Mary McGrory Quotes

Children are so used to seeing puppets that when they see a real ventriloquist they don't understand it.

One time, it was really funny, I was going on stage... and they were like, 'Oh, we didn't mic the puppet! Mic the puppet!' So, that's how I know that sometimes I do a very good job, because they think that the puppet is actually, like, real.

Sometimes when I'm performing, whenever my puppet cracks a joke, it actually makes me laugh.

I think I've got it pretty easy compared with somebody who works at a desk nine to five. I'm just working for an hour in the evening. I get a bit breathless, as I have to talk non-stop because of the puppets.

Up until college age I was using the typical little-boy dummy that sits on the knee and makes woodpecker jokes. My first original character didn't happen until later, and that was Jose the Jalapeno on a Stick.

I have no idea why people want to watch puppets be the slightly meaner version of the weirdo holding them. It's beyond my comprehension.

I make napkins talk in restaurants, socks talk on car journeys. There is an awful lot of puppetry going on in the house.

When I was a kid, I never saw a puppet show. I never played with puppets or had any interest in them.

I'm a pretty good ventriloquist, but it's the entertainment value and the laughs that keep people sitting there and wanting more.

I do laugh when I hear myself saying, 'I am a ventriloquist.' I am definitely suited to it, though. I took it and ran with it quite hungrily. It is not for everyone, but it is just the chance to write for a character.

When I was eight years old, I got a dummy for Christmas and started teaching myself. I got books and records and sat in front of the bathroom mirror, practising. I did my first show in the third grade and just kept going; there was no reason to quit.

When I was eight, I bought my first puppet. It was a monkey, and I paid five cents for it. I collected some scrap wood and built myself a puppet theatre. I made 32 cents with my first show, which I thought was pretty good, and that's when I knew I would be a puppeteer when I grew up.

Funny enough, there have been puppets in everything I've written because I have a huge love of puppets. There's a big puppet musical at the end of 'Sarah Marshall.' I wrote 'The Muppets.'

The magic in performing as an entertaining ventriloquist happens when the characters come to life and the interaction between the separate personalities on stage becomes 'real.' Then don't forget that the act has to be funny, and to me, being funny and entertaining any given audience is more important than anything.

It would be quite interesting to use Kermit the Frog to act like a real frog. But it wouldn't produce captivating theatre.

I dabbled in puppetry throughout college and even had my own traveling puppet show after I graduated.

I never thought that being a puppeteer was something someone could do as a job.

I was fascinated by puppets as a kid and one I had when I was eight or nine, a skeleton, is now hanging in my office.

I admire ventriloquists, because I can't do that. I mean, I might get mistaken for a ventriloquist dummy every now and then, but I can't do what they do.

I was a kid in the third grade ... saw a dummy in the toy store. In the '60s and '70s there were a lot of those vinyl ventriloquism dummies - just about every toy store had one. Everyone close to my age that I've talked to, especially guys for some reason, tell me that they had one too, but they said they never could do it. So many people come up to me and say that. It was just something that I thought was cool. I started doing book reports with it - I developed the skill. I easily got A's on all my reports. It was just something that a little kid grasped on to - so I stuck with it.

If you want to call me a Karaoke King, I'll take it.

That was my goal going on 'AGT,' was to keep ventriloquism alive and get it more common, to put it out in the open so kids like me who wanted to pursue it as a passion... can do it.

People had kind of a spooky feeling about ventriloquists after 'The Twilight Zone.'

Everyone loves puppets.

I directed the play 'Amadeus' with puppets way back in the day for theater. I also studied puppetry at the Eugene and Neil Center with a lot of the 'Sesame Street' people, so I do have a little bit of a history with puppetry.