Posted in: TV | Tagged: Jeff Dunham, The Cars That Drove Us

The Cars That Drove Us: Dunham on Bringing Innovators' Stories to Life

Comedian Jeff Dunham discusses his Discovery docuseries, "The Cars That Drove Us," the show's inspiration, his car history, and more.

Comedian Jeff Dunham is a natural when it comes to hosting because on the stage, presentation and delivery are everything, and with his latest project, The Cars That Drove Us, he taps into those same skills, sharing his childhood passion for cars and bringing the stories of the automotive innovators to life behind the Vector W8, Batmobile, HumVee, DeLorean, and more. Partnering with Nacelle and Discovery, the ventriloquist and host spoke with Bleeding Cool about how he developed his love for cars, starting with Hot Wheels toys, and how his success in stand-up comedy allowed him to expand his car collecting, and how he balances his comedy with the seriousness the docuseries demands.

Jeff Dunham's The Cars That Drove Us: Host Dives into Telling the Automotive Industry's Greatest Innovators in Pop Culture

BC: What inspired you to do The Cars That Drove Us, and what made Nacelle and Discovery ideal partners?

Dunham: Well, the biggest inspiration was I needed to be able to write off all my cars [laughs], just kidding. I started collecting cars many years ago, and as a kid, the only thing I was interested in was Hot Wheels, and that carried on. As I got older, my dad was not a car guy, and so I never developed an appreciation for real vehicles until I got older. By the time I was behind the wheel, I was driving my mom's '71 Mercury [Grand] Marquis, so I had nothing to fall back on of any knowledge or experience working on cars, but it wasn't until I got pretty high up in the comedy club chain in the early '90s and was doing pretty well.

I had a little extra cash, and I said to my accountant, "Can I buy a nice car?" He goes, "Yeah, you can buy a nice car," so I got a 1994, it was '92 when they came out, the Dodge Viper. It was bright red, and at that time, it was a pretty radical design, and it looked like somebody my age who said, "Let's make a Hot Wheels into a car," and that's what it was. Then again, that was the only thing I had for years and years. About 15 to 17 years ago, I started collecting, and now, I'm up to a crazy collection, and so, I'm looking at this collection, and thought, "What are we going to do with this?" My agent said, "You could do a car show…featuring…you have such a varied collection. I mean everything from supercars to the most horrible cars on the planet, and it's like looking at your phone or your iPod and going, 'What kind of music do I like?'"

Most people, when they look through it, only have five genres on there. You've got some rap, rock, country, you probably have some classics on there, Tom, right? That's the way my car collection is. So we decided to come up with the idea of the format for the show, and that was featuring one of these great vehicles, but then getting together with Nacelle, who has done The Movies That Made Us, and The Toys That Made, and those are wonderful series on Netflix. They said, "Let's do that style for the cars," and so when I say, "This is unlike any other car show you've ever seen," I say it in all sincerity.

I don't know of another car show like this that has so much heart to it, because it's not, "Oh, look! This car does zero to sixty and has this big giant motor." That's not it, we're talking about the people and the folks who lived, breathed, and dreamed of coming up with these vehicles. They put their lives toward it, and if it's either one guy thing like DeLorean, the Meyers Manx Dune Buggy, or it's a group of people behind the Corvette, and how that all started. It's some wonderful stories, and then, you've got the crazy cars like the Batmobile or the DeLorean time machine. How did those come about, and who were the creative and amazing people who came up with those? Some of these episodes are tear-jerkers, and they have a lot of heart, and by the end of the Myers Manx episode, which is coming up, if you're not getting a little misty-eyed at the end of that, then you have zero humanity.

How does a show like this become the perfect outlet for expanding your comedy, and how do you balance that with the seriousness the show like this needs?

Sure. They should be completely opposite things. We're not opposites, but two completely different categories that make no sense of being together. I have standup comedy, my shows have been on the road for years and years, and that's what brought me here, but now I have this other interest, which is cars. How does that have anything to do with the stand-up? I thought, "You know what? You've got to dance with whoever brought you, and so we decided to bring the characters in at least a little bit in the beginning and have that tonality to it. Also, the show has a little bit of snark and fun, so that sense of humor from my act carries over into the show. That's how those two are married together, and if we get a second and third season, maybe we'll get a little creative and can do a little more with the dummies. I also wanted to satisfy the car community, where I'm not going to walk around with a dummy asking questions. That would be stupid, so it was a careful balance.

What went into selecting the vehicles for the season and planning it? Was it like picking a favorite child to put out front there?

Well, we did it from a business and entertainment standpoint. It's the number one criteria was, which cars are going to interest the most people? How can we get the biggest audience with the cars that we choose? So, we got those, but I also wanted to do the ones that the people who had hands-on experience in either building, designing, or developing them. We wanted to make sure that some of those people were still around. There were a couple of vehicles we were considering first, but literally everybody who had anything to do with them was either dead or 95 years old and couldn't do a good interview. All these cars [featured this season] are told by the people who were there.

Jeff Dunham's The Cars That Drove Us, which also features guests Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Leno, Adam Savage, Emilia Hartford, Bob Gale, and others, is available Tuesdays on Discovery and is also available to stream online.

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