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

The Cars That Drove Us: Jeff Dunham on Series Future, Comedy & More

The Cars That Drove Us host Jeff Dunham spoke with us about the "goofiest" additions to cars, his secret to comedy success, and much more.

If there's a double-edged sword about TV in the streaming age, it's that you must generally put your best foot forward without as much time since you're not dealing with the typical 20+ episode season, but often at half or less. It's something host Jeff Dunham had to do for his new Discovery docuseries, The Cars That Drove Us, which he partnered with Nacelle, the company behind The Toys That Made Us and The Movies That Made Us. The standup comedian and actor, who developed his love for cars from growing up on Hot Wheels, was able to amass an impressive car collection of his own with his success as a ventriloquist with favorites like Peanut, Jose Jalapeno, Bubba J, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, and Walter, he can play off the stage. Dunham spoke to Bleeding Cool about whether there are any plans for new vehicles to be featured should Discovery renew the series, his miscellaneous episode of the craziest additions innovators placed in cars, and how he's able to tackle subject matter in a way that other comedians might not be able to tackle properly.

The Cars That Drove Us Host Jeff Dunham on "Goofiest Things Car Designers Added" and Using His Ventriloquism to His Advantage in Comedy

BC: If you guys get picked up for another season, you already have the cars lined up, or are you still deciding?

Dunham: Not a clue. What I loved about this one was it was seven great cars, and then, in the eighth episode, we did a call, it's called "That's Factory?" It was some of the goofy things that car designers put in the vehicles, and so we have an idea, and they're not B cars. These are still A cars, and if you pointed a gun at me right now and said, "Tell me which ones they are," I could not do it, because I can't remember since we've gone through so many ideas, but I like that idea of in a season having one episode that's an outlier, kind of a weird one, and I came up with this the other day. "When you learned to drive, Tom?" How did you learn? Did you just get in a car, or was there a simulator when you were learning to drive?

I learned to drive my dad's van and everything, and hoped he would minimize being the backseat driver for me.

Well, there are still some people who, in whatever driving school, would be put in a simulator. I thought a great episode would be the development of the simulator. Some of the ones they have out now are like $100,000 for a freaking simulator, so I think that would be a fun episode, because some have no earthly idea of the technology and how far it's come.

Final question: How do you feel you've come along since you came into the scene with comedy? Do you feel you had to temper your act much at all with the changing times, or was it something you felt like you had to roll with the wave, and did it naturally make sense?

It's a great question, and timing is everything. I would not want to be a new comic coming up right now trying to do stand-up comedy, because it's been a long time since I did a show at a comedy club, but as I understand it now, especially out here where I am in Hollywood, the audiences can be brutal and if you say anything that's somewhat too left or too right, you will get nailed, nailed, nailed by the audience. They don't like it. When all this business started rumbling a few years ago, I was at a point in my career where there is two different ways when you go to a comedy club: you're either paying money just to go to the comedy club, and you don't know who's going to be there. You don't care. You just want the night of fun, or you're paying a little bit more money to specifically see some particular person.

That's a little bit easier, because the audience who paid to see you, and most of them know what to expect. That's the point where I was doing theaters and arenas, where it was 85 to 90 percent already my crowd. They already loved Achmed, the Dead Terrorist, Jose Jalapeno on a Stick, so if I come up with those characters right now, there is no way that they would work. As a comic, you must, as you say, "temper things," or at least, I'm not going to use the word "temper." I am going to show you how I present the comedy, and because I do what I do as a ventriloquist, I have a little bit of a huge advantage over other comics, because I can point and counterpoint. The dummy can make a joke, I can argue with him, I could be astonished and say, "No, that's not okay," so it's a conversation, it's a debate.

The true ingredients of comedy are conflict and tension. I can create that on stage myself, and by the time I'm finished with whatever I'm talking about, whatever subject it is, the audience walks away going, "I really don't know what he thinks or what he believes," because he presented both sides and argued it. The answer is "Yes," with an asterisk, but I can get away with things, because I'm not going to say, "get away with things," I can talk about more things than most guys, because I can get the other side of it.

Jeff Dunham's The Cars That Drove Us, which also features guests Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jay Leno, Adam Savage, Emilia Hartford, Bob Gale, and others, airs Tuesdays on Discovery and is available to stream online. For more, including Dunham talking about his upcoming appearance on NBC's The Hunting Party, you can check out the video.

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