Señor Wences

There are those among us who feel bereft because they cannot know the fashionable jokes among 14th century Catalan peasants. Cultural ephemera of this sort lacked an annaliste interested and literate enough to record them. We in the 20th century may count ourselves both lucky and unlucky to have records aplenty of such banalities as Señor Wences, the elegant ventriloquist whose catchphrase ’S Awright!” did or did not enthrall a nation whose cultural highlight was “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Señor Wences was a thrower of voices. It may at first seem little short of amazing that he did so in monophonic early television, where the single aural source precluded certain subtleties of performance. Yet we must remember that the most successful ventriloquist of the century, Edgar Bergan, animated his wooden-headed slave Charlie McCarthy primarily on radio, a medium both monophonic and bereft of pictures.

Señor Wences was widely considered the dean of ventriloquists, though theirs is a small world. There are no awards for distance voice chucking, for instance, no plaudits for most humans fooled. But Wences was nevertheless a master. His act was a triumph of minimalism. There were two puppets. One was Pedro, a gravel-voiced head in a box. The other was Johnny, who was composed of Wences’ own hand, with a mouth drawn over the thumb and index finger and a tiny blondish-orange wig draped over the top. Moreover, Wences didn’t deal in jokes exactly. The act was an absurdist dialog between him and his puppets that veered between surrealism and violence. Occasionally Wences would puff on a cigarette while stuffing a handkerchief in Johnny’s mouth, all the while creating Johnny’s muffled voice. Then he would give Johnny a toke – Señor Wences had learned to make his own hand smoke. Sometimes, for a change, he would juggle.

Wences learned the way most natural comedians do, in the classroom. But instead of dipping young Maria’s pigtails in the inkwell, so the story goes, he answered “present” for students who were absent at roll call. This was in Spain before World War I. It is known that at age 15 he appeared in the corridas of Spain as a matador. He quit that profession after being badly gored. Soon after he joined a travelling circus, where he was a bare-back rider, a juggler, and an acrobat. After emigrating to America in 1934 he concentrated on ventriloquism. In addition to Sullivan’s show, he appeared with Perry Como, Jack Benny and Milton Berle. He toured with Danny Kaye, appeared on Broadway, acted in films. He didn’t retire until last year, age 102.

Besides the ’S Awright! Bit he contributed another now forgotten bit to the comic vocabulary of midcentury America. Arguing over some trivial matter with Johnny (Wences’ hand) the following nonhilarious dialog would ensue:

Wences: Is difficult
Johnny: Is easy
Wences: Difficult
Johnny: Easy
Wences: Dee-fee-cult
Johnny: Deefeecult for you. Easy for me!

Apparently this joke was very funny.