Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wild Ride with Steve O. This one is a good one. We got a king of comedy. A guy who I relate to very

intimately. And well, it's, can I say, man, I'm really excited about this one. So

ladies and gentlemen Jeff Dunham. Yeah, dude. Thanks for having me. Oh, dude, thanks for for joining us. This is my co host Scott Randolph. How you doing?

Hey, Scott. How's it going? Good. And that's wait, wait, wait, wait, what's the one little rectangular tat? I see one little tiny.

This one. Yeah, what's that? It's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a blue square with a wave in the middle. What does it mean? Anything? No, I don't have any tattoos that mean anything.

I'm sure your pot leave. I'm a pot leaf. I got a pot leaf. He went to go get a palm tree and it just looks like a pot leaf. Yeah.

What else do I got? Oh, we'll talk about that. They're out there. They're all pretty bad. My, my dog Wendy, all pretty bad. Yeah, my dog Wendy is sitting here.

I think she knew that we were going to have you and she wanted to look like a puppet. Normally she lays down when he lay down. So Steve, I missed the news the past few days. So could you, I know all your viewers and listeners must know, but

so duct tape to the billboard. Is that what it was? It was that one. It's been, it was in August. So it's been a couple of months, but I had this really, really provocative, crazy

adult only multimedia comedy special called gnarly, which I distribute direct to consumers streaming from my website stevo.com. And I wanted to promote that. So I bought a billboard duct tape myself to it.

God, all kinds of great press. But you know what did it's such a great entry point to talk to you because of course, Jeff Donum, the, the not only the world's most famous ventriloquist, but probably the only famous ventriloquist.

Yeah, there's a good reason for that. Right. But now one small union. One, one night, I was hold up in a hotel room on tour somewhere.

And it's not even usual for me to watch TV, but I turned on the TV and just sat there and watched an entire hour long documentary about you.

And well, yeah, dude, it was fascinating. And I related so intimately to your struggle with trying to sell comedy specials. If I remember right from the documentary, I think you taped your own comedy special, but nobody would buy it.

Yeah, what happened was it was back this was back in old five, I guess. And I, I was in the comedy club world. And I was at the top of the food chain in that, but I couldn't get any higher. It was the glass ceiling. You know, nobody would take me seriously beyond that.

Sound out clubs all over the country, but no television. So nobody who wanted to be the executive that failed with the show about the ventriloquist. You know what I mean? Nobody wanted to be that guy. So nobody would give me a special nothing. I'd get on, you know, you think at the improv and all those things.

So my management at the time did one of those deals and they said, look, if Jeff films a special will you. I'm sorry, this was after I filmed it. And I paid for it myself. And back then, that was a lot of money. I think I spent 150 grand. It was a lot of cash. And the special was great, but nobody nobody wanted it.

So my management went to Comedy Central and they said, look, we'll give you this guy. We please put him on and we'll give you this other guy that's more famous as well. So it was one of those kind of deals. So Comedy Central said, okay, we'll take done. We'll play it one time. And that's it. And stop bothering us. And they said, fine.

So aired on a Friday night and then on Monday, we called him for the ratings. And they said, we think there's been some kind of a stake. We'll get back to you.

But, you know, doing comedy clubs for 20 years, I built that grassroots following all over the place. So when people tuned in, it was like the numbers were off the charts and they couldn't get the second one fast enough. So that was that was a cool time and like.

Man, that's great. You know, like in my case, it's not that I bring props or anything, but I was fighting up Hill, like you said, doing very well in the comedy circuit, but couldn't get anywhere else.

And I think that there's sort of a built in resistance to the jackass guy as a stand up comedian, you know. And where I thought I cracked the code was, you know, I got my first special, you know, it came and went with like very mediocre viewership.

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