Strassman, ventriloquism’s ‘bad boy,’ talks the talk at Golden Nugget

Thursday, Jan. 23, 2003 | 8:25 a.m.

David Strassman was holding his month-old son, Carson, on his knee when a family friend a woman in her 70s stopped by to say hello at their home in Ireland.

Strassman asked his son, "Do you like grandma Greta?"

"Yes," replied the infant.

Stunned, the woman yelled, "He can talk already!"

Carson isn't a talking prodigy. His father is an internationally acclaimed ventriloquist who usually is putting words into the mouth of Chuck Wood a dummy with an attitude.

Some of those words are only four letters long.

"Chuck is like Bart Simpson," Strassman said. "He's 13 years old and he swears like any 13-year-old kid."

Chuck described as a leering, foul-mouthed psychopath ain't no Lamb Chop.

And Strassman ain't no Shari Lewis.

He and Chuck aren't likely to be candidates for a Saturday morning children's program on television, unless the FCC relaxes some of its rules.

But the duo do have a new show at the Golden Nugget, filling in the slot vacated by Amazing Johnathan, the magician who has been called the Freddy Krueger of comedy.

Johnathan has taken his bag of horrific tricks to the Flamingo Las Vegas.

Strassman arrived in the magician's wake, which he says he seems to do about every 10 years or so.

"In 1980 I got a call to play at a club in Anchorage, Alaska," the 45-year-old comedian recalled. "They paid me 1,000 percent more than what I was making at the time so I jumped at the chance. When I got there everyone kept talking about this guy who had just left, the Amazing Johnathan."

Strassman performed his cutting-edge act in Alaska off-and-on for 10 years without ever bumping into Johnathan.

"In 1991 I get a call out of the blue from producer Martin Bergman to play Australia," he said. "When I got there, everyone kept talking about this Johnathan guy."

(A spokesman for Johnathan said the comic magician has only met Strassman briefly on a couple of occasions and doesn't know the ventriloquist.)

Bergman, who is producing Strassman's show at the Golden Nugget, is now the husband of comedian Rita Rudner.

"He made Rita very successful in Australia," Strassman said.

The couple live in Las Vegas, where she performs at New York-New York's Cabaret Theatre. Bergman produces the improvisational show "BOO!" at the same venue.

"I went down to Melbourne for three weeks and ended up staying three months," Strassman said.

And he's been performing in Australia regularly for the past 10 years.

In June he married a woman from Ireland. Strassman said they were going to live there and he would continue his Australian tours, which last two to three months.

"Then two months ago, right out of the blue, I got this call from Bergman who said that Johnathan was leaving the Golden Nugget and would I like to come to Vegas," Strassman said. "I'm following him like in 10-year cycles, but I've only met him a couple of times at the Magic Castle (in Hollywood). I've never even seen his entire act."

The two entertainers attract similar audiences.

"I don't want to use a catchphrase, but he is the bad boy of magic and I'm the bad boy of ventriloquism," Strassman said. "He turns his art form on its head, and I do the same.

"Frankly, I'm very disappointed in this art form. It's just boring. So what I do is, I make fun of it."

The similarity of the extremism in the two acts may stem from the fact that the two men have similar backgrounds -- both honed their skills as street entertainers, Johnathan in San Francisco and Strassman in New York City.

Although born and raised in Los Angeles, Strassman went to high school in Chicago, where he learned his craft and performed at birthday parties.

"Eventually I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York to become a serious dramatic actor," Strassman said. "I was very successful in the school, but when it came time to earn money I pulled out the puppet and performed on the streets of New York."

During the summer he worked the lunch crowd on Wall Street. Then, from 7 p.m. to 7:45 p.m., he worked the theater crowd on Broadway. He worked Greenwich Village streets on Fridays and Saturdays. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons he worked in Central Park.

"I drew huge crowds," he said. "In 1977 I was making $500 a week in nickles, dimes and quarters. You had to be funny or they would walk away. And you had to project over the sound of the honking cars."

Then summer ended.

"It got cold, and you can't perform on the street when it's 20 below zero," Strassman said. "So I took it all into the comedy clubs, and suddenly I'm in this stand-up comedic situation and so I restructured my act. My jokes had to be better. On the street it was kind of improv, where Chuck insulted people."

Strassman studied the performers at all of the comedy clubs in town. He says learning his art on the street gave him an advantage over other comedians.

"I had to get a laugh every five seconds or they didn't pay you," Strassman said.

By 1985, when comedy clubs where riding the crest of their popularity, the ventriloquist was at the top of the wave.

"I became a stand-up comic with a puppet," he said. "I was headlining all of the major comedy clubs around the United States."

He dropped out for a year to manage a comedy club in Bakersfield, Calif., but then he was back touring the country with Chuck in '86.

When he returned to performing, he modified the dummy, using engineering principles commonly found in remote-controlled airplanes (a hobby of his).

"I developed this routine where Chuck fires me," Strassman said. "I left the stage and he came to life. The audience freaked. It just blew people away. Suddenly I had a signature piece -- a guy whose puppet fires him and then comes to life. It's still a signature piece."

The cast includes five puppets who are as strange as Chuck.

"The show is all about theater," Strassman said. "I approach these characters as characters in a play, rather than as a vehicle to show how quickly I can talk or drink a glass of water. I don't do that in my show at all.

"I try to show you a twisted gang of puppets and their lives, their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their foibles and their nightmares. My show really is an expose on these characters, rather than look how fast I can talk without moving my lips."