Alan Semok

Alan Semok at the Vent Haven Museum, 2007. Ventriloquist Central Collection.

Every trade has a person everybody quietly calls when something breaks. In ventriloquism, for about fifty years, that person was Alan Semok. The performers who worked with him called him the Dummy Doctor, and the nickname undersells him: he built as many figures as he ever fixed, worked as an actor in film and television right alongside them, and when Buffalo Bob Smith needed a duplicate Howdy Doody made by someone he trusted completely, he called Alan. Pull up a chair. This one starts with a kid, a suitcase, and a rejection from a man who couldn't be bothered.

A suitcase, not a paper route

Semok started ventriloquism around age eleven or twelve. "All my friends had paper routes, I had a suitcase," he said later, working birthday parties and Cub Scout shows for ten or fifteen dollars a show, which beat any paper route he knew.^[1] He outgrew a department store dummy fast and did what any serious kid would do: he contacted Frank Marshall, a famous figure maker who had built most of the era's biggest names.^[1] Marshall was in his late sixties by then, hard to reach and not especially interested in a thirteen year old with limited funds.^[1] So Semok built his own. His father, an amateur woodworker, taught him the tools at a workbench the man had built a couple of years before his son was even born.^[1] By fifteen or sixteen he was good enough to sell one, and he sold his first figure to Al Flosso's magic shop in New York City for thirty five dollars, around 1966.^[2]

The Dummy Doctor Workshop

By the mid 1960s the business had a name: the Dummy Doctor Workshop, out of Somerset, New Jersey.^[3] From 1966 on he built hundreds of vent figures, hand puppets, and marionettes, including puppets for network television programs and commercials, and he always said the same thing about it: quality over quantity.^[3] The proof he offered was blunt, working-man marketing, and probably true besides: Semok figures almost never turn up on the resale market, because the people who own one tend to hang on to it.^[3]

Watch him work in the archival footage and you see why owners hang on. A lever for the mouth, one for the eyes, a closing eyelid mechanism, and inside what he called "a pretty nice array of plumbing," brass linkages with some steel, everything brazed and soldered solid. "I build these for people that are out there doing shows," he said. "You don't want anything breaking down."^[1] A working figure maker builds for the road, not for a glass case.

The trust

Word in the trade just called him the Dummy Doctor, and it was never only about repair.^[4] Semok refurbished, cloned, and created classic style figures with real respect for the originals, crafting scores of them for other ventriloquists out of his New Jersey studio and finishing a "Gran'pa" figure in time for a 1998 exhibition where his own Frank Marshall pieces hung on loan.^[4] He became known industry wide for restoring famous figures to their original grandeur, chief among them Howdy Doody, and he was also credited as the official voice of two of "The Three Stooges" for their estate.^[4] The rundown his friends put together during his final week named the roll call plainly: the original Edgar Bergen and Paul Winchell figures, Charlie McCarthy, and the original Howdy Doody marionette all passed through his hands at one time or another.^[5]

Buffalo Bob Smith didn't send Howdy to just anybody. In the early 1990s Smith commissioned Semok to build several precise Howdy replicas, including a marionette copy more exact than any made before, plus a new Photo Doody that Smith used at personal appearances until his death in 1998, all of it molded from Velma Dawson's original head.^[6] A colleague who watched Smith make that call explained the choice on camera, years later: "There was really one person that came to mind. Not just because of his art and his talent and his creativity, but because of his trust. I knew I could trust him not to duplicate what he shouldn't duplicate, and to do everything appropriately. And he did."^[1]

Both sides of the figure

Here's what makes Semok different from most figure makers: he never stopped performing. He earned a theater degree in 1975 and went after an acting career, then picked the tools back up to help pay for it, which meant the building financed the performing rather than the other way around.^[7] He played Aaron Burr on PBS's The American Experience in February 2000, and on Shining Time Station he played Tex Boy, working alongside Ringo Starr and Didi Conn.^[7][8] For eleven seasons across twenty years he played Ebenezer Scrooge for the Chatham Players' A Christmas Carol, in the New Jersey town where he lived.^[5]

When Adrien Brody needed to hold a figure believably for the 2002 film Dummy, Semok built the puppet, Woodrow, and personally coached Brody's ventriloquism.^[9] It was typical of the man: IMDb lists him as actor, additional crew, and art department, often on the same production.^[10] He was the ventriloquism community's 1987 Ventriloquist of the Year, and in 2007 Buena Vista University gave him an honorary Ph.D. in Fine Arts.^[5] At the 2014 Vent Haven ConVENTion he performed and emceed the Wednesday show, one more credit in a career that never picked a single lane.^[11] Tellingly, when he lectured at conventions it usually was not about materials. He stressed reacting with facial expressions while the dummy talks, and gave attendees an exercise to practice it.^[12] The figure maker's own lesson was about the human face doing the acting.

Three names on one figure

One Willinger auction catalog lot records exactly how divided this trade really was. On Bob Isaacson's figure "Mr. Crabbe," John Arvites cast the head, Semok built the mechanics, and Isaacson did the finish carving, the painting, the wig, and the body.^[13] Three names, one figure. The same lot names a second Semok, "Floyd," the working ventriloquist Al Getler's back up figure, all original except that its eyes were later reset by Jeff Dunham, a favor done on Dunham's own tour bus for a friend.^[13] Below are a few of the figures that carried Semok's name into the world.

Woodrow

Built for the 2002 film Dummy and used by Adrien Brody on screen. Semok coached Brody's ventriloquism in person while he built the figure.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Papa Polis

Built for ventriloquist Johnny Main. When it crossed the auction block decades later, the room paid $1,550 for it, a strong price for a living maker's figure.

Photo via Worthpoint

Floyd

Al Getler's back up figure, cast in resin in the 1980s. Its eyes were later adjusted by Jeff Dunham, a repair done on Dunham's tour bus for a friend.

Photo via Worthpoint

The walkaround girl

Possibly the smallest fully loaded figure he ever built, 23 inches, sized for walking through a crowd rather than sitting on a knee. Once owned by Mark Wade.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

What they said when he was gone

Watch the tribute his friends put together after he died and one word keeps coming back: generous. Jeff Dunham, who won a "Most Deserving Vent" award from Semok as a fourteen year old at an early Vent Haven convention and got a figure named Archie out of it, called him a friend with "not a mean bone in his body."^[1] Austin Phillips said learning to build from Semok in his early college years was the reason he started building figures of his own at all.^[1] The Flexitoon puppeteers, Craig Marin and Olga Felgemacher, told the elevator story: Semok throwing his voice at a stranger riding up with them, "help me, I'm stuck," then deadpanning "all right, never mind" as the doors opened, and falling apart laughing once they closed.^[1] Nearly everyone in that video reached for the same two words: generous, and funny.

Semok suffered a major stroke on October 19, 2019, and died eight days later in Chatham, New Jersey, at sixty seven.^[5] His wife, theater director and professor Mary McGinley, and the friends who raised money for his care that final week were the ones who put the loss into plain words. A fellow ventriloquist named John Pizzi had written seven years earlier, in a comment on Semok's own community profile, that he was "not only a great builder slash vent but a wonderful human being I am proud to know."^[14] Seven years later, when the same community posted its own goodbye, that line did not read like a compliment anymore. It read like the last word.^[15]

Thirty five dollars for that first figure in 1966, and every dummy after has been quietly paying off the discount. I always say, get a man who once had a suitcase instead of a paper route to build your face, he already knows what it means to carry someone.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy