Jeff Dunham, Terry Fator in voice-throwing throwdown on the Strip

By John Katsilometes

Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014 | 12:57 p.m.

When Terry Fator was a kid, he watched a guy who was a few years older than him perform with a puppet on a platform.

“I started doing this when I was 10 years old, and I really had an obsession with it. When I was about 15, I told myself that I wanted to be one of the greatest ventriloquists ever,” Fator once said during an episode of “Kats With the Dish” on KUNV 91.5-FM. “Why I wanted to be one of the greatest ventriloquists, I have no idea. Most people want to be actors or singers. But for some reason this just took hold of my heart as something that I really, really wanted to do.”

That yearning to speak and sing as someone else was further illuminated when he watched another person similarly passionate about the ventriloquial arts.

“Because I got a little bit involved in the ventriloquist community, I saw Jeff Dunham when I was 11, and he performed in Dallas, and he’s from Dallas, the same area I was from,” Fator said. “He was like 15. He’s really close to my age. He might have been 16. But I saw him, and I loved him.”

Fator went on to buy the comedy albums of famed ventriloquists including Edgar Bergen and Jimmy Nelson, but how very ironic that it was Dunham who helped ignite his interest. Fator went on to win “America’s Got Talent” and has had a robust run at the Mirage for the past five years.

He talked of Dunham in the spring of 2011, when Dunham was performing occasionally at the Colosseum in Caesars Palace. Today, he is set up across the Strip from Fator at Planet Hollywood’s showroom.

This duel of similar artists reminds of the arrival of Gordie Brown on the Strip, across the street from Danny Gans at the very theater in which Fator now headlines. In October 2006, Brown and his manically paced impressions act opened at the Venetian in what is now the Sands Showroom and home to Human Nature.

Gans was the established star of the Strip at the time, featured on the boulevard’s biggest marquee, and Brown struggled to match his box office numbers. Brown returned to the Golden Nugget in 2009, where he continues to headline as the city’s busiest impressionist.

Similar to fans of impressionists, there can only be so many ventriloquial devotees out there. Fator has held that community almost exclusively since he debuted in town at the Las Vegas Hilton in 2007 after his championship run on “AGT.”

Now one of Fator’s earliest inspirations is threatening to chip away at that fan base.

They are not quite the same, Dunham and Fator, other than their work with puppets, or “figures,” and a healthy complement of advanced staging and video technology. What Fator presents in his eponymous theater at the Mirage is, well, a theater that is named for him, which is an indication of his stronghold on a successful Strip headliner identity.

Fator takes the music seriously, with a cracking backing band, and sings to terrific effect, and even in his own show, Dunham mentions that the guy who sings is actually across the Strip. Fator’s is a precision show, crisp and obviously well scripted and rehearsed.

Fator is not one to stray off the fairway and call out to the audience too often. He keeps his casual conversation between himself and such puppet partners as Winston the Impersonating Turtle and Walter T. Airedale. He has used 16 figures in his shows at the Mirage.

The Dunham show has a comparatively loose feel (aside from the new theater seats, which make you feel as if you’re riding coach on Snuggy Airlines). I was struck initially at how long it takes the new Planet Hollywood ventriloquist to actually perform ventriloquism. A show that is listed as a 7 p.m. start begins with a lengthy video charting Dunham’s path to Las Vegas.

Then he talks to the audience about his career in a funny sort of way that brushes against straight standup. Only after about 30 minutes of stage presentation does Dunham start pulling out the puppets.

As is the case with most ventriloquist acts, the performer has an advantage in drawing guffaws in that these figures are funny looking. The old man Walter, the fuzzy-purple, gender-defying Peanut and Achmed the Dead Terrorist draw laughs even as Dunham just moves their little eyes and heads.

Achmed’s tag line, “I kill you!,” doesn’t necessarily read funny, but it’s a winner every time from the stage as the little figure raises his eyebrows as his eyes bulge out.

Dunham picks out audience members to pick on and performs a high measure of improv, or what appears to be improv, by taking audience members’ questions and making hay with those questions. He flayed an audience member who was, lucklessly, visiting from Mesquite and operated a Del Taco and Chevron station in that small town just northeast of Las Vegas. “You must be ONE BUSY MAN!” Dunham-as-Achmed cried out.

Dunham has an edge that is unique among those who have been onstage as ventriloquists in Las Vegas. He’s crude, vulgar and brazen. In his most daring moments, Dunham not only accused Britney Spears of lip-synching in her show at Axis, which is under the same roof and ownership as his own theater, but of doing it poorly.

“Like in Britney’s show, some of the lip-synching will be a little off tonight,” he says in his opening moments. During a conversation with Peanut, he notes that it would be fun to sit at the front of a Spears show and throw his voice so it would seem she would be singing from areas of her body that were not her mouth.

It’s rough stuff, and I wonder what hotel officials think of that onstage onslaught. We’ll see if Dunham continues to use that Spears material in his run, scheduled now through May 15.

But what will remain in place is Dunham’s lineup of popular figures, sure to delight anyone who has caught his TV specials or seen him on YouTube or in one of his appearances across the country.

On a cold February night this year, he drew 8,000 to the Bradley Center in Milwaukee, and he has headlined at the 4,200-seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace before setting down at Planet Hollywood. That room seats 1,600, cozily, and the hotel is betting that there is enough room in that theater, and on Las Vegas Boulevard, for two ventriloquists to prosper.

Fator and Dunham say they are different enough to be enjoyed independently, but, really, they come from the same place. And today, it’s on the Strip, where talk is cheap, whether from a human straight man or a skeletal puppet with an attitude.

Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWiththeDish.