Funny Talk: Magician Jack Wise

Hat’s magic

s he prepares for his Wicklow Comedy Club debut on September 26th in O’Shea’s Corner, acclaimed comic magician Jack Wise takes some time out from pulling punchlines out of hats to talk to GG about mind reading, DIY sword swallowing.

GREYSTONES GUIDE: Comedy and magic make for particularly good bedfellows – was it always your plan to have the two shack up?
JACK WISE: Yeah. When I started performing magic full time in my early twenties, the biggest challenge was walking up to a group of people in a nightclub and interrupting them to ask them to watch a magic trick! I I just couldn’t bring myself to ask them to sit there and watch me perform something like I had some special powers. I had to take the proverbial piss.

Thanks to the incredibly annoying David Blaine in the US and the far more likeable Derren Brown on this side of the water, magic has made it back into the mainstream once again. Are you a fan of any of the current TV generation, such as Dynamo and his Tyler Durden, Troy…?
I wouldn’t say I’m a fan, but I know Dynamo. We both performed together years ago. I do find it fascinating to see the tricks that their magic producers come up, with given the huge budgets of Channel 4, etc. And from that point of view, I think it’s good for magic. It makes magicians push the boundaries and come up with new amazing tricks.

Having magic on TV is akin to having ventriloquism on the radio – the camera often lies, so, you can never be completely sure about what you’re seeing. Do you like to believe in magic, or are you keen, like Derren Brown, to emphasise that it’s all just tricks?
Something is only magical if you can’t explain it. I have seen things I can’t explain, therefore to me they are magic! I don’t mind if an audience think the tricks are real or not. If they want to imbue me with special powers that’s fine just as long as they are laughing and having a good time while doing it.

Spoke with the great English comedian Tom Binns recently, and he was shocked at how many people really believed in his comic psychic creation, Ian D. Montfort. Do you enjoy your audiences believing you just might be a witch doctor?
Absolutely, it’s great fun particularly when myself and my mates would be out on the pull. I used to help them out no end. I’d force a card on a girl (which I would have told my mate) and then let him “read her mind”! It always ended well…

Tom spent a year learning how to be a psychic – or, as he says again and again, how to appear to be psychic. Is mindreading something anyone can learn, or do you have to share some DNA with the devil…?
No, you don’t have to share DNA with the devil – mindreading is a mixture of neuro-linguistic programming and reading body language, and when done well, it can make you look like you have a sixth sense. Anybody can learn it but it is hard work.

Lucky enough to interview the legendary Jerry Sadowitz too, who, famously, got himself banned in the early 1990s from just about every media outlet with his cutting humour – and so turned his hand to magic instead, finally, combining the two. An influence, perhaps?
Jerry is a comedic genius but my greatest influence was a magician that most of your readers will never have heard of – a man called Billy McComb. Originally from Northern Ireland, Billy moved to America where he performed in the Magic Castle and Vegas. He performed well into his 80s and was hilarious.
The curtains would open, revealing a geriatric Billy who looked every day of his eighty years. He would look at the audience and say, “I know what you’re thinking… Who is this old fart? Well, I will make it fast because it’s rice pudding night in the home”. His entire show consisted of him machine-gunning the audience with one liners as he performed cool magic. He was great!

Not content with making the two of clubs disappear, you are also only one of sixty professional sword swallowers in the world today. What in Elvis’ name possessed you to try that?
I saw a sword swallower at a carnival and as a small kid, I thought it was really cool. I later read a book – still available – called Memoirs of a Sword Swallower by Daniel Mannix. It was about him running away with the circus and becoming a sword swallower. I was very impressed by it. While I didn’t run away with the circus, it made me determined to learn how to swallow the sword! And looking back on it now, it was very dangerous decision given that I was self taught.

So, it can be a long road from performing in front of your family in the living room to playing to a roomful of (very often) drunken strangers. How long did that journey take, and did you ever doubt it?
To me, it’s just a game. 99% of shows are great and the ones that aren’t just make for funny stories to tell your friends and even to tell other audiences. I consider it a great privilege to entertain people. When you make somebody laugh for just a moment, they forget all their troubles – the mortgage payments, health problems, everything! For just those few seconds, you make their troubles disappear, and I suppose, that’s the real magic!

My uncle Ned was a magician for a while – called himself The Great Sarcasmo. His big finale involved pulling hats out of rabbits. Did it take you long to work out who the onstage Jack Wise was going to be…?
Yeah, it took a while to find out who Jack Wise was on stage. I had to give myself permission not to care too much and then things started to fall into place. Jack Wise is like my delinquent brother who says the things I only dare to think. It’s almost therapeutic on stage.

Finally, if a trick ever does go wrong, have you ever pulled a Tommy Cooper, and play the collapse purely for laughs?
I’ve never collapsed but I sure have laughed. As I sometimes say to my audiences at the beginning of the show, if any of the tricks go wrong, screw it! I’ve loads more crap in the magic bag!

Boom! Playing The Wicklow Comedy Club at O’Shea’s Corner on September 26th, you can find out more about Jack Wise here. This interview first appeared in April 2015.