Ronnie, The Dumb Blond Dummy That Deserves Our Respect, & Sophie, Her Handler

There’s nothing more respectable, for me, than people who find their thing, and throw everything at it.

And when that thing, that thankless, exhausting, underpaid, overly vulnerable, under appreciated thing is meant only to make us laugh? All the respect.

How fucking lucky are we to have entertainers.

When we at F&F decided that we needed to revive Bones, and specifically a joy and humor edition, in response to this year, I knew I wanted to sit with what it means to put on a show, for the rest of us ingrates to enjoy. 

It was such a pleasure to catch up with Ventriloquist Sophie Becker, from her residency in Belgium, to explore how she approaches her craft, challenges perceptions of dummies, and turns skeptics to fans. 

Needless to say, by the end of our conversation I became an even bigger fan.

BF: It’s great to meet you, Sophie, and thanks so much for making the time to chat. Can I ask where you are right now?

SB: Right now I am in Belgium at a residency called Kunstplaats vonk working on a new show, kind of tightening up its development...I'm tightening up a show that I do on stage in New York quite a bit and adding new parts to it.

BF: So how did you land this residency? Like, what was your path to Belgium?

SB: My good friend did this residency and then she introduced me to the person who runs it. She thought it would be a good fit, and Belgium supports their artists and they also really support performance art. So it's really awesome to be here. For once, I’m like, oh my god, people like performance art. Yeah.

BF: What's it like  to be in a place where you feel supported?  And what's it like doing ventriloquism in New York?

 

 

SB: I think being here in Belgium feels like I can take more creative risks and maybe get a little more freaky with it. Or maybe just that I could make more mistakes. 

I think when I perform in New York, I do a lot on stage, but I also do things in variety shows at galleries and clubs.  And it feels like when I do those, I'm really like, okay, well, this is ventriloquism. I don't necessarily do jokes, but I'm like, this is a funny character that I've created, it's fun to watch and everything's so fun. 

But I think in Belgium I can dive more into Ronnie's psychology and explore, you know, what it means to be controlled and to control her, her emptiness, and all of those things. It feels like there's more room for that here. I mean, I could do that in New York, too, but I found the entertainment level there, people in New York just want to laugh. 

BF: You say you don't do jokes. If you don't feel like your style of ventriloquism is jokes, how would you describe what you do as a ventriloquist? What is the Sophie Becker approach to ventriloquism?

SB: I take from my acting background and it's more important that Ronnie has an aged character and that's where the humor is. It's not necessarily that, you know, she's cracking jokes that hit a mark. It’s more that she, you know, has an MLM empire or something. And like, she's like this fully fledged woman who's trying to navigate life in a corporate space and gets a ton of Botox. It's like, they're not necessarily jokes. They're more character development that feels really absurd and that pertains to her.

BF: Can you tell me about coming into this acting background and figuring out what you were going to do, what was going to be your signature angle or approach or method in your relationship with Ronnie and your presence on stage as an actor?

SB: I think part of that came because I wanted to be on stage with other people. But I started learning this during COVID when we couldn't be on stage. So a lot of it came from this desire that I was like, I want to be in a play, I want to be in a play, I don't want to just be a comedian, like that's alone on stage, I want to be in a play with other people. And back then, when I first started, I didn't even have a dummy. So I was using like, random objects and animating them, even if they didn't even have mouths…it felt really abstract to anthropomorphize them. 

And Ronnie and Jerry, my two dummies came later, and dummies are super expensive. So I think like, at that time, in the early time, I was like, well, I can't get a real dummy, I could get like a shitty one, but I don't really want a shitty one. So like, I don't really care, I want to go abstract. 

So I think it was the experimentation, that's what I felt like I wanted to bring to ventriloquism.

BF: The ventriloquism you’re doing, it's part comedy, it’s kind of puppetry, it’s kind of a magic act – it’s really old school entertainment. Can you explain how you define or understand ventriloquism and how you fell in love with it?  

SB: Yeah, I think for me, bringing them all into one is ventriloquism. What I was really attracted to was the uncanny quality of the dummies and the magic in just throwing your voice. 

With a magician, they do their tricks – and they do so many tricks and it's so exciting. And with the ventriloquist, you kind of know the trick the whole time; you know exactly what we’re doing. But your awareness of it falls in and out. You'll be like, oh, I saw her lips move,  she is doing this. Or you’ll go, whoa, suddenly the puppet looks so alive. And I think I really liked having the puppeteer on stage. That sort of oscillation between awareness and unawareness of what's happening and your brain’s ability to  grasp what is happening, I really like that. That's the magic.

BF: And where in that equation does the humor sit? The humor is kind of this other element, whether it’s one-liner, punch line stuff, or like you said, a deeper psychological development of an absurd character. Where does the comedy sit in it for you?

SB: I think the comedy sits in building the character. I love the one-liners, and if I was good at writing one-liners, I probably would write a ton of them. But sometimes when I watch ventriloquists who do so many one-liners, one after the other, it can break me out of believing that this dummy is a real person. And also there's something so funny when she [Ronnie] gets really serious, when she's really devastated over something. I think humor that stems from absurdity is maybe sometimes a little bit slower. It doesn't have that punch, but it just adds to that uncanniness. And that’s what I like about it.

BF: And you kind of came to it in the absurdity of the pandemic and trying to be an actor in New York at a time when all performance arts was just…what the fuck? And then finding this kind of old school craft, Vaudevillian tradition…and now you’re in The New York Times being praised for reviving a lost vaudevillian art form.

I don’t really have a question. It just seems kind of absurd all around. 

SB: I totally stumbled upon it and I feel like people responded so strongly to it. They were really

excited about it. And from the very beginning, even from the time that I was just doing it as a joke, I stumbled upon this thing. It didn't feel like I chose it at all. I just sort of followed it…I felt like I really followed it. So I don't have an answer as to why now, because I didn't choose it.

BF: How much do you think your enthusiasm was born of audience reception? You were like, all right, fuck it, I'll try this, and people loved it. How much of falling in love with it was seeing people loving what you were doing?

SB: That totally helped me go down this path, for sure – all of that positive affirmation and people wanting to see it. I also think it was something that I wanted to see, which is why I started doing it. But then when I realized other people wanted to see it, too, I was like, Oh, what? Everyone kind of wants to see this. So why not? Why shouldn't it just be me that's doing it? 

There's a lot of the Jim Henson plush softer dummies, but the Jerry Mahoney's of the world and now the Ronnie Woods of the world, there's very few people who use them. So I think people like, I don't know, they have this power over people.

BF:  Can you tell me about Ronnie?

SB: She's custom, she's out of a mold. And her role is technically a male character that I slapped a wig on. But most people buy that male character from my dummy maker who's in Maine. Most people buy that male character from him and they just keep it as an object. There's not very many people actually using them, which is crazy.

I think there's a lot of collectors. Yeah, but the Jerry Mahoney I have was lent to me by a friend and he's a replica. He's like a movie quality replica of the original Jerry Mahoney.

BF: I see. So he's in the likeness of a historic character?

Yeah, like when you open up his skull, you can see that he was made in 2006, like Jerry Lane signed it and it says 2006 on it.

BF: What is the reaction backstage? I mean, so you're around standup comics and actors, but you're in ventriloquism, what is the backstage reaction and relationship to other professionals?

SB: Well, we've never been backstage with another ventriloquist, which would be crazy and awesome. But usually people are just super hyped backstage, and they're like taking pictures with her. 

She's very expensive. I don't like to leave her, but usually I walk backstage and always prop her up so that it looks like she's sitting there because I don't like it when she looks dead. So she's usually sitting backstage, propped up, and people will be taking photos of her. They love her.  People go crazy.

BF: She’s just holding court back there in the green room. Why didn't Jerry get to come to Belgium?

SB: Too many cases to drag on the plane. And also we always have issues with TSA and I couldn't bring both of them to carry on. So I chose Ronnie, and Jerry's not my character. He's Paul Winchell's character. So if I make anything new, it's always with Ronnie.

BF: What do you get from the TSA? What is it like to travel with a dummy?

 

SB: They just always pull me over and they always open up the box and they're like, really like, Oh, God. Ah. They’re like freaked out, but also really excited. Like, one time, it was like five in the morning, and a guy called over four of his colleagues and his manager Gary. It was really funny at the airport. Like, I think they always think that they're a bomb. I don't know, I don't know what it looks like on the [TSA security] screen. I don't know if it looks like a body, like I don't know what it looks like. I wish I could get a picture.

BF: They’re kind of like dolls, or clowns… these things that people bring their own baggage, and they hold an odd place in culture.

SB: Yeah, I have friends who cannot look at my Instagram. I have friends who are just like, I hate that. I love you so much, Sophie. I hate that, and I cannot look at it, which I totally understand. I don't fault them for it. The dummy is so uncanny, and I like exploring that uncanniness, and, you know, she's like one degree away from our realm, which is why she feels so weird. It's like, she's almost human, but she's not human, and that's hard to stomach, I think. I feel like she's really different from a clown, though, because clowns don't feel like they're supernatural in the same way. I do think that there's something a little bit more spiritual about the dummy.

 

BF: Do you play with that discord, that discomfort?

SB: I feel like I've kind of tried to stay away from it, just because people have such strong feelings

about it, my whole thing has really been like, don't be afraid of them. Like, Hollywood convinced you to be afraid of them, and Hollywood wanted you to be afraid of them by green lighting all of these, you know, horror movies, the dummy horror genre. And so I've really been like, you shouldn't be afraid. But I also know they're really freaky.

BF: How does Ronnie disarm people?

 

SB: I think because I really want Ronnie to be in the real world, she's like a woman in the real world who's trying to make it. She has a TikTok where she's an influencer. She's just as uncanny as the influencers that have a filter on their face. Wait, maybe that's a crazy thing to say, but sometimes when I'm on TikTok, there's a lot of things that feel really uncanny on there. It’s like, what am I really looking at? Ronnie feels one degree away from what the truth is, and so I don't necessarily think it's personality. It's more like her mimicking this thing online.

 

 

BF: Could you introduce me to Ronnie?

RW: You've just got to go out there. I'm excited and good. You know, that's just how it is.

BF: Hi, how are you? [Ronnie comes on zoom]

RW: So excited to be on here and, you know, just kind of like you, the star for once. You talking to my manager?

BF: She's been telling me about you and your TikTok channel.

RW: Yeah, no, it's pretty great. Yeah, I had my TikTok and I just post important stuff without, you know, like, I don't know, telling people that, like, they need to believe in themselves. And also I talk about my ‘situationship’, like, I don't know if either had one of those, that I talk about my situationship and I talk about co-dependency issues and what that means because I am

not co-dependent, so.

BF: What do you think of Europe?

RW: It's kind of weird here, frankly.

It's like no one around at all, like I'm just like alone here.

Anyways, I better go.

BF: She's bigger than I expected. it.

SB: Oh, yeah, oh my god. Yeah, no, she's like the size of a small child.

BF: That's why TSA dudes are like, what are we dealing with? Um, you, you were talking about psychology, this kind of thing around control and controlling and developing her personality as a strong independent woman doing her own thing. Talk a little bit about developing Ronnie, 

SB: Yeah, a lot of Ronnie's development came out of sort of wanting to do something really different from Jerry because Jerry was my boss and Jerry is my manager. And my relationship to Jerry is very much like, he knows everything and like, I really look up to him and he's just like, he's a Hollywood star because he is a Hollywood star. 

And I think with Ronnie, I wanted a doll that maybe could reflect the things that I was looking at every day or maybe the things that I was feeling insecure about myself, you know. It's like, I want my makeup to look good, but I want to do this weird makeup tutorial on TikTok. And then those are really embarrassing thoughts to me. And Ronnie can sort of be that instead. She can be the vehicle to sort of say it back to me and make me be like, ‘oh my God’. It’s clarity I guess. I think that came with building her character.

Also, her being someone who really knows how to talk about codependency and is working on her codependency issues, I don’t necessarily have those issues. It's just ironic because she literally cannot do anything.

BF: Back to what you were talking about where the comedy is just one of the layers…

SB: Yeah, what's the psychology of the dummy who can't function and is made out of wood, what are her fears?. She's a dummy and she's a dumb blonde, it’s all obvious. But obvious is good. Don't overwork it. 

BF: But she also seems unapologetically self-confident…

SB: Yeah, she's unapologetically self-confident and self-centered, for sure. She thinks that she can do everything herself and she does everything herself and she's like ‘my style is perfect’.

BF: Do you ever bring her out socially?

SB: No, I've brought her to bars, even on the subway. It is so overwhelming. No one sees these objects normally, so when they do, they freak out. And kids will grab at her. I was at a bar, I took her out and someone screamed and the whole table was freaking out. It’s it's kind of like all eyes on you in this way that's like, ‘Oh, shit, we gotta get out of here’.

BF: Even more than being on stage?

SB: Yeah, because you're not supposed to be taking the attention away. I don't know. On the subway, I should enjoy it more, but I just don’t.  Maybe I should go out on the subway and do it, but it  just feels overwhelming to me, all of that attention.

BF: Yeah, I can see that for sure. It's anything goes…

SB: Anything goes is right.  I think people really are like, 'you should bring her out more’, but not to parties, but like in public. And it's intimidating, feels intimidating. People have definitely told me never to bring her to a party.

 

BF:
 Sophie, and Ronnie, Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me about your work. I hope the rest of your time in Belgium goes great and that I can catch a show in person sometime soon. 

SB: Thank you. We’ll be in touch for sure. 

[All images credited to Sophie Becker’s Instagram. Go follow & Like]