The Umpire was built in 1941 by George and Glenn McElroy, the Ohio brothers considered to be the Stradivariuses of ventriloquist dummies. The figure stands six feet tall and was meant to work the plate at a girls’ softball game. (Remote-controlled sewing-machine motors raise each arm to call balls and strikes.) But the Umpire never ended up being used. He’d been packed in plastic in a garage and then a basement for five decades — chipped in places and blighted by mold — by the time the stand-up comedian and ventriloquist Jeff Dunham got him last spring. Dunham, who builds the dummies he uses and restores antique ones as a hobby, went to work.

He was finishing the job one night last July, gluing on a new, male-patterned ring of hair and comically bushy eyebrows. Dunham is 47, with feathery brown hair and a habit of curling his mouth into an overbite when he finds something hilarious. He beams with regular-guyness. Recently, Forbes listed him as the third-highest-earning comedian in America, after Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, both of whom make their piles largely on television syndication and film royalties. Dunham has neither; his first series, “The Jeff Dunham Show,” had its premiere on Comedy Central on Oct. 22. Instead, he has toured relentlessly for 25 years. In the past year, he has played 150 shows and grossed $38 million in ticket sales, far more than any other comic.

Last November, Dunham separated from his wife of 14 years, with whom he has raised three daughters. His new girlfriend, Audrey Murdick, who is 29 and also his nutritionist, was helping with the Umpire, handing Dunham swatches of eyebrow. He was matching his work to a photo on his MacBook. It showed the McElroys standing with the just-completed Umpire in their workshop. It’s a famous photo; later, when I met some of Dunham’s ventriloquist friends, they knew what time the clock in the background showed. As a boy, Dunham saw the picture in a ventriloquism museum every summer, while attending a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky. “I’d think, Man, I want to see him,” he told me, smoothing down the Umpire’s lapels. “The fact that I’m standing here fixing him up is too wacky.”

It was wacky. Especially because we were in the back of Dunham’s mammoth black tour bus, outside the Prairie Capital Convention Center, an arena in Springfield, Ill., where he had just performed for a sold-out crowd of 7,000 as part of his summer tour. For close to two hours, Dunham had loosed a big stew of jokes, ranging from goofy to racist and homophobic, but which — delivered by puppets, with Dunham making disapproving faces — managed to feel almost wholesome, and even a little square. An exchange with Walter, Dunham’s crotchety-old-man character, went like this:

Dunham: “Your wife is supposed to be your soul mate.” Walter: “I think she’s my cell mate.”

It was followed by a story about making a sex tape. Peanut, a hyperactive purple Muppetish dummy, kicked off his portion of the show just by saying different words for breasts — “bodacious ta-tas” got the biggest laugh — and closed with a bit about ordering Chinese food, done in a preposterous Fu Manchu accent. By the encore, when Dunham brought out his redneck character to do a routine from his first DVD, all 7,000 people in the arena were ecstatically chanting the dummy’s punch lines together — a choir of thrown voices. (Dunham: “Do you have a drinking problem?” Everyone: “No! I’ve pretty much got it figured out!”) Then, when it was over — after Dunham fired some balled-up Jeff Dunham T-shirts into the upper decks with the kind of air-powered bazooka you see during N.B.A. halftimes — he literally ran out the arena’s back door and onto his bus, where he went back to work on the Umpire.