'America's Got Talent': Can a Ventriloquist Win It Again?
America’s Got Talent is currently playing host to the usual array of singers, comedians, acrobats, and a magician named Piff the Magic Dragon. The show has begun its live elimination rounds. But my interest in AGT now is: Can another ventriloquist win it?
You’ll recall that Terry Fator won Season 2, and in the process became the second-most-well-known contemporary ventriloquist. (Of course you haven’t forgotten Jeff Dunham.) The new challenger to ventriloquial superstardom is Paul Zerdin. Zerdin is a British voice-thrower who performs most frequently with a soft puppet named Sam. Here’s what Zerdin and Sam did on Tuesday night’s edition of AGT:
I’ve seen almost all of Zerdin’s AGT performances and watched more of him on YouTube, and I’ve got to say, he’s not that special. He’s got terrific mouth control, but his jokes are super-lame (puppet to Zerdin: “Read your lips!”), and the character of Sam is the umpteenth variation on a wise-kid tradition that extends back to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
Yet the reaction to Zerdin demonstrates how little most people know about ventriloquism. Howard Stern praised Zerdin after the clip above, expressing wonderment that the vent — as ventriloquists refer to themselves — could muffle his tone when he closed up Sam in the bag. Stern, usually such a savvy show-biz observer, seemed ignorant of an elementary vent technique, the “distant voice.”
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Terry Fator won AGT largely via a series of musical numbers he did with his dummies (or “figures” — again, the preferred vent term). The singing helped Fator a lot, enabling him to fill huge performing spaces during the AGT finals.
Zerdin is going to struggle in Radio City Music Hall as he proceeds to the next rounds, I think — he doesn’t have an act that can expand in scale and ambition to increase audience attention. He drew raves from the judges by pulling a mechanical-puppet trick that, as Heidi Klum noted, took away one big thing people enjoy: watching for lip movement during a ventriloquism performance. However, Klum and the other judges ended up praising Zerdin for resorting to this. It’s like praising a comedian for removing all the punchlines in his routine.
I really want to see ventriloquism continue as an entertainment art form that has vitality and inventiveness. I’m rooting, I suppose, for Zerdin in spite of his mediocrity, simply because I’d rather see a vent win than a singer or an acrobat.
But if you want to behold what a good ventriloquist can do — I mean, have you never seen Nina Conti?
America’s Got Talent airs Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on NBC.