Whether they're taunting crowds, belittling their keepers or launching into politically incorrect tirades, dummies say the damndest things.

A new wave of ventriloquism is emerging as audiences seek out increasingly outrageous styles of comedy. Puppets are like a license to rant, enabling performers to experiment with edgy material that traditional stand-ups won't touch. Some of today's most confrontational comics are men with dolls.

There are vents (shorthand for ventriloquist) who add bite to their repertoire using dummies that take ethnic cliches to subversive extremes.

Jeff Dunham, star of two Comedy Central specials, voices a bling-adorned black character named Sweet Daddy Dee. He also plays a melancholy Mexican chili pepper, Jose Jalapeno. Achmed the Dead Terrorist is a hapless skeleton in a turban whose failure to scare people is mined for amusement.

Dunham acknowledges that his irreverent puppetry spurs some strong reactions.

"If you're not offending at least a couple of people, you're not pushing hard enough," says the 45-year-old Texas native, who just added a second show Feb. 23 at the Nokia Theatre in New York after the first sold out.

"The comedian points out parts of life that normally people wouldn't talk about," says Dunham. "Puppets can get away with saying things that are inappropriate but they have to be real enough to the audience so people feel there's a life essence there. You can't just pull out a sock and have it say inappropriate things."

In a world where everyone is forced to choose their words carefully, lest they get sued, jailed or worse, it can be cathartic to see a puppet say all the wrong things. And as computers grow more pervasive in entertainment, it's created a thirst for live, impromptu styles of performing.

According to Valentine Vox, nee Ron Sheridan, director of the International Ventriloquists' Association, there are thousands of performers making a living throwing their voices, whether they're headlining concert tours like Dunham or playing clubs, corporate events and cruise ships.

Vox says, "Ventriloquists have more work now than ever in the history of the art. Stand-up has been overexposed and this puts a little bit of a different edge on it."

Ventriloquist John Pizzi is a Don Rickles disciple who plays a lot of private parties, along with Las Vegas and Atlantic City shows. He tries to create a sense of equality in the audience by doling out even amounts of ridicule among different nationalities and religions. His puppet entourage includes Smokey, a black pimp. The character grew out of a Mafia dummy with the wrong shade of paint.

At the end of the night, when all of the dummies, also known as "hard figures," are packed away, Pizzi tells the crowd that whatever their ethnicity, ultimately they're all Americans.

"I'm always thinking about how to give it a positive spin," says Pizzi, 45, who's married and has a 9-year-old daughter. "When I'm making fun of people, I'm looking to roast but not burn."

Black ventriloquist Willie Tyler, whose spectacled dummy Lester sported a fashionable Afro during the team's heyday on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," accepts the idea of integrated venting.

"White vents voicing blacks is their style," he says via e-mail from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in the Pacific, where he is a featured performer. Lester likes being at sea, according to Tyler, because he's made of driftwood.

When Pizzi made his stage debut with Smokey in the Bronx two years ago, he was admittedly anxious, but feels his routines are the opposite of exploitation. "Doing ethnic jokes breaks down the barriers of tension between people. It feels right to dispel this stuff."

Pizzi describes himself as a "new vaudevillian," a throwback to age of showmen in straw hats and striped vests.

The technique actually dates back pre-vaudeville to biblical times, when charlatans would alter their voices to feign unearthly talents like talking to spirits and making inanimate objects spring to life. During the 1800s, the discipline was reinvented from dark art to variety act. The church, in turn, co-opted puppets to teach Bible lessons, as Christian ventriloquism has sprawled into its own genre.

Among the most iconic vent-dummy teams of the 20th century are Edgar Bergen (father of Candice) and Charlie McCarthy, Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney, Shari Lewis and Lambchop, Willie Tyler and Lester, and the inimitable Senor Wences (real name Wenceslao Moreno).

Although it's unlikely venting will ever return to a place of Bergen-esque prominence, of late it's been cropping up on the mainstream radar. David Letterman introduced "Ventriloquist Week" on "The Late Show" last year and it made such a splash, it is now an annual event.

Winona Ryder had a sordid relationship with a dummy in the indie comedy, "The Ten," to be released Jan. 15 on DVD. A singing vent, Terry Fator, won season two of "America's Got Talent" with his eerie-perfect Etta James, Roy Orbison and Louis Armstrong impersonations.

Last spring's finale of "CSI" revealed that the season's creepiest killer was the daughter of a deranged ventriloquist, portrayed by Jay Johnson of the cult sitcom "Soap" and the Tony-winning Broadway show, "The Two and Only!"

Johnson acknowledges that his TV characters perpetuate the myth that vents are twisted. "A lot of people think you have to be crazy to be a ventriloquist, but I think that ventriloquism keeps you from being crazy."

He created the autobiographical "The Two and Only!" to correct misconceptions and provide historical context. "People tell me they are glad to see somebody elevating the art form to its respectability rather than demeaning it to some psychopathic kind of schizophrenia."

To him, riffing with a dummy is no different than a musician riffing with an instrument.

"If it were a saxophone, you might play something that you never learned before," says Johnson, 58. "It's the same thing with ventriloquism. Sometimes that puppet says something you've never thought of."

The true test of a ventriloquist's talent is what happens when he or she says something that hits a nerve. If the voice work is convincing, anger from the audience will be directed toward the dummy.

For Otto Peterson, it was a perverse form of praise when his puppet, George, was stabbed by someone convinced it was real.

Peterson says the culprit "must have been on acid or something because he was just glazed over and he was transfixed with George. I knew something bad was going to happen."

The Keyport resident specializes in insult comedy, spouting unprintable put-downs via his deceptively adorable dummy. Peterson has evolved from street performer to nightclub headliner, billing himself as Otto & George. The live album, "A Boy and his Log," is available through Laugh.com.

Unlike a lot of contemporary vents, Peterson only uses one puppet and he only works blue. He's earned notoriety with his appearances on the shock jock show, "Opie and Anthony," now an XM satellite radio program.

It may seem strange to put Otto & George on XM since illusion is such a crucial component of ventriloquism. Yet trailblazer Bergen got famous jawing on the radio with his wooden alter-ego, Charlie McCarthy.

In a way, George is an R-rated version of Charlie. Both are modeled after mischievous boys, but where Charlie was cute, George is downright crude, heaping verbal abuse on everybody in sight.

No one endures more derision than Peterson himself. Although it would seem self-mockery might be therapeutic, Peterson, 47, says the opposite is true.

"It's damaging. If you just sit in a chair and say to yourself, "You're a loser,' saying it out loud, it's very negative. I feel beaten up after shows but, what the hell. It's not really happening. It's just words. But it still hurts on some level."

For all of his off-color remarks, Peterson is more conservative than performers like Dunham and Pizzi. His language is vulgar but his dummy is in the classic mold of Charlie McCarthy. Dunham and Pizzi use ethnic puppets that can provoke without even opening their mouths.

What's edgy now was socially acceptable during the late 19th century, when vaudeville houses staged minstrel shows and intolerance was pervasive. Vox says, "There was a ventriloquist, Frank Travis in the 1880s, that had a complete row of black dummies."

Attitudes are different today, he says. "Then it was derogatory but now, John (Pizzi) can just bring out the character and everybody's laughing. We're laughing at ourselves."