Especially because we were in the back of Dunham’s mammoth black tour bus, outside the Prairie Capital Convention Center, an arena in Springfield, Ill., where he had just performed for a sold-out crowd of 7,000 as part of his summer tour. “The fact that I’m standing here fixing him up is too wacky.” “I’d think, Man, I want to see him,” he told me, smoothing down the Umpire’s lapels. As a boy, Dunham saw the picture in a ventriloquism museum every summer, while attending a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. It’s a famous photo later, when I met some of Dunham’s ventriloquist friends, they knew what time the clock in the background showed. It showed the McElroys standing with the just-completed Umpire in their workshop. He was matching his work to a photo on his MacBook. His new girlfriend, Audrey Murdick, who is 29 and also his nutritionist, was helping with the Umpire, handing Dunham swatches of eyebrow. Last November, Dunham separated from his wife of 14 years, with whom he has raised three daughters. In the past year, he has played 150 shows and grossed $38 million in ticket sales, far more than any other comic. Instead, he has toured relentlessly for 25 years. Dunham has neither his first series, “The Jeff Dunham Show,” had its premiere on Comedy Central on Oct. Recently, Forbes listed him as the third-highest-earning comedian in America, after Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, both of whom make their piles largely on television syndication and film royalties. Dunham is 47, with feathery brown hair and a habit of curling his mouth into an overbite when he finds something hilarious. He was finishing the job one night last July, gluing on a new, male-patterned ring of hair and comically bushy eyebrows. Dunham, who builds the dummies he uses and restores antique ones as a hobby, went to work. He’d been packed in plastic in a garage and then a basement for five decades - chipped in places and blighted by mold - by the time the stand-up comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham got him last spring. (Remote-controlled sewing-machine motors raise each arm to call balls and strikes.) But the Umpire never ended up being used. The figure stands six feet tall and was meant to work the plate at a girls’ softball game. The Umpire was built in 1941 by George and Glenn McElroy, the Ohio brothers considered to be the Stradivariuses of ventriloquist dummies.
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