I had this idea in a dream a year ago. Had to look it up that morning to see if it was real. Sadly it wasn’t, though the origins of ventriloquism are disturbingly similar to this.
Still I have a universe I can probably tuck something like this into.
Faux Wiki
American Ventriloquism was a rude style of entertainment started on the western edges of the US in the mid 1800s. Early practitioners were reported to make burping and other crude noises, that were thought to be funny, interpreting these sounds as human speech. This lead to small acts to toured in local areas. The humor was rough spun, some claim intentionally so. Men would pretend their stomachs were speaking, or that their belches and gurgles were their friends telling a story.
John Flannery of Stockton became the most famous of this style of ventriloquist, traveling up and down the state of California in the late 1860s with a small keg named Louis that was painted with a human face.
Reports of this style of entertainment last into the late 1870s before they were eventually overcome by entertainment groups traveling from the east coast on the newly developed railroads.
Must be a good night for dreams for me because 6 years ago I posted on facebook this idea:
I dreamed last night that a strange disease afflicted a group of astronomers, slowly turning their bodies to ice cream. By chance, a sample of one of these scientists, carefully kept in a freezer, was consumed by a young girl who became pregnant and gave birth to the most prominent scientist of our age.