooms, Vent Haven’s puppet bazaar. He cradled a Tiffany-blue dragon in reading glasses with both of his large hands. “A new member of the family,” he said, holding it out for me. I met its eyes and rubbed its fat stomach in a gesture of congratulations. Nigel concentrated on the dragon, waiting for some presence of character  —  a name, a vocation, neuroses —  to take hold and inhabit the dummy with substance. Several seconds passed. “He smokes,” I suggested. “Weed.”

“A stoner,” he nodded. “Good. Hookah too. Maybe he runs a vape store.” He tried on several languorous voices. “Hey, I got edibles,” he said, putting the dragon’s face near my ear. “Edibles, flower, I got it all.”

Rocco’s vent was trying to get my attention near a box of pizza that now looked like the leftovers of a major surgery. “Hey, Media!” he shouted. (Throughout the night, my title had undergone two re-christenings, from “Media Girl” to just “Media,” then pronounced Medea, as in the sorceress of Greek tragedy, or the title character in Tyler Perry’s film franchise.)

I was pulled into a discussion about prime-time television  —  quibbles about “America’s Got Talent,” seemingly the only remaining path to mainstream ventriloquial stardom, loomed large here  —  but I had a nagging question, a formal question. Can a ventriloquist ever make drama outside of the mildly angry buddy comedy?

Monologuing, mused one. Dummies that don’t let their vent talk, said another. But if both speak, the dummy has to win, right? The everlasting ire, the fiery friction, all that? “That’s the point,” shrugged Vinnie, the hospitality room heavy.

“I tried a two-headed dummy once,” he offered. “Siamese twins. One was gay, and one was straight. That didn’t really solve anything.”

*   *   *

Some soggy hours later, we found ourselves seated midway through the midnight open mic. Onstage someone was singing “The Rainbow Connection,” and the entire audience was yelling along, most in faithful imitations of Jim Henson’s Kermit. Rocco’s vent leaned over our laps. “I’m just never going to grow old!” he screamed. “Never going to get old!”

I asked a British vent, Shane, if a puppet had ever made him cry. “I suppose I’ve been close,” he whispered loudly as a pair of Japanese vents took the stage. “Why do they do that, I’m not sure. Suppose you can absorb something so fully, it touches you.”

“Shit,” announced a former firefighter from Missouri to my right. “I’ve cried. Lots of us need a coping mechanism. From womanizing, to alcoholism, to gambling, to drugs. This kept me alive. I just quit the force  —  I’m 53  —  because too many of my friends were dropping like flies. If I’m dead at 65, what’s the sweet spot I’m shooting for? How long should I get to live?”

This seemed to be a shared concern. Shane told me a story about how a ventriloquist  —  one who would later perform for George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth  —  locked himself in a room for three days in his first ConVENTion sometime in the ’80s. Hotel security was asked to open the door because people were worried he had hanged himself. “My first time here, I broke down and wept in my room, too. Talking about this is such a shame, because I don’t know when I’ll be back again. I’ve been coming for years, and everyone here’s such family, but”  —  he was cut off  —  “it’s Cookie!”

It was Cookie. Beloved Cookie  —  queenly, devastating, powerful Cookie  —  was onstage. A longtime vent with a saintly halo of hair made platinum under the stage lights, Cookie had an upsettingly moving speaking voice, like a girl’s and a woman’s at once. Whoops showered from front to back of the house when she smiled.

“So as some of you may know, my husband Tim and I used to come to the convention,” she began, pausing as the racket settled. She cleared her throat.

“Last year, as some of you also may know, he passed away. I’ve been in bereavement and support groups, and I wrote a book called “Grief Steps: The Path,” which is actually on sale in the dealers’ rooms. If someone you know needs encouragement or positivity after loss, it’s there. The main thing that I just wanted to do was thank everyone for all the love and support and comfort I’ve gotten here. I just don’t know what I’d do or who and where I’d be without you all.”

Rocco’s vent hollered “WE LOVE YOU COOKIE!” The rest of the audience ran with it, making it into a sort of hymnal. “COOKIE  . . . COOKIE  . . . COOKIE!!”

She and her tiny puppet  —  something that looked like a mango from my seat  —  broke into “Friendship,” the Cole Porter show tune from 1939, though they duetted it like Judy Garland and Johnny Mercer had in 1940. “If you ever lose your mind, I’ll be kind,” Cookie sang,

And if you ever lose your shirt, I’ll be hurt,

If you’re ever in a mill and get sawed in half, I won’t laugh

It’s friendship, friendship

Just a perfect blendship

When other friendships have been forgot

Ours will still be hot

A-lottle-dottle-dottle-dig-dig-dig

Eyes leaked all over the place. We continued chanting “COOKIE” as she walked offstage, rising for her ovation, banging on the plastic of the seats before and behind us. Someone beside me, either a doll or a human child, tapped me on the hip to bend down, and a hand, soft as a glove, rose to wipe my face.

*   *   *

“My name is Egor, and my name is Jaxon,” said one child, the first in the circle of plastic seats.

“My name is Puppet, and my name is Georgine,” said the second.

Junior Vent University is a sacred zone at Vent Haven, one of the most well-protected domains in the building. (“Usually, we don’t let any adults in on this class,” one of the instructors told me the day prior. “Parents can’t even attend, and we keep the doors locked  —  we just want to make sure the kids feel really, really safe. But,” he added, “it helps that you’re a woman. Just saying.”)

“I’ll go!” said a teacher. “My name is Chloe, and my name is Lynn.”

“I’m Barbie Q. Chicken. I’m 4, a little bit of a diva  —  and when I see chicken being cooked, I do say curse words,” said another.

Her 9-year-old keeper looked up.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t had coffee today, so I’m not really awake yet.”

“No problem, honey. And you?” asked the instructor.

“My puppet is named Deadly Sally,” said a puny girl in a ponytail.

“Why Deadly Sally?”

“Because she tried to kill my sister,” she smiled.

The children ranged from consummate to highly eager. On one side of the spectrum were the pageant kids, the “America’s Got Talent” fast-trackers, all disciplined and carefully coached. The others had bought their first puppet months prior, or yesterday. Every child cradled their puppet like a parent with a toddler, basketing it by butt or back, and seemed pleased to burst into ventriloquial practice phrases (“ny nother Nary has nany nonkeys,” a favorite) without prompting. I had the sense that this environment was more serious and rigorous than any session geared at those at least triple the median age in the room.

“We have to make people believe that this is a two-character play,” announced another instructor, sweating charismatically through his Hawaiian shirt. “If we don’t believe that he’s a real person, we have a problem. Remember this phrase  —  you’re ‘committing to a bit.’ You’re switching their minds into your world. Treat your act and your puppet with great dignity.”

Even more than at the Junior Open Mic, it was glaringly obvious that puppetry, like sports or foreign languages, is a practice best taken up before puberty. Nowhere did I witness the guardsmen at the gates of the mind  —  those responsible for self-consciousness and self-doubt  —  more swiftly outsmarted, pacified or outright killed than in that room. And the children seemed to inherently grasp the complex psychodramatic relationship they shared with their dummies  —  they were not sidekick, nor instrument, nor prop, but extension of brain and self.

“I want someone to try and say a hard sentence in front of the class,” said one instructor, by way of her pigtailed doll. “Let’s try F! ‘Phil and Frank went to the fair!!’” She careened her puppet’s face before a child with a plush toad and a terrific stutter.

As though only he and his doll existed  —  no fellow kid vents, no teachers, no history, no future, no box of Rice Krispies waiting for him at break time in the corner  —  he heroically strangled the alien consonant. “Phil and Frank went to the fair,” he said, satin-smoothly. “And I wasn’t invited.”

*   *   *

Seven minutes east of the Holiday Inn is the long-awaited Vent Haven Museum, which is part graveyard and part melancholy pornographic facility for the devoted ventriloquist. The chartered school bus that would take us there was already humming with action by the time I boarded. A puppet maker beside me saluted the driver with a clap on the back of his seat.

“Everyone, this is Jack,” he went. “Everyone, say ‘Hi, Jack!’”

“HI, JACK!” we obliged.

Jack hit the gas and looked into the mirror. “Don’t say that around the airport.”

The rooms of William Shakespeare Berger’s refurbished suburban home bulged with the generous gifts of many dead vents. Victorian-era dummies peered patiently from their station. Mammy dolls, various ethnic minstrels and puppets simply marked “Chinamen” loomed solemnly. One splashy placard explained a series of numinous wooden figures that had washed ashore after their owner  —  last seen traveling by tugboat from Tabasco to Yucatán  —  drowned in a shipwreck. There were legions of German devils, an exquisite six-foot pussycat, one wooden bunny carved by a nervous soldier floating somewhere off the coast of Vietnam. A Hitler dummy is supposedly in storage and never put on display.

“Puppet” comes from the Latin pupa, which is not only the root for the French word for doll, but also the name for the cocooned insect in a post-larval state. Not alive, not dead  —  not unconscious, not conscious. Kentucky, which has those glossy black roads and Grant Woodian horizons of curly trees, barns and ponies, was a dignified vantage to reckon with the undeadedness we witnessed. My seatmate, who introduced himself as a vent of 40 years, splayed his wallet to show me photos of him shaking hands with Jeff Dunham, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump. “I have a Winchell heart,” he said, proudly. “I flatlined for 12 minutes on an operating table. Winchell saved my life.”

“Those dummies are a communion,” he explained, as the highway swished outside. “My grandmother, a medicine woman, spoke to the dead. What you saw is a little like that. We speak through those figures, but they speak to us.”

The thin daytime moon hovered above us. We whizzed past a Chinese restaurant, a fruit stand, a morgue, acreage of two-star hotels. I asked if he heard voices in his head when not with a puppet.

“I am a lifelong resident of that planet,” he said, smiling and squeezing my hand. “I believe I’ve been given many gifts.”

*   *   *

The pool, which was 10 meters long and viscous from saliva, was an unbeautiful place to swim, though lying by it, in the company of a small team of children warring like a gang of weasels in the water, offered a clear view of the hallway that funneled toward the checkout desk.

As the children tried to suffocate each other, and their mother  —  someone’s mother  —  entered with a placating bag of sandwiches, I wondered if there was a weasel in me. Maybe it was a nightingale, or a donkey, or a meatball  —  maybe a tiny Brooklynite with a big heart and a bad attitude. I waved to all of them as they passed by the window. One vent put his puppy dummy’s paw against the glass and made him mouth what I assume was “bye!” with such an expression of martyred tenderness that the children began yelling again.

All love is an outcry of secret recognition, I supposed. If man suspected a mystical symmetry not found in the mirror, why not seek out the thing that balanced it best? Why not split the heavy onus of being? Wouldn’t the practice of a shackled, stupider voice add truth to the one we had when we let our lips flap freely?

The gospel of Vent Haven, I considered from the deck chair, was like any faith or art. It shared in the belief that the whole language of the human spirit was huger, vaster, more wild and sprawling than what could be kept in flesh. Its congregation, surrendering to this idea, spoke in tongues. It demanded courage, tested patience, had saints and, like any faith, no need for justification. All it asked was a commitment to its bit.

“Ny nother Nary has nany nonkeys!” shrieked a girl in a pistachio one-piece. Her scuba mask made it hard to tell if I’d seen her in the Junior Vent classroom the day prior. “Nany nonkeys!” she shouted. “Nany nonkeys!”

A very small boy, standing on her left in a pair of swim underwear, mouthed the words privately to himself as he studied her screams.