Marc Rubben
Marc Rubben’s first comedy performance was for family members at around age nine. He was just a kid who was learning ventriloquism, but he remembers that people told him that he was good at not moving his lips. He gave it up for several years during his adolescence, but when he was a senior in high school he took a drama class and loved it! At that time the ventriloquist Jay Johnson was on the TV show “Soap” and Willie Tyler and Lester were on Saturday morning TV shows, so he started doing ventriloquism again as a possible way to get into show business. He took theatre classes while in college and developed an act by studying humor and performing sketch comedy every couple of weeks with a group of students who started a comedy night in a room above a local restaurant. He got his first paid gig at age 21 in the Denver CO area.
He had moved to Grand Lake CO for the summer and was bar tending at a local club. When it was slow he would sometimes pull out a puppet and entertain the people at the bar. A Kenny Rogers impersonator from Denver had been hired to entertain one weekend and before his show he saw Marc messing with some people at the bar with his puppet and asked if he would be willing to perform on stage before he started his act. He liked what he did and offered him a room and 50 bucks a night to open for him in Denver. Marc jumped at the chance to make money doing comedy. His parents were supportive of his interests in entertainment, but urged him to get his college degree as a back-up plan. He completed his degree at Louisiana State University in 1984, worked offshore on an oil production platform in the gulf for 8 months in order to pay off all his debts and have a small nest egg. In 1985, Marc moved to Nashville to develop his act at “Zanies” a comedy club that had an open mic night. He developed both straight stand up comedy and ventriloquism and got on stage every opportunity he could for free while doing all kinds of odd jobs including bar tending and telephone solicitations in order to develop his act. Marc became one of the house opening acts at Zanies and then took his act on the road in 1986 and has been full time ever since. He worked his way up the ranks and was able to support his wife and two children with his comedy career. There was plenty of financial struggling, but he was always optimistic about the future. In the late 90s, he began headlining some of the top comedy clubs in the country and frequented the clubs in Vegas and Atlantic City such as The Comedy Stop at 
the Tropicana and The Catch a Rising Star at Excalibur. This past decade he landed a spot on a television show called Accidentally Famous that was recorded live at the HBO Aspen Comedy Arts Festival and have enjoyed a lucrative career as a Fly-on entertainer for Carnival Cruise lines, a guest entertainer at Club Meds all over the world, and a corporate entertainer for major corporate events. Marc’s love is still in the freedom of the comedy club atmosphere though. There is something about connecting with a group of regular people in a relaxed atmosphere where everyone is there because they love to laugh. He is fortunate to have some of the finest ventriloquist figures in the world to work with and has an eclectic little group of them. A redneck, a psychic Swami, a burned out hippy, and a dirty old man. He still enjoys doing a bit of stand up to break the ice with the audience and allows them to get to know him a bit before he introduced his cast of ventriloquist characters.His style is similar to that of Jeff Dunham in that they both use a wide range of characters, but his characters are a bit edgier like his most recent addition “Achmed The Dead Terrorist”. He always involved the audience in his show to give them a true live comedy experience and enjoys improvising whenever possible.
