Jeff Dunham

Weep not for Jeff Dunham. Just check his tour schedule.

Las Vegans have a lot of entertainment to keep up with. Forgive us for thinking Terry Fator's "America's Got Talent" victory and subsequent deal with The Mirage may have pulled the rug out from under Dunham.

After all, Dunham is the ventriloquist who worked for 20 years to carve out space on the Strip, headlining midsized showrooms at the Sands and Sahara. He even remembers getting chewed out by Steve Schirripa, managing the Riviera Comedy Club pre-"Sopranos," for going three minutes over his allotted time.

But when Dunham last played Las Vegas -- during a Lance Burton vacation at the Monte Carlo in 2000-- he hadn't invented Achmed the Dead Terrorist.

Now, 72 million YouTube hits later, Dunham on Saturday plays the 4,200-seat Colosseum at Caesars Palace, headlining The Comedy Festival alongside Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld and Dane Cook.

"I love Vegas, but right now you gotta dance with who brung you," he says of touring sports arenas such as the Joe Lewis in Detroit and Agganis in Boston.

"There will be a future when I'm looking forward to coming to Vegas and doing some fun stuff," he predicts.

Sunday also brought "Jeff Dunham's Very Special Christmas Special" to Comedy Central, the cable channel that helped catapult the popularity of Dunham and puppet sidekicks Peanut, Walter, Bubba and Melvin the Superhero.

Dunham's pop culture breakthrough came about a year after the 9/11 attacks, when he saw a skeleton on the wall of a Los Angeles store and decided it looked like a terrorist.

The wheels started turning. Dunham hashed over a routine with a dead Osama bin Laden, before settling on the more universal idea of a terrorist who wasn't very good at his job.

Ringtones of Achmed's catchphrase "Silence! I kill you!" now sell around the world, and the U.S. only ranks ninth in Google searches for Achmed sorted by country.

"I knew Achmed was going to be big and popular, but I had no earthly idea it was going to be beyond our borders," he says.

But he figures the psychology is fairly universal. "I think it's kind of like whistling in the dark. You like to laugh at what scares you."

He says the Christmas special, which includes Achmed's rendition of "Jingle Bombs," turns the angry puppet into a sympathetic character. "When you hear an entire audience go 'Ahh' after a terrorist says something, I've twisted somebody." But that's something Dunham, 48, has worked for since he was a youngster transcribing cassette recordings of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

"As a kid, I realized the funny part is the most important part," he says. "I decided to become a stand-up comic who happens to use ventriloquism as a vehicle for the comedy.

"You can amaze an audience once or twice with a couple of skills and make a whiffle ball talk. Who cares after a couple of seconds? If it's not funny, so what?"

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