Jeff Dunham

“The best place to find material is in real life. I've always maintained that it's not until the mid-20s that you have enough of a life to draw from. There's nothing better for a comic than to go through some bad stuff - and some good stuff, like getting married.”

“I try to make the majority of my audience laugh.”

“I've never been truly hammered... Never. Not even in college. I was too busy driving or flying away on weekends doing shows around Texas and the country.”

“I'm a geek to the bone.”

“I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a cheap version of the doll. Achmed started out just being this little plastic toy from the store.”

“I taught myself computer. Then Macintosh came along, and it became a really bad addiction. If I wasn't in show business, I'd have pocket protectors growing out of my chest. I do everything on it. It's kinda sick.”

“I think all the garbage in the world is thanks to a very small handful of idiots.”

“I'm not trying to teach anybody anything, I'm not trying to say anything, I have no political motive whatsoever. My motive is just the big laugh.”

“I honestly go back and forth in my head about using advanced and innovative technologies for creating my characters. There's something more 'real' and charming when the characters aren't perfect. It's the difference between anything that's built by a computer and machine versus the same thing being made by hand.”

“A lot of my best stuff is just ad libs on stage, and that's one thing that I've gotten back to at the live show.”

“A comedian needs to have his own filters, needs to know his audience, how far he can push things.”

“There are not that many ventriloquists out there who build their own characters. I love that because they are uniquely mine.”

“Family time was very difficult when my girls were little, but I never missed a birthday; I was there for every major event.”

“My mother and my father have always supported me. Now in their eighties, they actually clamor onto the tour bus with me once or twice a year so they can watch the performances and hear the crowds. Traveling with eighty-something-year-olds on a tour bus... there has to be some sort of reality show in that.”

“Up until college age I was using the typical little-boy dummy that sits on the knee and makes woodpecker jokes. My first original character didn't happen until later, and that was Jose the Jalapeno on a Stick.”

“I'm guilty of being fascinated by gadgets and toys and technology, but any penny that I spend, I try to make it be a part of what I do for a living. Because then you are forwarding. You are forwarding that art, forwarding that career ahead.”

“I've always said that instead of watching a guy juggle seven things amazingly I would rather see a really bad juggler who's really funny.”

“My goal in any show is to make people laugh. That's the No. 1 thing. Everything else pales in comparison to that.”

“I was a shy little kid, and getting up in front of people and making them laugh and being able to carry on a dialogue rather than a monologue was something that was pretty interesting to me because you could set yourself up - you could ask a question and then answer it.”

“I think there's a lot of, unfortunately, unfunny ventriloquists out there, so they've got a bad rap. It came after Edgar Bergen because everybody had a little cheeky boy dummy like Charlie McCarthy, and everybody decided to become a ventriloquist because Bergen had popularized it. He brought it back from the doldrums of vaudeville.”