ABSTRACT
For us, ventriloquism has now become a largely visual phenomenon. Ask anyone to visualise a ventriloquist and the image forms instantly of a single figure, usually male, in colloquy with a single dummy, perched, sometimes on a stand, most typically on the performer’s knee.14 Valentine Vox accounts for the puzzling popularity of radio ventriloquists like Edgar Bergen and Peter Brough in the 1940s and 1950s by suggesting that ventriloquism ‘is essentially a vocal, not a visual illusion’.15 But a vital part of the effect of these radio shows was that the audience knew so well what the dummies were supposed to look like. Charlie MacCarthy and Archie Andrews made frequent appearances in newspapers, comics and magazines outside the radio studio, and, indeed, the radio studio or theatre were often enough portrayed in photographs to be immanent in the listening eye of the audience. We may presume that the scene of radio performance only became invisible, or unvisualisable, very gradually over the century. Charlie MacCarthy featured alongside Edgar Bergen in a number of films, as well. Although the ideal of what I have been calling sonorous autonomisation, of a world of sound functioning separately from and in excess of the visible world, survives for us, it is not carried any more by the art of ventriloquism.
