My Review of 'Jeff Dunham: Beside Himself'

I haven't seen a Jeff Dunham special since his first televised specials. It's been a long time and I wasn't familiar with some of the new characters that he has brought along for the ride. Of course he's created tons of new puppet personalities as he's progressed his career. We only get to see a portion of them in this special.

Netflix has been seriously chasing a ton of comedians down for Netflix exclusive specials, and I think this will benefit them down the line because they have a ton of great talent under their belt. Jeff Dunham is another big name to add to their list.

In this special, Jeff talks about his family, politics, social media and how it affects himself and his show. It's interesting to hear his perspective on things because he's a vastly different perspective than someone like Dave Chappelle, but he's also got some issues that he agrees with Dave on.

The show opens up with him talking about him and his family. It was nice that he was able to make it more personal by telling us about him and his family and what they're going through nowadays. I couldn't really tell the real reason why he was doing this stand-up portion of the show. He was setting up for future jokes that would recur later on in the show. It was a really good plan and he worked it very well. It was like a nicely tuned script that seemed so natural the way he pulled it off.

Again I haven't seen a Jeff Dunham show in a long time, so when I saw this one it was a little shocking that he had some more risqué material in his otherwise PG-13 special. He doesn't go full out and describe explicit scenarios, but he uses innuendos that are somewhat obvious. Maybe it's obvious because we're adults watching this special, but I didn't realize what he was doing when I was younger. I'll have to go back to some of his earlier material to see if it was as risqué as this special. I just don't remember it being like this before.

As usual, you will be dazzled at how much personality and charisma Jeff is able to instill into his puppets. They have so much personality that he could very well have his own primetime show on TV and no one would bat an eye. He does a really good job making us think that the puppets are real people and that the personality is totally separate from his own.

Some of the puppets are of course the subject of controversy. For example, he has a character named Achmed the Dead Terrorist, Bubba J. Peanut and Jose Jalapeno on a stick. They're mainstay characters of his routine but terribly politically incorrect. He plays this off very interestingly and has fun with these characters. He doesn't really do anything that would be classified as racist with these characters. He plays the characters off as personalities. They're just different characters that have extreme personalities.

It's still a great show despite the politically incorrect puppets. It's great fun and a ton of people will fall in love with the personalities of his puppetry. The characters are all portrayed tastefully. It's a different type of humor and I remembered how much my girlfriend was laughing while watching this special.

Overall, I had a good time watching this special. It wasn't consistently funny for me, but it was entertaining throughout. I will have to give this special a 7.5 out of 10. It's a good special that will appeal to a general audience. There are big laugh out loud moments and it seems a little edgier than what I expected. This isn't the Muppets though.