What you see below is a full playlist of the best “Achmed” videos from YouTube. Simply click play and sit back and all of them will automatically play one after the other.

This following clip is insanely funny! The “Achmed” dead terrorist character has been brilliantly conceptualized. Jeff Dunham exposes the funny side of being a terrorist (if there is such a thing), even though it sounds a little cliched at times. It just doesn’t get much better than this.

Character development:

The key to being a successful ventriloquist, is that your puppets need to have a personality.

You: Comment
Puppet: Punchline
You: Comment
Puppet: Punchline

This routine tends to get old very fast, and your audience will lose interest very quickly. The key to keeping your audience involved, is to create a character out of your puppet. The puppet should have a life of its own, likes and dislikes, quirky behaviour – and all of this has to be consistent.

For example, if your character is a rude, old, wise cracking, know-it-all male chauvinistic pig like Wilson then the character has to be consistently the same. You can occasionally go off on a slight tangent (like when your puppet is supposedly having a good day, say) but you cannot suddenly turn your grumpy-old-rude-man puppet into a kind, decent man who loves and respects women.

If you want to learn about character development, this is one of the videos to watch and learn from.

– Ravi Jayagopal