Ventriloquism: The Science of Dummies

I think it is a wonderful art form. However, I do recognize that a lot of people think it's creepy, uh for good reason, because you have this inanimate object that you're bringing to life. Yeah, but then, of course that's that's kind of all of puppetry. And granted you have individuals who claim to be creeped out by all puppets, which I find tends to be more of a like a frailty of the imagination because you're you're cutting out an entire storytelling medium that is that is, you know,

almost as old as humanity. I've we've been telling stories, uh for so long, and a lot of the time we've been using inanimate objects to tell them it's true. Um. And actually this is really interesting. In ancient times, ventriloquists were actually thought to be able to speak to the dead and predict the future, and then the voices seemed to come from their stomachs, and that was the thought to be the voice of the dead. And this continues

today with the work of Jeff Dunham. That's right, that's right. By the nineteenth century, ventriloquism became a form of entertainment and then people started to use dummies, but before that they were just throwing their voices. And in fact, in some parts of the world, such among the tribes of the Zulu, Inuit and Maori, ventriloquism is still used for

religious in ritual purposes. So there you go, just in case you thought that ventriloquism was just a throwback to you know, of this early twentieth century art form, the creepy wooden doll head. No, it's been around for a long time now, that the creepy wooden doll head, and then the vaudevillian act of ventrol equism is probably what still resonates with most people, and probably not so much

the actual acts. I think most people when you when people think of ventriloquism, they're not even necessarily remembering any kind of actual ventriloquistack that they've seen. And I've seen some some good ones here and there. I don't actually actively seek it out, but occasionally, yeah, and but occasionally, in the course of of just going about your day life, you're going to run into a ventriloqual stack. And and some artists make go at being lively with it and

creative and doing something interesting. But over the years, of course they they've also factored into a number of horror films and uh and and creepy interpretations. A few that come to mind. There was a nineteen sixty four film called Devil Doll, which is probably most known today as as having been used in an episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand. But it is even even with the silhouetted figures at the bottom, with the with the mike and the bots riffing on it and making fun of it,

it's like a legitimately creepy film. It's one of these where it's where there's magic and there's a there's this tug of war between ventrilo was Dummy and uh and and puppet Master about who's in charge of who. And it's one of those films where the film quality is so poor, the acting is so weird that it almost feels like some sort of a documentary. You almost get this this feel feeling like you're peeking through a keyhole

and at something that's actually happened. And I find it to be a really unsettling film, despite it being kind of boring and and and despite always having seen it with people making fun of it. You know why I think that is because I think that even though there's all sorts of misdirection and illusion used in ventriloquism, there is a truth to it, meaning that there's a relationship between this puppet and the master, which means to say

that that is a splintering of the ventriloquists personality. Yes, it's just another version of them. Yeah. So a lot of these these horror tales basically come down to this idea that there is some deeper connection between between puppet and puppet Master. You see that in the Dummy episode from UM the Twilight Zone. You see it in Magic, which started Anthony Hopkins to the Ventriloquist. Uh, you see it in the Batman Villain the Ventriloquist, where it's the

ventriloquist dummy that's like a little mobster kind of character. Um. Then there was an episode of Tales from the Crypt that I strongly remember as well, called The Ventriloquists Dummy, in which this character is played by Bobcat Goldway, who is this up and coming ventrol aquist who wants to get some tips from this older master played by Don Rickles. And the big reveal here is that Don Rickles character

it's not really a ventriloquist dummy. It's like a parasitic twin that's monsters little creature on the end of his his hand. What which that just wears a mask? What is the name of this film? This is the Ventriloquist Dummy. And it was an episode of Tales from the Crypt that has everything I love in it. And I think I have mentioned before shamefully that I really really do

like Don Rickles. His his humor. Oh well, he's an insult comic really yeah, yeah, And he's acting in this he's he's actually really good in this, and Bobcat's fun as well. It's it's one of those, uh, those episodes of Tales from the Crypt that is at once like Tales from the Crypt at its best and worst, depending on exactly what you're expecting from that show. So anyway, and then of course today we have Jeff done him, which which I find kind of frightening and horrifying as well.

Um yeah, I mean he's incredibly popular, and the thing is is that he's not incredibly popular because ventriloquism is incredibly popular. He just uses it as a medium and has been successful at it. But I really wanted to bring up Nina Conti. She is a ventriloquist. She has a documentary called Her Master's Voice. It is wonderful. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we sort

of unrolled this podcast and the science behind ventriloquism. But what I like about her act is that she she can do the sort of straight up um insult comic jokes visa be her her puppet Monk the Monkey. Yeah, because that's the that's like low level ventriloquism humor, the idea, it's not me. That's awful. It's this little guy. I can't well what he just said. And that's the other thing. They can really get away with saying a lot of things that they normally wouldn't be able to and there's

a sort of power in that, right um. But she also has a very serebral part of her act in which she's sort of making a comment on the human condition, and in one of her bits, she pretends as though Monk has taken over her body and has possessed her, and Monk is very cute just to see just we're just just looking at a still image of in but menacing and see that's the interesting thing is she really does struggle with her relationship with this puppet and whether

or not she should continue with it. So it's it's interesting. It's like something that she had gets a lot of pleasure out of, but also at the same time doesn't

She feels completely nnacled to this as a profession. So in that context you see her being possessed by Monk, and there's some very dark undertones there that are expressed and that we all sort of feel, you know, we're tethered to something in our lives that we feel like, oh, I can't escape it, well, you know, and it also brings to mind some of the issues we talked about in the episode we did about the Shadows self and about uh and well we did the episode of two

about pro wrestling where we talked talking both of them about what happens when we take on other personas in one way or another, be it as part of an act, if you're an actor, you know, a wrestling persona, or you're going undercover as a as a as a vice agent, um, all these these different roles we take on. What does

that do to us? What does what does what happens to us when we sort of pour a portion of our soul or our mind into this artificial creation and and it sounds like this, uh, this, this uh, this film explores some of that territory as well. Yeah, it absolutely does. And it's funny that you brought that up because I thought the same thing when I was watching enough that this is a lot about um, you know,

what sort of personality you put out there. And then this Monk character is really fulfilling aspect of her personality because she says in the film, I feel kind of bland as a person, but Monk feels makes me feel as though I can express things that are hidden within me.

It falls in nicely with the because on one hand, we have the more or less perceived reality of ventriloquism, where it's that's somebody in a puppet saying a bunch of awful stuff through it, and then we have this fictional interpretation of it where it's like, oh, what if there's something more significant it's taking place between puppet and puppet master, And then the closer you look, you realize that, yes, there is something more significant taking place In many cases. Yeah.

Another aspect of this film that gives it another level of oddness is that um and I won't give it all away, but basically she has been bequeathed six puppets her ex lover, and these are bereaved puppets and she has to do something with them, and uh, one of them is based on her ex lover. It's it's the face and um and she can't quite make his voice work, and so it's weird because she's trying to sort of like resurrecting him and her relationship with him through this puppet,

because in a way, these puppets were him. They were all pieces of him that that he brought to life with his own energy, and now he's gone, but these puppets remain, and with certain extent she can reanimate them and make them live again. But she also sort of is burdened by these puppets, and one of them is a grandmother puppet. And I won't go into it, but there's a very creepy pool scene she takes the grandmother swimming.

It's very nice, right you think, Um, so yeah, it does sort of uncover these these weird feelings that she has about maybe that she's been burdened with this. Um. But anyway, very interesting film. Let's get into the technical aspects here of how ventriloquists fool our brains. Okay, well this this is really interesting because it really comes into the way that we interpret what we're seeing, the way the way we the sense data enters our brain and

it's turned into conscious thought. Um. And this applies when when you're when you're thinking of this, think of the ventriloquist and the dummy, but also think of your television set and it's speaker system, think of any kind of puppetry or just the ability like I have a dinosaur the stuff dinosaur on my desk. I can pick it up and I can kind of talk and go, like,

got on with this podcast. It's going kind of along, and you kind of buy into I buy into the fact that he's talking even though I'm the one talking. You know, just stop real quick. You just said something that maybe you wouldn't normally say. Right, this is going a little we're kind of going off the tracks here again the power of the puppet. Maybe that's why he's here. He's here to keep me on track. So he's looking at you meaningfully. But the older idea was that we

have the five senses and is an actuality. There more than five senses, but but the five primary senses are entering our brain in a separate part of the brain is dealing with each so side hearing, smell, touch, taste, uh, the ideas. The old idea is that each part is governed by its own corresponding region of the brain, but not so. According to a two thousand seven Duke University

Medical Center study. So they were studying monkeys and they found that auditory and visual information is processed together before the combined signals make it into the brain's cortex, where all the analytical stuff is going on. So, in other words, the sound the ventriloquist voice, and the image the ventriloquist with the moving mouth, and the and the mum mouthed puppeteer, the audio and the visual combine before it reaches the part of the mental factory where we have to make

conscious reason, reason thought out of it. Yeah, certainly in instances where your brain sort of makes an assumption, right, because you have the um, the inferior colliquelus, the tiny round structure in their brain which is carrying visual and auditory signals, bungling them all together. So if you're watching TV, as you say, you're you're looking at the mouth and thinking that the voice is emanating from the mouth speakers. Yeah, and it's it's kind of it's handled in another department

before it reaches the uh, the really analytical portion. In fact, according to the study they found it about six of the neurons in the inferior colliculus can carry visual as well as auditory signals. So again, visual and auditory information gets combined early before the brain can process it in

the thought. Um, you know, it's like the brain is where the smart guys hanging out but he has all these underlings that are dealing with the actual sense data, and so the sense data guys out there and he's like, yeah, that's all this, uh, this little dummy made out of wood, and he was totally talking what do you make of that? And You're like, oh, okay, well what was he saying? That's what I'm going to focus on, because I trust you to tell me when there's a piece of wood

talking to me. You know, I was thinking about how ventriloquous and UM magicians are so similar because they're both relying on these little quick tricks to try to trick your brain right, And I was thinking about the vanishing coin trick, where you know, you see the coin in one hand, you see it disappear, But really what's happening

is is this thing called persistence of vision. The audience well actually see the coin in the left palm for split second after the hands separate, for instance, And visual neurons don't stop firing once you have a stimuli like that UM, and it's no longer present. So our perception of reality lags behind reality about one one of a second,

which is just enough for a magician to exploit. So again, this same idea that the way that you're processing you know, auditory and visual signals could be bungled up, and and you know, puppeteer could take advantage of that same idea magician and a coin trick. Yeah, I mean, I hate to to in any way support the the idea that the mind body can action. Idea of the of of our brain is the is the rider on a horse.

But it's kind of like the brain is in this dark box and uh, and then there's reality on the outside, and we are given, as you say, a perception of the reality. And and it is the fact that we're dealing with the perception of the reality rather than the reality that allows for a lot of these tricks to take place. I don't even get me started about how reality is just a three D computational model that we've constructed these blueprints in our brain. We're not even really

paying attention. So much of what we're perceiving is an illusion anyway. Um, but in our ability to to look at a puppet and listen to a puppet and then really feel like that that creature is alive, like in a way, that's kind of a glitch in the system that could not have possibly. I mean, it's just it ends up becoming an artifact of our development. Well. And then of course, uh, the ventriloquists also directs your attention to the dummy, so that takes the attention away from

their mouth or from seeing their vocal courts moving right. Um, And they are not, as we have learned, ruaring their voice at all. They're adjusting the volume. Uh, but they are. They are again just sort of adding to this idea that that's actually the puppet talking. Your brain knows puppets not talking, and yet it sort of accepts that. And plus we're going to buy into it because we want to. I mean, if you're going to a ventriloquist or a puppet show because you don't want to believe, then you're

in the wrong. Uh, You're you're in the wrong place for your entertainment. It's true. And but even if you don't want to believe it, you end up to at least the subject matter. Right. Another thing that ventriloquists do to sort of perfect the art form is to make substitutions with certain letters. Because certain letters like B, F, M, P, the plosive P, V and W all rely on moving

your lips. They're called labial sounds. So what you have to do, is a ventriloquist, is to then substitute other letters or sounds that don't rely on you moving your lips around. So something like an M you can substitute with the end, which is more like an. It makes more sense when you're the ventriloquist doing it. Um. So if I say, hikin, guy, guy, I'm really using an N in there, right Yeah. If I really listened closely to it, you're saying Donny okay, joy Johnny right um,

so much creepier in person. By the way, well look for the video because you do. We have a video on the web Science on the Web episode coming up that explores some of this ventral equism stuff. Then you'll get to actually see clips of examples of it, and you'll get to see Julie's fabulous parlor trick that she does. Oh you've got a nice one to them, I do. Oh yeah, well that one involved a little bit of an additional cinematic magic, but still it's a wonderful ventriloquist voice.

Kids love it, though, like they're at a certain age. I enjoy um pleating the two dots on my my hand and doing the hand puppet. The senior wins. This type guy. I tend to not have him talk though. I just have him chew and kind of like look at the kid and then eat things like, you know, whatever is around, actual food if possible. And then also I have him turned into a crab and crawl around on the table. That's always fun. Do you ever have

him dipping tobacco? No, we can't really dip tobacco. He's kind of just all he can do is crawl around on the table like a crab and then ball back up into a talking fist. But kids at a certain age love it. So all right, well, let's take a quick break, and we are going to talk about an extreme example of this technique of letter substitution and muscle control of a mismatch between your face and your lips. Really amazing stuff. But let's take a quick break and

we'll be right back. All right, we're back. We're talking about Vince Trilloquism. We've spoken about the creepies side of ventriloquis stomach the will, the fictional creepy side, and then the arguably creepy real life complications that occur when we breathe life into an unmoving object. It's true. And um, you know, we didn't really mention the etymology of the word ventriloquist, but it comes from the Latin words ventire

stomach belliar womb. That's what that means, and low key to speak, so it means to speak from the stomach. But it's not necessarily the stomach here that that is the key. It is really the ventriloquist brain and specifically this act of bifurcation, of course, bifurcation meaning to split.

In the documentary Kevin Johnson A Wonderful, Wonderful Ventriloquist explains how uh you have to take command of your facial muscles, and he says that the ability to form words with your tongue and then restrain the muscles that correspond with the sound necessitates that the performer bifurcate their attention. So, in other words, the thinking really really hard about what they're saying. But at the same time they're trying to rain in the muscles around their their mouth that naturally

want to move to the rhythm of speech. Of course, and then sometimes they have to do something completely contrary to what they're saying, right, they have to plaster this expression on their face. That's the opposite of the emotions that are being performed, because it really is like performing yourself yourself and then a version of yourself at the same time. And you might even be drinking water. That's a favorite trick of course, Yeah, drinking water. Um. He

also has a beautiful opera voice is pretty amazing. Um. He gives an extreme example of this by talking to the camera and miss Matt purposely mismatching his mouth's movements to the words that are coming out. So it's probably one of the weird It looks like like the video and the audio have become out of sync, but he's creating the effect just completely organically by moving moving his lips at one speech and then speaking at another. It's it's amazing. Yeah, it's like there's a five second delay

on it. And he did say to Nina Conti like, I can't look at you while I'm doing this because it takes so much concentration to try to pull this trick off on myself essentially. Um. But another expert that she interviewed that I thought gave a great example of

how puppeteers are creating a solution. Is Nacho Estrata best name ever by the way, Um he's a distant voice expert, and he was showing Nina Conto how throwing your voice is really just a matter again of misdirection and then controlling that volume of the voice as well as the direction, so you can sort of speak in a direction to do, you know, trick the ear. Um. But I wanted to play this clip for for you guys out there because although you can't see it, you can hear the differences

of when he's quote unquote throwing his voice. So let's check it out. As he uh describes someone being I believe they are stuck in a cup a teacup, they say through your voice. But I'm fooling your hearing. So I can do something like I throw my voice in here, but I'm not really throwing. It's a misdirection. So I said, hello, say so it things like it's nothing in there. But I'm just fully I'm using this to show you different

you're directing your attention here. Yeah, I love that dead It's just you kind of have to see the video to get the full effect because he's doing the whole thing where he's putting it into the cup, and then he's covering the cup up and it's just kind of this kind of juggling of this sound and the and I feel like his his you know, his hand movements are important as well, because he's in the same way that the addician says, hah, the coin is here, because

that's how I am moving my hand. He's doing the same thing with this voice that he has taken out like it's a physical object and put it into another object. And what I like about this is I feel like he has elevated the art form of ventriloquism to such a height that he really is able to manipulate eight uh the voice so well that it does really appear like, hey, that voice is stuck in his his cup, which which is not even a cup, but his hand representing a cup.

And it's such a well done like throwing your voice, when it's actually done by someone who knows how to do it, it's such a convincing act that that everyone's interpretation of the act uh is completely wrong. Um. Basically, when you encounter people throwing their voice in cartoons or or you know, comedy shows, or or even in movies, such as when a stranger calls back a horrible psychological thriller in which the killer um perpetrates his crimes by

sneaking into people's homes. Uh, look like I guess early in the morning or something, then stripping down and painting himself so that he resembles a complex brick wall or something like. It's not it's never as simple as I look like the white wall now and I was standing as a white wall. It's always something really elaborate that there's no possible way he could have painted himself to look like that does. Then he'll stand they're unseen and throw his voice around so that it sounds like he's

elsewhere in the room. But of course it's just completely stupid, because part of the the whole idea is that is that you need to see the person who's throwing the voice like that's an essential part of that direct it somewhere so in reality, not just I can make it seem like the corner is talking, and you know it's just in reality you'd be like wise the dude who's

painted up sitting there talking to right right. But I feel like it's all because the act is so convincing and and the magic of it is is literally less understood than other forms of puppetry and uh and and voice manipulation, that we even though we know it's a trick, we still don't really understand what's happening well. And one of the things about that the tricks that are pulled up is that it takes a ton of practice, years and years of this to get really good at it.

And of course that means that this inanimate object that you work with, you you really do begin to deepen that relationship because it is sort of a therapeutic aspect. Right, continue to talk to this puppet, you say things to yourself that you normally wouldn't say. Right, you have a fairly deep relationship with it. At least this seems to be the case, um with what Nina Conti presented when she interviewed the ventriloquists and so puppet master are pretty

wound together. So what happens when a ventriloquist passes away, Well, that is a bereaved puppet, and it has to find a home, and it does in the form of the event Haven Museum, Okay, which will take bereave puppets in Fort Mental Kentucky. It is the world's only public collection of materials related to ventriloquism. There are seven hundred ventriloquist dummies arranged in three buildings, some sitting in rows as if waiting for a class to begin. That's a place

that I want to be in by myself. For the most have been hours in that room by myself. Um. There's some really unusual creations, including a head carved by German prisoner in the be At Pow camp from World War Two. Um. The vent performed for fellow prisoners as well, is for the cook to get extra food. So there's a lot of history that goes into this museum. It's not just you know that the puppets are sitting, they're

gathering dust. But more importantly, vent Haven actually hosts a convention every year where four hundred and fifty ventriloquists converge on Fort Mitchell's restaurant. Scenes You're really talking nine hundred at least participants. Though that's true, that was insensitive of me. I just kept thinking about the town, like you know that all the restaurants are probably, oh boy, pretty soon the restaurants are gonna be filled up with people sitting

at their table talking to their puppets. Yeah, because I understand that this convention, like other puppetry conventions, you have people there with their puppet, and they're often they're communicating with their puppet. They're communicating with other people via their puppet. Um, like the link between puppet and puppet, puppeteer and puppet becomes such that that it's just part of communication when

at least when you're in group. Well, you probably won't be surprised to find out that most people who practice ventral looquism or introverts and speak through their puppets. So um, without the puppet, I think it's it's a lot harder to communicate. So it's sort of it's odd because you have false extroverts milling around in the in the crowd, or maybe not false at that moment. All right, So I think we've covered it pretty well. But Robert, I wanted to know from you, if you were forced to

get a ventriloquist dummy, what would yours be? Oh? Well, well I would I would not want to go with the you know, traditional ventriloquist dummy, that's for sure. I would want, you know, something the one that the bow Tai one. That's the one I always think of, the more traditional one with the dork hare. I don't know, does anyone have a mommy ventrolus dummy ventrol aquist mummy? Is it were? That would be a lot of fun. Oh you could. There's so many mummy mommy jokes there.

I'm not sure what I oh, I know what I would do. Okay, So this would be the whole get up. The idea is that a Victorian explorer happened to just you know, you know, during the tomb plundering period of of colonalism. Um. He's he discovers this tomb and breaks open the sarcophagus, but then the mummy overpowers him, which

is places with him and then locks him in. So then the so the the actual mummy uh runs off and you know and is still alive enjoying a wonderful life in uh in England, while um, the Victorian gentleman is is trapped in the sarcophagus for another hundred years. And so my puppet would be essentially a British Victorian mummy who would talk, So we'd be talking in a you know, a nice British accent, but he would be a mummy. That's fine. I think first of all, I

really want you to do this. Second of all, did you just think about off the top of your head? Yes, but but largely it was it came to be because I was thinking, Mommy, Evnentrokas puppet would be great. But I don't know what an ancient Egyptian accident would consist of. But I love British accents, so that's what I would do. You've got it all figured out. You've got to do this.

We know this, right, yeah? Okay? Uh. The other thing, you know, I don't think we mentioned this, but comic timing is incredibly important to this um to ventriloquism because you can be a master at the voices, um you still, but you still need to pick and make people laugh. Yeah, because otherwise it's just sort of like, oh that's interesting. Yeah. You gotta know your audience. You gotta taylor your act.

You're honest. We okay, well how about you. You. Let's say you had your dream ventral equist to me, what would your act be? I don't know. I mean an animal comes to mind, um, and I think just a foul mouthed one. I'm going to have to say. I mean, I don't think that comes as a surprise probably one that's interested in schatology. This is not an act I think anybody wants to see. Maybe maybe you'll go with some sort of extreme prehistoric mammal, which is going to

be the topic of a couple of upcoming episodes. Maybe there's something in there, I think, so, yeah, all right, perhaps it will mammoth. All right, Well, there you have it, Ventriloquist Dummies explained. Hopefully everyone has a little more a little more respect for the art form and a little a little more of an understanding about what's going on when someone is when you're watching a puppeteer use a puppet and buying into the act, what's happening when somebody

is actually throwing their voice? Um, how we're all brain roubes. Really yeah, essentially, and you know, the the puppetries is awesome, but it just kind of a glitch in our our perceptions of reality. So if you have something you would like to share about this, I'm sure we have some puppeteers out there as we're listening to the show. If you are a puppeteer, if you are a ventriloquist, if you can throw your voice any of these things, or if you just really appreciate the art form or are

terrified of the art form. Really, whatever your thoughts are, we'd love to hear about them. You can find us online as always at the Mothership stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com, but you can also find us on Facebook and tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind on both of those. You can find us on Twitter, where our handle is blow the Mind, and on YouTube we are Mind Stuff Show, and you can always drop us a line at below the Mind at Discovery dot com.

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