Otto Petersen, a ventriloquist who was the flesh-and-blood half of Otto and George, a comedy team renowned for vulgarity so stunning as to make Rabelais look like a church picnic, died on Sunday at his home in Keyport, N.J. He was 53.
Mr. Petersen died in his sleep, his longtime companion, Tricia Conte, said. He had been hospitalized last year for bacterial meningitis; whether the illness played a role in his death is unknown, she said.
With George Dudley, his wooden companion of four decades, Mr. Petersen was a frequent guest on “The Opie & Anthony Show” and “The Howard Stern Show,” both on SiriusXM satellite radio. On television, he was seen on “Late Show With David Letterman” and elsewhere.
Popular with audiences and widely admired by other comics, Mr. Petersen was often described as soft-spoken in private life. But he was no match, he often said, for the strong-willed, forked-tongue George, whose caustic, profanity-laced outbursts rained down on a spate of targets, not least of all Mr. Petersen himself.
No subject was sacred, and George’s myriad observations could range over matters sexual, scatological, urological, gastroenterological, racial, bestial, theological and homicidal. None will be quoted here.
Mr. Petersen’s act was so scurrilous that it once proved too much for a historically thick-skinned crowd.
“They were told they had managed to offend the audience at the annual adult-film awards — the porno-world equivalent to the Academy Awards — in Las Vegas,” The Montreal Gazette reported in 2010. “Otto and George had twice served as hosts, but weren’t asked back by the insulted and suddenly squeamish organizers.”
Performing on network TV, Mr. Petersen served up an only somewhat bowdlerized version of his live show.
“I’m doing an act,” he told The Gazette in the same article. “I don’t mean everything I say. Jack Nicholson was in ‘The Shining’ and chased people around with an ax for two hours. It doesn’t mean he’s an ax murderer.”
Otto Sol Petersen was seduced by a dummy as a child. The son of a Danish father and a Jewish American mother, he was born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1960, and reared on Staten Island. Growing up, he fell under the televised spell of the mild-mannered ventriloquist Paul Winchell and his milder-mannered dummy Jerry Mahoney.
Otto bought his first George for $350 from a Times Square magic shop in 1974 and spent his teenage years honing his craft on city street corners, on the Staten Island Ferry and in Central Park, where an admiring John Lennon once gave him two dollars.
“He came up and said, ‘$1.50 is for your puppet, and the rest of it’s for you, since he was funnier,’ ” Mr. Petersen later recalled.
In the late ’70s, when Mr. Petersen began seeking club dates, he ran up against an obstacle: the pervasive disdain in which ventriloquists were held. He realized, he said, that in order to work at all, he would have to “work blue.”
“Clubs need to inform people that this is going to be a filthy night of comedy,” Mr. Petersen told The Bergen Record in 2010. “I was playing a place in Rhode Island recently, and there were grandmothers and conservative-looking women in the crowd. They had no idea that they were going to see a brutal show. They thought they were going to see Bob Hope.”
He added, with breathtaking understatement, “I’m no Bob Hope.”
Besides Ms. Conte, Mr. Petersen’s survivors include his mother, Sylvia; a sister, Lona Palmieri; and a brother, Tom.
With George, he was featured in “The Aristocrats,” the 2005 documentary about a joke so utterly profane that even Mr. Petersen appeared to have difficulty telling it on camera.
George rose articulately to the occasion.
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