America’s Got Talent wrapped up its most recent season last night. I hadn’t seen any of America’s Got Talent. Had I known there was a ventriloquist on I might have watched. I suppose I could say the same thing for the last every one of that show since there seems to always be a ventriloquist at least starting out on it. And with good reason. Ventriloquists are good entertainment. Puppeteering in general is good stuff. At least it was for my generation. If you missed out on watching professionals play with puppets, you missed out on a lot. Really. I’m serious. Really. Again.

Let’s look at some of the ventriloquists I grew up with. Shari Lewis was the first ventriloquist I have any memory of. Shari hit the national stage with Captain Kangaroo in 1956 which was when I was hitting the stage for the first time also. Granted, my stage was in home movies but hey, all the world’s a stage, right? I loved Shari Lewis as a child (when I was a child, not her) (maybe I would have loved her as a child too, I dunno) (her as a child, not me) (maybe both of us as a child) (children). Shari played on stage with Lamb Chop, Hush Puppy, Charlie Horse, and Wing Ding. She and her puppets might have been more popular than even I realized because now that I think about it, I recall my own daughter playing with a Lamb Chop puppet when she was a baby 30 years after I put my puppets into cold storage. And I seem to also recall that her Lamb Chop was new.

When we hit the new century, ventriloquists were still hitting the stage but none hit it as hard as Jeff Dunham. Dunham and his crew say what we all have wanted to say but were afraid it would end up on Facebook the next day with 450,000 comments about how rude and undiverse we are being. (You’ve made up words too!) I like Jeff Dunham but I’d probably like Jeff Dunham even without the dummies. (Is it undiverse to call them that? Perhaps they should be life-challenged?)

Ventriloquists weren’t the only puppeteers that shaped a generation. In a modern take to the marionette, Jim Henson created a neighborhood full of puppets that began with Kermit in 1955. By the early 1960s he (Jim, not Kermit, although I suppose you could say they) met up with puppeteer Frank Oz and writer Jerry Juhl and the Muppets were off and running.

Hand puppets, though the least techy of puppets (although exactly what Lamb Chop and friends were) had the biggest impact on me as a developing mental genius. (It’s my blog, I can call myself whatever I want.) In particular, King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday, and X the Owl, the puppets of the Neighborhood of Make Believe in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was a force in puppeteering and all things educational for children. From his earliest days with the Canadian Broadcast Company’s “Children’s Corner” he introduced children to his own childhood make believe characters. But it was in 1966 from WQED in Pittsburgh, the nation’s first public-owned broadcast company, that Mr. Rogers, his puppets, and his live neighbors swept a nation, and a generation.

So maybe the next time someone accuses you of just being a puppet, you might take solace in that you’re in some pretty good company and prepare yourself to mold the mind of some future mental genius.