Once again I am going to revert to one of my best known puppetiers known as Jeff Dunham the ventrilaquist. He uses different forms of violence in his performance. Most of the violence is verbal abuse used in the form of comedy to make the specktators laugh. Each puppet has it's own personality and with their personalities different forms of verbal abuse. One of my favorite puppets is Waltor an old man who uses crude termonalogy and violent thoughts to talk about life. He always has a negative point of view and likes to degrade people and places. He represents a grumpy old man who likes to blame the world for his problems. He likes to bash his wife as an old bag of bones and the places they do the performances. He always finds something bad to say about the places they perform.
He also has different charectors who use sexual verbal abuse and all different kinds of verbal abuse. The one i found to be the most interesting is one of the newer charactor who represents a violent living charactor. This newer charactor is the skeleton of a terorist bomer. This charactor likes to talk about killing and murdering people. He talks about his bombing experience. This charactor represents a huge scene of violence in our world today. Ever since september eleventh terorists have been in the minds of every american and people all over the world. Our air ports have been under a lot more security since then. This ventrilaquist uses this character to turn a living tradgedy into a comedy show. He uses modern day violence scenes to create his jokes by blowing them out of perportion by bring the terrorist back from the dead to talk about the experience and why he did it. I found this violence interesting because most people wouldn't think that it is violence when actually it's just making fun of a very serious violence in our world.
The following is a website to a youtube show of Jeff Dunham and Aukmed the dead terroris....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uwOL4rB-go
I think that is a great way to look at the violence in puppetry. Violence does not have to always be intentional, and I do not know if that is his plan or not, but to take something that effects everyone in our country, and be able to look at the incident from a different view point. It, for lake of a better word, lightens the aspect of what happened, and sheds some humor on it all. I also think that they need to be careful though about how they go about making a violent act like that into something that it comical, because some people may find it crude.
ReplyDeleteI do find it interesting though that he does use marionettes as skeleton characters for violent acts in his puppet performances. It is a great way to make the puppets represent different things or people, and it still allows you to bring the puppet to life, and allows the audience to use their imagination, and create a bond with the puppet.
Violence is a touchy subject, because each person will interpret it differently. And different violence issues are harder to recreate than others without appearing offensive at the same time.