You may have heard of comedian/ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, called “America’s most popular stand-up.”
Dunham’s been riding a massive wave of stardom for years. Sold-out tours. Millions in DVD and merchandise sales. His A Very Special Christmas Special was the most-watched telecast in Comedy Central history, and his introduction of the hilariously controversial puppet Achmed the Dead Terrorist is the 12th most-watched video clip of all time (more than 328 million views as of March 2010).
(You can check out the clip here; note there is some off-color language.)
That’s right. Achmed the Dead Terrorist has a son.
In addition to being an incompetent terrorist (suffering, as he says onstage, from “premature detonation”), Achmed also has been confessing to audiences for years that he’s a horrible father.
“Why?” Dunham asks.
“Because I took my son to take-your-kid-to-work day.”
That take-your-kid-to-work day one-liner Achmed’s been flooring audiences with all these years? It’s the brainchild of Matthew Bradley, a Dunham devotee who dreamed up the joke when he was 13 and then sold it to the comedian for $80 in cash and a handshake after an Erie, Pa., tour stop in 2008.
So thanks to Matthew, Dunham not only has a joke with staying power, but also a new character for his act. And thanks to Dunham, Matthew gained a ton of confidence since Dunham bought his joke and started using it onstage.
“It felt good every time I heard it,” Matthew says today, more than three years since Dunham debuted the joke on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
It felt good to Sue Bradley, too, Matthew’s mother, who says she had been trying for years to help her son understand and appreciate humor. Nothing worked, she says, until a friend emailed her a clip of Dunham’s stage act with Achmed. When Matthew watched it, he was literally falling out of his chair with laughter.
“I couldn’t believe he was getting the humor,” she recalls of the March 2008 breakthrough. “We played the clip over and over.” Matthew’s not sure why Dunham’s humor worked for him: “I suppose it was just that something finally clicked.”
Read More: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/how-the-unlikely-intersection-of-a-superstar-comedian-an-autistic-teenage-boy-and-a-hilariously-offensive-stage-puppet-bettered-all-their-lives-yes-even-the-puppets/
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