Sold-out global concert tours. Ratings-shattering broadcast specials. A best-selling author. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A few Guinness Book of World Records set for good measure.
Jeff Dunham, the only child of a real estate appraiser and homemaker, raised in a Dallas suburb, at the age of 9 received a toy ventriloquist dummy for Christmas, began to practice, and started dreaming of characters who could say what nobody else would dare.
The little boy who fell in love with Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd was soon charming and disarming classmates, appearing at Kiwanis Clubs and Scout banquets, doing TV commercials for Texas car dealerships, and was on his way to national appearances while still in high school. By the time he attended Baylor University, he was earning $70,000 a year for having public conversations with himself.
Later came the comedy club circuit, larger and larger venues, and ultimately sold-out concerts in the same arenas as Taylor Swift and Metallica. Dunham holds the Guinness Book of World Records record for Most Tickets Sold for a Stand-Up Comedy Tour: his Spark of Insanity Tour racked up almost two million tickets across almost 400 venues worldwide.
Dunham has nine record-breaking comedy specials to his credit – two were Comedy Central’s most viewed specials of their respective years (Minding the Monsters, 2012; Controlled Chaos, 2011), and his Jeff Dunham’s Very Special Christmas Special, 2008; remains the network’s highest rated program of all time. His NBC primetime special, Unhinged, ranked as the time period’s top non-sports program on the Big 4, rebroadcast six weeks later on Comedy Central to become its top rated special of 2016.
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