Parenting & Family Quote by Edgar Bergen

A grown man asking a “kid” to go talk to Charlie sounds like the softest kind of invitation, almost throwaway. That’s the trick. In Edgar Bergen’s hands, it’s also a piece of cultural sleight-of-hand: a friendly line that quietly rewires who holds the power in the room. “Charlie” is Charlie McCarthy, the monocled ventriloquist dummy who wasn’t just a prop but a celebrity with a sharper tongue than his handler. The sentence works because it treats an object like a person and treats the audience like co-conspirators in that fiction.

The intent is practical showmanship. Bergen isn’t explaining ventriloquism; he’s staging consent. He’s asking you to agree, for the next few minutes, that a wooden figure deserves direct conversation. By addressing a “kid,” the line folds in the era’s vaudeville-radio tradition of family entertainment, where innocence and mischief sit side by side. Kids are imagined as more willing to suspend disbelief, and adults are invited to follow their lead without embarrassment.

The subtext is even better: Bergen pretends he’s the mediator, the safe adult who can introduce you to Charlie. But the moment you accept, Charlie becomes the one who can say the unsayable - flirt, heckle, needle authority - while Bergen stays “responsible.” It’s ventriloquism as brand strategy: outsource the edge, keep the charm.

Context matters here. On radio especially, Bergen had to conjure bodies and faces through voice alone. This line is an on-ramp into an imaginary social world where a dummy can dominate the conversation, and everyone listening is happily in on the con.