Jeff Dunham’s driving to work for comic inspiration

Jeff Dunham has traveled the world, but has never driven himself to work.

“I don’t know what it’s like to work and live 20 minutes away,” says the superstar ventriloquist. “When I worked in Los Angeles, the closest clubs were probably 45 minutes to an hour away.”

But he is about to find out. Dunham and his wife, Audrey, have rented a house in the Las Vegas area, and on Friday he launches his Planet Hollywood Resort residency, “Not Playing With a Full Deck.”

It’s rented, because he says it would be “premature” to cash out in Los Angeles and move his massive car collection, including two Batmobiles. (He will at least bring two of his cars: the Achmedmobile hot rod and a replica of the ’60s TV Batmobile, to display in the lobby of his second-floor theater which long hosted “Peepshow.”)

But Dunham, 52, has little reason to doubt the viability of Las Vegas; even if the ambitious schedule of six shows a week, three weeks per month, is something he might adjust to demand or the needs of his voice.

The Strip has been part of the ventriloquist’s career since he was mostly unknown, working the Riviera’s comedy club in the late 1980s. Exposure on “The Tonight Show” promoted him up to occasional headliner of midlevel showrooms such as the Sahara, Sands and Monte Carlo.

When Dunham went through the roof after introducing Achmed the Dead Terrorist in 2007, he became an annual draw at the 4,200-seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace, which was still smaller than the arenas he packed on the road.

So while he’s “very optimistic” that all those years of “pounding the road” will lead audiences his way during his break from traveling, Dunham says he will use the time he’s given by not traveling to work on new characters and Las Vegas-specific material.

“It’s not going to be a general, milquetoast cardboard version of a show. It’s going to be very specific to where everybody is and what they’re doing, at least pieces of it,” he says.

He decided to take one of his recent back-and-forth trips from California by highway.

“I hadn’t driven to Vegas in I don’t know how long,” he says. “A big number of people drive to Vegas. We specifically got in the car to come to Vegas to see what there was to see and what towns there are to joke about.

“Then we drove up and down the Strip and tried to go to a bunch of places most people would go to. As a comic, you have to experience and smell and taste everything else that everybody else has, and then you have material to draw from.”

Last week, Dunham was filming a new opening video to reflect the show’s Vegas-specific title.

“We’re going to recognize where we are, for sure,” he says. “What you can joke about in Vegas is what everybody experiences when they come there.”

But, he adds, “Opening night is not the show you’re going to see in three months.”

As the residency goes on and he gets more comfortable, “I’ll start throwing in the things in the middle, trying out new stuff and hopefully that’s when (a) new character will show up.”

Was Dunham’s recent world tour, recorded for home video and the new Comedy Central special “All Over the Map,” akin to a binge at the buffet before going on a diet? Was he trying to get the road out of his system?

“There was no lump in my throat when I finished,” he insists. The only sad part of it was saying goodbye to the crew that traveled with him to Singapore, Israel, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and other destinations.

“The reason I did the around-the-world thing was because I could,” he says. “I had the opportunity to strike while the iron’s hot. It’s an amazing time with technology, social media, to be able to do all this.

“How many comedians in the history of the planet … have the opportunity and the draw to be able to sell tickets other than their home country?” he adds. “Europe is one thing, but to be able to go to the Middle East and Singapore and Malaysia, places like that, I pinch myself and go, how in the world did this happen?”

Along those lines, Dunham is asked if it’s only possible once to have the kind of pop-culture impact he had with Achmed. His topical routines with the skeletal remains of a failed suicide bomber took Dunham’s gradually escalating popularity through the ceiling.

“You never want to sit on your laurels and say, ‘OK, I’ve done it, that’s it. It can never get any bigger or more important,’ ” he says.

He agrees Achmed’s introduction, well-timed to the novelty days of YouTube and viral video, was “a magical time there, where it was the perfect storm. It was the mood of the country, what I was ready to do, the DVD market. … Everything all came together at once to make Achmed happen.

“Could it happen again? Sure it could,” he says. “I have to react to whatever’s going on in society, whatever’s going on in the world.”

But for now, his world will be centered in Las Vegas.

“All I concentrate on is the comedy,” he says. “There’s not going to be any showgirls or lions jumping out of my suitcase.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.