Recently, an original long lost manuscript resurfaced having been discovered in an ancient bookshop in the back waters of the southern states.
Archive for January, 2010
Edgar Bergen – Lessons In Ventriloquism Part 4
In this session Edgar Bergen discusses how to act with your ventriloquist dummy.
Edgar also summarizes the steps to getting started in being a ventriloquist.
Edgar Bergen – Lessons In Ventriloquism
Part 3 of Edgar Bergen’s Lessons In Ventriloquism – how to use humor and where to get jokes to use in your act.
If you want more information on how to be a ventriloquist, vist ventriloquist secrets revealed
Lessons In Ventriloquism Part 2 By Edgar Bergen
Here are more lessons from Edgar Bergen with Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy – the secret of speaking without moving your lips.
Learn Ventriloquism With Edgar Bergen
Some great lesson in ventriloquism from Edgar Bergen with Charlie McCarthy and with Mortimer Snerd. It will make you laugh but also teach you how to be a ventriloquist from one of the best. Enjoy it and let me know what you think.
Ventriloquist After A Few Lessons
After taking a few lessons the student may find that he has a hitherto unsuspected talent for the ventriloquist’s art, which only needs proper cultivation to be made a source of amusement and profit. As in music, there is a certain technique which must be thoroughly mastered before one can become proficient, and certain exercises conducing to voice production and culture which must be faithfully gone through with before one can give an efficient exhibition before the public. One must learn how to use the mouth and tongue to achieve certain results, how to speak interiorly with entirely motionless and almost closed lips, and how to make each of the sounds or voices used distinctive in tone, pitch and character.
The successful ventriloquist must also be cool, confident and something of an actor. The voices
to him present no illusion, and he can judge of his success only by their effect upon his audience. I say no illusion, but this is not quite true; for though he knows that he is creating the sounds, if he is thoroughly proficient, there seems a sort of isolation between himself and the voice which discourses with him. If he is talking with “a man on the roof ” and his performance is perfect, the voice almost seems even to him to be that of another person and he enters into argument with it with as much earnestness as if this were so.
In one respect the ventriloquist’s work is more difficult than that of an actor.
Most People Can Become Good If Not Great Ventriloquists
There are very few persons, however, whose ear is so imperfect that they cannot sing a little or imitate something, and it is safe to say that eight out of every ten could, with practice and perseverance, become acceptable if not great ventriloquists. There is nothing really wonderful about the art, although the effects produced by the successful performer may seem so, and if one has the qualities mentioned, or at least can develop, by intelligently directed exercise, those which he does not already possess, he can soon become a ventriloquist. The progress made will depend of course upon the fitness of the student and the faithfulness with which he pursues the study.
The feminine voice does not so readily lend itself to the uses of ventriloquy as does the masculine, but it is not impossible for a woman to become a good amateur or even a professional performer. A few years ago a female ventriloquist presented an excellent act with four or five mechanical figures in the vaudeville theatres of the country, and once I met an old lady who informed me that in her younger days she possessed natural ventriloquial ability which had more than once enabled her to completely deceive her brothers. Some one, however, has had the audacity to remark that ladies should not learn, “as their voices are heard in too many places already.” Of course this is a base libel on fair womanhood, and ought not to deter any lady from taking up the subject if she feels a desire to do so
Ventriloquist – You Need A Good Ear
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The absurdity of the belief that ventriloquist’s are born is shown by the fact that persons who practice ventriloquism in mature years show no indications in infancy of possessing abnormal vocal powers. If they were born ventriloquists they would undoubtedly cry and talk ventriloquially in childhood, but this they naturally decline to do. When a pin pricks them or they feel the pangs of hunger they indicate that fact in the unmistakable manner of all infants—that is, by cries which clearly emanate from their own small persons—and not by throwing their infantile voices into different parts of the house to the consternation of the family and the wonder of the neighborhood. A born poet babbles in verse, crude though it may be, from babyhood; but ventriloquism is not bred in the bone and its practice made inevitable by a peculiar structure of the child’s throat.
Ventriloquism does require, however, the possession of certain qualities of voice, such as strength, clearness, flexibility and ready ability to change at will; ordinary strength in the cartilaginous membrane of the throat and the muscles of the abdominal regions, and some aptitude for mimicry, which of course is dependent upon a combination of qualities connected with the ear and the voice. A person having a defective ear can neither sing in tune nor imitate sounds correctly, simply because not being able to hear correctly he has nothing to guide him in his own efforts. He may be endowed with every other requisite for the musical or the mimetic art, but through his inability to accurately sense the niceties of tone or pitch he neither sings correctly nor deceives by his attempted imitations.
Jay Johnson in NYC and Soap
Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!, winner of the 2007 Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event, will return to New York, producer Dan Whitten of Tiger Theatricals announced today. The one-weekend only event will play from January 8-10, 2010, at the Theatre at Saint Peters.
Best known for playing the schizophrenic role of Chuck and Bob on the groundbreaking television comedy, “Soap,” Jay Johnson is widely regarded as one of the world’s great living ventriloquists.
Read more about Jay Johnson and his show here: The JAY JOHNSON TWO AND ONLY
Here is a great a video of Jay performing with Bob on Soap:
Ventriloquist Is Evolved Not Born
UNLIKE the poet the ventriloquist is not born, but is evolved by persistent practice. This is contrary to the notion held by many persons even in these enlightened days, who believe that the ventriloquist comes into the world with a vocal apparatus differing from that possessed by humanity in general—in fact, with a ” double throat” by which he is enabled to project his voice into space and have it explode anywhere at will, much as a dynamite bomb explodes away from the source from which it is hurled. In other words, a large part of the otherwise intelli¬gent public still labor under the delusion that the ventriloquist is endowed by nature with the power of throwing his voice wherever and when¬ever he pleases and causing it mysteriously to return to him; and that it is as easy to ventrilo¬quize in the midst of a crowd or in the street as it is from a theatre stage or in a large hall where the audience is some distance from the performer.
If the commonly accepted theory of the vocal bomb were correct, it would undoubtedly be as easy to ventriloquize in one place as in another; but, as a matter of fact, there is nothing peculiar about the formation of the throats of the pro¬fessors of this art, even of the most adept, to dis¬tinguish them from the rest of humanity, and as for actual voice throwing— unfortunately there is no such thing.
It does take practice, but most people can become a ventriloquist.
Ventriloquists Are Not Born
Undoubtedly in ages past the art was practiced secretly by a corrupt priesthood to strengthen its power over ignorant and superstitious peoples, and only in modern times has ventriloquism emerged from the veil of mystery which enshrouded it. But even in these latter days, pro-fessional ventriloquists have taken care to carefully foster the idea that only to a favored few is vouchsafed the so-called power of ” throwing the voice.” With rare exceptions they have zealously guarded the methods used by them in the production of ventriloquial effects, and have usually tried to discourage eager inquirers with the assertion that “one must be born that way.”
Therefore, in presenting a reliable and comprehensive treatise on ventriloquism and its allied art polyphony, I feel that I am meeting a genuine need. Handbooks on ventriloquism have been published before, but few of those published in this country have attempted anything more than a superficial treatment of the subject, and are therefore of little use to the general public.
For many years I have studied and practiced ventriloquism, and from the experience thus gained, have endeavored to write a genuine work¬ing manual, not only for the beginner, but for the professional performer as well. If those inter¬ested at all in ventriloquism will give to this book the amount of thought and attention which I myself have devoted to its preparation, I shall feel repaid for my attempt to shed illumination upon a subject about which little of practical value has hitherto been published.