The ventriloquist’s voice is neither anchored in the body of the ventriloquist nor in that of the dummy the voice is enigmatically doubled and only partially visible. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the 1930s Edgar Bergen was turned down by the manager of the radio station WMAQ (later a vice-president of NBC) who told Bergen that ventriloquism would not work on radio (Graubart and Graubart 202). Also, the phenomenon of ventriloquism is both visual and vocal, and both spatial and temporal. Hugo’s automation reveals the boundary-defying nature of ventriloquism in, for example, blurring the lines between anthropomorphic objects and their human partners. Despite the extremity that Hugo represents, precarious uncanny animation of the puppet still lurks in more amiable situations, for example, when the famous American ventriloquist Edgar Bergen first introduced himself on television as the “best friend and severest critic of Charlie McCarthy.” To activate that automation, the ventriloquist needs no more technology than his own hand and voice in the case of the puppet. The danger of autoamputation, the flip side of automation, already lurks in ventriloquism performance, as we can see from Hugo. As Marshal McLuhan insightfully observes, electric technologies such as printing not only extend the power of man but also trigger “a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism” (McLuhan 43). Hugo therefore stands as a perfect metaphor for the uncanny automaton, a dangerous promise made by the ventriloquist. The Hugo example also shows that the ventriloquial voice is neither inside nor outside of the spectacle, as the image-for example, the dummy’s moving lips-fails to contain the essentially other voice. The extension takes places as an alienation of the puppeteer, or rather, an amputation, as the puppet often speaks in a half mechanized, disagreeing voice that has some extralinguistic quirky sound (e.g. A puppet is the extension not only of the puppeteer’s hand but also of his voice. What the animated automaton Hugo exposes is a sense of alterity that is always at the heart of the production and perception of ventriloquism. He speaks in the voice of the presumably “dead” Hugo in a vicious tone: “I have been waiting for you.” When Maxwell finally speaks again, he ventriloquizes with his lips moving mechanically in dissonance with the spoken words. After stomping Hugo to pieces in jail, Maxwell is sent to an asylum and becomes silent. Maxwell, though not unexpectedly, takes the blame for all the terrible things actually done by Hugo, including an attempted murder of Hugo’s partner-to-be. Hugo not only overrides Maxwell in their show but also seeks to replace Maxwell with a new ventriloquist. The partnership between ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (played by Michael Redgrave) and his dummy Hugo goes wrong in many aspects because the dummy, as it turns out, literally has a mind of his own. “Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” the final sequence in the 1945 British anthology horror film Dead of Night, takes that loss of control further into what may be considered the ventriloquist’s biggest nightmare-having his own voice silenced by the dummy.

In so doing, the ventriloquist stages the illusion that his dummy is somewhat out of control. The ventriloquist displays virtuosity often by pretending to argue with the dummy-which sounds witty and mischievous-while pretending to lose the argument. For a ventriloquist, the trick to winning the audience is to have his dummy play the leading role as if it had a mindof its own. The word is a Latin re-creation of engastrimythos, the Greek word for speaking through one’s abdomen, by combining “Venter” (stomach) and “Loqui” (to speak). Ventriloquism, also referred to as throwing the voice, is a special way of using one’s voice to create an effect such that the sound seems to come from somewhere else, a body part other than the speaker’s mouth or a different person or object.

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