Jeff Dunham and his dummies will be featured at Colisee show

LEWISTON – A comedian who is selling out arenas all over the country – giving life and wit to a collection of surly puppets – is bringing his show to the Androscoggin Bank Colisee.

Tickets to see Jeff Dunham go on sale Saturday for the Dec. 7 show. All seats are $45.

“This guy has a big audience,” said Shawna Romain, the Colisee’s communications manager. “The puppets are really the focus of the show.”

His material is bound to offend some folks.

Among his characters is a grumpy old misogynist named “Walter,” the Hispanic “Jose Jalapeno” on a stick and “Ahmed the Terrorist,” a skeletal Arab with a turban and a catch phrase: “I kill you.”

The show has been drawing mostly solid reviews as Dunham has toured the country, despite the minefield of race and gender he pokes fun at.

Dunham is a regular on cable’s Comedy Central and has sold hundreds of thousands of DVDs.

According to his Web site, www.jeffdunham.com, he travels about 40 weeks and performs 240 shows a year.

The local stop in Dunham’s “Spark of Insanity” tour has been in the works for several months, since before Firland Management Inc. and Jim Cain took over the arena in June from the city of Lewiston and its management, Global Spectrum.

Global Spectrum had been working to make the Colisee a popular concert venue, something that the new ownership has been less enthusiastic about. Firland is concentrating on hockey and figure skating rather then angling for big-name performers, Romain said.

There will be room for other activities, she said. Among them is a Christian music show now under discussion.

“We definitely plan on doing some events other than hockey,” Romain said.