Jeff Dunham and his ventriloquist puppets

Previously

…The familiar opening music swelled, and the audience, a sea of expectant faces, stretched out before him. He plastered on his practiced smile, the one that said, ‘Everything is perfectly under control.’ But tonight, as he looked out at the cheering crowd, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the real show, the one that would truly test him, was just beginning. And it wasn’t happening on stage. It was happening right here, in the tense, unspoken dynamic between a man and his oldest, grumpiest puppet. The road ahead, he suspected, was about to get a lot more interesting, and a lot less predictable.