Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity

Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity (2007) is the solo stand-up special you can watch online on iFILM, eighty minutes of American ventriloquist Jeff Dunham trading insults with a suitcase full of puppets in front of a live crowd.

Grumpy old Walter kicks things off, arms folded, picking apart everything wrong with modern American life. Then come the new faces: Achmed the Dead Terrorist, a hopeless skeleton bomber who threatens the audience with "silence and death" and promptly turned into an internet phenomenon, plus the bumbling would-be hero Melvin the Superhero. Familiar dummies drop by too, and the trick never gets old — Dunham runs the back-and-forth so smoothly you stop tracking whose voice is whose.

The comedy is deliberately blunt, politically incorrect and built on the absurd rather than the subtle. The ventriloquism is the real thing, no edits to hide behind — the lips hold still while the lines fire back instantly. It's for anyone who likes brash American stand-up and doesn't expect a joke to apologize. Stream Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity (2007) online on iFILM.