Restoration for dummies: Colwich man runs ventriloquism business

It’s not uncommon to see many tiny, painted heads baking in the sun on Tyler Ellis’ back porch.

At first, the neighbors on his sleepy Colwich street turned their heads at the sight, but now they simply laugh, Ellis said.

In the basement of his home, Ellis, 30, runs Dapper Dummies, an online business that creates and repairs ventriloquist dummies for clients all over the country.

To his surprise – and delight – business is booming, as people are rediscovering the vintage pastime.

“It’s been pretty busy,” he said. “I’ve been consistently building things and restoring older figures.”

Resurgence in popularity

Ellis attended a national ventriloquism convention in mid-July and came back encouraged.

Interest in the pastime, he said, is building.

“Surprisingly there was a wide range of age groups,” Ellis said. “You see a lot of younger people and you see a lot of seasoned performers – middle-aged people that are doing it for a living.”

Ventriloquism, which originated as a religious practice, came into popularity as entertainment in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Its popularity began to wane around the 1970s, Ellis said, but performers such as Jeff Dunham, Terry Fator and Paul Zerdin have sparked a new interest in the art form. The 2003 Broadway musical “Avenue Q” even featured a cast of puppets (not technically ventriloquism).

Greg Claassen, a professional ventriloquist based in Whitewater (and, as far as he and Ellis know, the only one in the Wichita area), said the nostalgia of ventriloquism entices people, especially younger ones.

“There is a little bit of an interest in … going back to some of these older art forms again and getting away from the modern techy entertainment,” Claassen said. “On stage, magicians are creating an illusion to fool your eye. Ventriloquists, we create the illusions that fool your ear.

“It’s an art form that a lot of people don’t truly understand, but it’s a very fascinating art form as well.”

Ellis first became interested in ventriloquism when he was 8 years old and received a toy dummy for Christmas.

“There was just something about seeing a performer breathe life into an inanimate object that I just found fascinating and entertaining,” he said. “When you see a really good ventriloquist, you kind of get lost in what’s going on. … It’s just goofy and fun – it always just fit me well.”

On his website, Ellis writes that “when most boys were busy riding bikes and chasing girls, Tyler was in his room trying to learn how to speak without moving his lips. (He knew what the girls REALLY liked … ventriloquism!)”

Ellis met Claassen at one of his shows when he was young. Claassen took Ellis under his wing and taught him how to build and repair ventriloquist dummies, Ellis said.

“There’s a lot of books on the subject, but when it comes to actually making it happen in person, it’s just a lot harder,” Ellis said. “Having a mentor to show you how to do it in person helps a lot.”

Claassen said he appreciates having another ventriloquism aficionado close by. Whenever his dummies need a touch-up, Ellis is a short drive away.

“Most of the time, we ventriloquists, we communicate long distance,” he said. “To have somebody, a comrade in arms, close by is really nice. We can bounce ideas off each other. … We talk probably every day, as well.”

Dummy-making 101

Ellis took his passion for ventriloquism and turned it into Dapper Dummies, which he says now occupies about as much of his time as his day job at an aircraft instrument business.

He creates dummies and does touch-up and restoration work on pre-existing ones, he said.

Each handmade ventriloquist dummy of his takes about 100 hours to create, Ellis said.

He sculpts most of the pieces out of clay, then uses molds of the sculpture to create the final figure with polyresin.

He then has to wire the various mechanisms that make the dummy operate.

After the dummy is wired appropriately, the figure is assembled.

Then comes Ellis’ favorite part: painting the dummies to look period-appropriate, giving them wigs, and of course dressing them as dapperly as possible.

“That’s my area of expertise, where I set myself apart from other builders,” Ellis said. “I’ve always kind of had an artistic side, but it wasn’t until I started experimenting with painting figures that I learned I could do it OK.”

He said Dapper Dummies’ restoration services are growing more in-demand – in the roughly two years he’s run the business, Ellis said, he has worked on dummies ranging in price from $550 to $50,000.

“It takes a little bit to get your name out there and get to where people will trust you to send their expensive tools to you to fix, but it’s picked up in the last two years,” Ellis said.

He said there are probably fewer than 10 shops in the country that do the kind of work he does, so he has his niche market cornered.

Most of his work comes through the internet; he receives the dummies through the mail and ships them back to their owners after his work is completed.

“There’s a lot of collectors out there – the collecting of ventriloquist dummies has really had a resurgence as well,” Claassen said. “A lot of these collectors want their dummies restored, and Tyler’s found a really cool niche.”

Now, Ellis works on Dapper Dummies projects in the evenings and when he has free time; however, he hopes to one day do dummy work full time.

“It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to need more time to dedicate to the figure stuff, just because that’s kind of where my passion is,” Ellis said. “The work is there and the demand is keeping me busy.”

‘Silly, fun art form’

When one of Ellis’ friends walks into his basement workshop, he or she is often greeted first by an unfinished dummy, red mouth agape and eyes wide open – with no irises.

He works in a modestly sized, unfinished basement room, mostly at night. That means he can’t hammer away at the dummies too loudly for fear of waking his sleeping 2-year-old.

Occasionally he enjoys a bit of lighthearted fun with his dummies, placing them in unexpected places in the home to spook his wife.

He thinks ventriloquism often gets a “bad rap” for being creepy, though he sees it as a “silly, fun art form.”

“I think it’s just when the figures and the dummies are just kind of sitting there staring at you (that) people are creeped out by it,” he said. “If you pick them up and make them talk, yeah, it’s funny.”

His 2-year-old daughter “gets a kick out of it” when he performs for her with his personal dummy, named Kirby.

Just don’t expect him to be performing in public anytime soon.

“I’m way out of practice,” he said with a laugh. “I’ve found my niche in working with the figures, so I think I’ll stick with that.”

This story was originally published July 29, 2016 at 3:52 PM with the headline "Restoration for dummies: Colwich man runs ventriloquism business."