Piff the Magic Dragon, a magician and comedian, gained popularity on the reality show "America's Got Talent" (AGT). Piff, whose real name is John van der Put, appeared on the show in 2015, and his unique act captured the hearts of both the judges and the audience. Piff's persona is that of a grumpy dragon in a dog costume, accompanied by his assistant, a chihuahua named Mr. Piffles. His act combines elements of magic, comedy, and ventriloquism, creating a one-of-a-kind experience for viewers. During his time on AGT, Piff performed several memorable tricks.
The team working to understand Houdini's illusions on Houdini's Last Secrets. (9Now)
In this last, with his ankles secured by heavy rope, he was hauled to the top of a skyscraper and, suspended above the crowd, was left to wriggle free. Despite Houdini s instructions for it to be burned and destroyed upon Hardeen s death, his brother gave the cell to Houdini collector Sidney Hollis Radner in the 1940s.
During his time on AGT, Piff performed several memorable tricks. One of his most famous routines involved turning a volunteer's dollar bill into a carrot. He also showcased card tricks, illusions, and mind-reading acts that left the judges and audience in awe.
Houdini, Harry (1874-1926)
Before there was a Doug Henning, a David Copperfield, or a Siegfried and Roy, Harry Houdini was the celebrity magician without peer. A worldwide celebrity thanks to his relentless touring, he was the first entertainer to take full advantage of the emergent mass media, engaging in death-defying public stunts that cannily made use of newspapers, radio, and film. Had Houdini simply been another skilled magician, he might have been forgotten along with the generation of vaudevillians from which he sprang, but the magnitude of his exploits, combined with his tormented personality and unexpected demise, have left an allure that has hardly dimmed over the passing decades. Houdini was a figure out of Greek tragedy: the indestructible warrior with an Achilles Heel, and his legend, like all archetypal figures, has only increased with time. Born Erich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, Houdini was the son of a rabbinical scholar of somewhat dubious credentials who moved his family to America in 1878 after securing a position as rabbi for a small synagogue in Appleton, Wisconsin. Ultimately, Mayer Weiss was not to the liking of his small-town flock. Perhaps it was his advanced age, or his European conceits or his habit of conducting services in German, but for whatever reason the congregation cut him loose, and the Weiss family, now numbering seven, moved to Milwaukee, barely scraping by on Mayer's earnings as a freelance minister. Young Erich felt the family's poverty keenly, and was hurt by his father's humiliation; in his later years he would take pains to ennoble the hapless rabbi. When the family had finally settled in Manhattan, Erich found work as a tie-cutter at the age of eleven. His ailing father—who soon was laboring alongside Erich in the tie factory—and the rest of the family joined him in short order. It was with a measure of relief that Erich and his family witnessed the passing of the ill and unhappy head of the household in 1892. Houdini possessed a meager education, but he retained as part of his father's legacy a deep respect for learning, and it was a book that changed his life. While reading The Conjurers Unveiled, French magician Robert-Houdin's autobiography, 17-year-old Erich discovered not only a fascination with all things illusory, but a template on which to build his own fictionalized autobiography. Robert-Houdin appears to have replaced the unsuccessful Rabbi Weiss as the young man's father figure, and Erich excised vast chunks of his tome to fill in the holes of his own shabby biography, even borrowing the dead magician's moniker to replace his own name. With his father dead, Erich was no longer constrained in his career choices by filial piety, and embarked on his career as a professional magician as one half of the Houdini Brothers. Harry (possibly a version of his nickname, Eiri) with his young wife, Bess Rahner, acting as assistant, plied the length and breadth of the country playing dime museums, burlesque shows, traveling carnivals, and medicine shows. One trick in particular, a bait and switch act, was a favorite with audiences, and the astute Houdini was soon specializing in escape tricks of a myriad variety, which had the added advantage of familiarity in their resemblance to the stunts of many spiritualist mediums. The escape tricks were especially well suited to Houdini, a small, compact man with a lifetime enthusiasm for sports, for they demanded strenuous exertion, muscular control, and prodigious endurance. For seven years he labored in obscurity and was in the midst of rethinking his career options when he was offered a position on a vaudeville circuit by theater impresario Martin Beck. At the turn of the century, vaudeville was the height of mass-entertainment, and theater chains, in stiff competition for audiences, were building palatial theaters to house their acts. For an entertainer such as Houdini, accustomed to making $25 a week, vaudeville was a quantum leap in remuneration and prestige. Under the management of Beck, Houdini was soon gaining nationwide notoriety and commanding a substantial salary. To promote his act, he had begun making a practice of escaping from jails and police stations, miraculously freeing himself from manacles and cells alike. Houdini was always anxious to keep one step ahead of the competition: as a refinement, he began to perform his escapes in the nude or dressed only in a loincloth, flabbergasting the police and inflaming the public's curiosity with each successive news story. When he sailed for England in the summer of 1900, Houdini had established himself as the "Handcuff King," adept at unshackling himself under a variety of conditions. He was not long in creating a sensation in Great Britain and on the Continent. Europe embraced his act with such enthusiasm that he stayed a full five years. He continued his habit of escaping from jail cells and offering a prize to anyone who could produce a lock he could not pick. This practice almost led to public humiliation in Birmingham, when a local judo expert and teacher of physiognomy devised a system of shackles that left the magician nearly immobilized. For a torturous hour and a half he struggled with his bonds, finally freeing himself, but not without casting a pall of suspicion over the escape with the suspicious filing marks he produced in his efforts. Returning to the United States in 1905, Houdini was alarmed by the legion of shameless imitators that had sprung up in his absence. He forsook handcuffs, leaving them to the copycats, and concentrated on new escapes, ideas for which flowed out of him in a constant stream. He had always known the importance of remaining in the public eye, and he began to perform high-visibility stunts, escaping from straitjackets, bags, crates—whatever could be thrown off a bridge. He toured for the next ten years, constantly refining his act, innovating, and pushing his body to the limits of endurance. This period saw the introduction of the milk-can escape, the Chinese Water Torture (perhaps the best remembered of his escapes and the most frequently performed today), the Vanishing Elephant and, for outdoor performances, an aerial straitjacket act. In this last, with his ankles secured by heavy rope, he was hauled to the top of a skyscraper and, suspended above the crowd, was left to wriggle free. In terms of cinematic potential the aerial straitjacket escape improved on his previous publicity stunts a hundred-fold. With the advent of film, Houdini realized that vaudeville's days were numbered. By 1918, he was hard at work on his first film. Until his death in 1926, he would for the most part forsake live performances for film acting, and moved to Los Angeles, where he starred in his first short, The Grim Game. Not content simply to star in movies, he started his own production company, which lost money at an alarming rate. But while Houdini the movie star carried on with his work in a desultory fashion, Houdini the whistle-blower was waging a fierce battle against the forces of hokum. Besides being a possessor of tremendous energy, he had a streak of the pedant in him. He had met the author Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a believer in spiritualism. Houdini, who had made his living artfully faking his way out of impossible situations, was skeptical of such beliefs. He had made a parlor game out of unmasking mediums and now directed his towering scorn at one Mina Crandon—better known as Margery—a society woman who, with the aid of her deceased brother, Walter, had impressed Scientific American as a legitimate medium. Houdini would have none of it, and in a series of seances where he deduced one trick after another, finally reduced Margery to fuming impotence and irrevocably splintered the Scientific American panel. In December of 1925 Houdini launched his two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza, Magic, on Broadway. It was his first big tour in a number of years, and started with a first act consisting of nothing but magic tricks—he even went so far as to pull a rabbit out of a hat to prove he was a magician—followed by an expose of spiritualism, and then an escape act. For the status conscious Houdini, Magic was a step up. This was a theater, not a vaudeville house, and when the show opened, it placed Houdini in direct competition with the lions of Broadway. The show ran through the spring, with time out for Houdini to take his anti-spiritualist campaign to Washington where he testified for Congress. During this break, he had a chance to unmask another fraud, a fakir named Rahman Bey, who allowed himself to be submerged in a coffin for an hour, claiming he had put himself in a trance. Houdini would have none of it. He trained himself to ration oxygen, and in a glass-fronted coffin he remained underwater for an hour and a half. It was to be his last unmasking. When the tour resumed in the fall, Houdini seemed rundown. If the testimony of his friends can be believed, he had also become convinced of his imminent death, and tearfully bade goodbye to several of his acquaintances. In Albany, he broke his ankle while being hoisted into the Chinese Water Torture apparatus and continued the tour on crutches. When he arrived in Detroit, he had a temperature of 102. Persevering through the night's performance despite his condition, he collapsed backstage immediately after, and was soon hospitalized with a ruptured appendix. After surgery, peritonitis set in and the master escapologist died six days later, on October 31, 1926. Houdini lore contends that the ruptured appendix resulted from a hit in the stomach. Houdini took great pride in his physical condition and often asked men to punch him to prove the strength of his abdomen muscles. In Detroit a man asked him if his muscles were indeed that strong and Houdini said they were. The man punched him, but Houdini was not expecting it and therefore was not prepared. It is inclear if this incident did in reality take place, but it does add to the eeriness surrounding his death. Harry Houdini was a transitional figure in the cultural pantheon, marking the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the modern one. A complex man, he was a textbook case of repressed neurosis in which Freud would have delighted. For a man whose very livelihood depended on nerves of steel, he was notoriously emotional. Vain and egotistical, he left a trail of broken friendships and hurt feelings in his wake. An immigrant of humble origins, he was obsessed by status, once buying a dress commissioned by the recently deceased Queen Victoria in order that his mother might wear it while entertaining her old-world relatives. Yet, despite his mother-love, his status-consciousness, his Victorianisms, Houdini was quick to embrace the expanding technical universe. A lover of gadgetry, Houdini filled his house with a surfeit of modern appliances. A masterful manipulator of the mass media, he did not allow the thrust of progress to leave him stranded as it had so many of his confederates in vaudeville. In the archetypal pattern of a tragic hero, Harry Houdini had been struck down by his own blind ambition, but it is for his extraordinary feats of endurance that his legend lives on. —Michael Baers
Piff's deadpan humor and sarcastic delivery added another layer of entertainment to his act. He often poked fun at the judges and incorporated witty banter into his performances, earning laughter and applause from the audience. Despite his unconventional approach, Piff's talent and comedic timing impressed the AGT judges, and he advanced through multiple rounds of the competition. While he did not win the overall title, Piff's stint on AGT launched his career and made him a beloved figure in the world of magic and comedy. Since his appearance on AGT, Piff has continued to perform his unique act in various venues, including Las Vegas, where he has his residency show. He has also made appearances on other television shows, such as "Penn and Teller: Fool Us" and "America's Got Talent: The Champions." Piff's success is a testament to his creativity, talent, and ability to connect with audiences. His combination of magic tricks, comedy, and a touch of whimsy has made him a household name in the entertainment industry, ensuring that Piff the Magic Dragon will continue to delight audiences for years to come..
Reviews for "Piff the Magic Dragon: The Memorable Moments and Performances on AGT"
1. John - 1/5 stars
I found Piff the magic dragon's performance on AGT to be very disappointing. The act relied heavily on insulting the judges and sarcasm, which I personally did not find funny or entertaining. The magic tricks themselves were average at best and did not have any wow factor. Overall, I was underwhelmed by Piff's performance and do not understand why he received so much praise from the judges.
2. Sarah - 2/5 stars
Although I appreciate Piff's unique character and costume, I was not impressed with his magic tricks on AGT. They seemed outdated and lacked creativity. The humor was forced and often came across as rude rather than clever. I was hoping for a more impressive and mind-blowing performance, but unfortunately, Piff the magic dragon did not deliver.
3. Mark - 2/5 stars
Piff the magic dragon's act on AGT felt repetitive and predictable. The jokes were not as funny as they seemed to think they were, and the tricks were nothing extraordinary. I expected more from a contestant on a talent show, but Piff's performance fell flat for me. The act relied too much on the character's persona rather than on the actual magic tricks, making it hard for me to appreciate the talent as a whole.
4. Lisa - 2/5 stars
I personally did not enjoy Piff the magic dragon's performance on AGT. The act felt disjointed and lacked a cohesive storyline. While the dragon character was amusing at first, it quickly became tiresome as the tricks and jokes failed to impress. I was left wondering what the purpose of the act was and felt that it did not live up to the standards of a talent show like AGT.