The magician David Blaine was on The Tonight Show recently, promoting his new special.
He does 9 minutes of amazing card tricks FALLON: “This is what i’m talking about, man.
What is going on, David Blaine?!”
And then he sets up his finale...
BLAINE: "100 years ago there’s a guy who converted his stomach into an aquarium, where
he could store live creatures, and then he could bring them up at will."
Down goes a glass of water...
And out comes a live frog.
"Yo! Oh my god!"
I’ve looked into this trick, and I can say with fairly high confidence that the secret
to how Blaine makes it seem like he’s swallowing frogs...
Is that he’s really swallowing frogs.
Yeah, the frog thing.
There’s no trickery.
It’s not hidden in his mouth, there’s no palming.
It’s just there.
This is Kieron Johnson, he’s a magician based in the UK, and one of the handful of
people in the world who perform regurgitation tricks.
It’s just like a relaxed thing.
So I’m aware the coin is there, traveling down.
And I’m aware it’s there but when I bring it back, it’s kinda tense.
So if I start focusing here, it becomes tense and then as I get to here to open my throat.
Kieron works mostly with coins.
He can bring them up on either heads or tails by feeling the texture of the coin inside
his esophagus.
And he can regurgitate a stream of water for over 30 seconds.
“Water spouting” is a stunt that dates back to at least the 1600s.
Performers drink dangerous amounts of water and then spout it out in a controlled,
continuous regurgitation.
Water spouting was revived in the Vaudeville days by a performer named Hadji Ali, who pushed
it further by purportedly drinking kerosene, which would sit on top of the water in his
stomach.
He’d then set a fire with the kerosene and extinguish it with the water.
Regurgitation of live animals is also a rare but old trick.
Scottish performer Stevie Starr has been working with a goldfish for a while.
The performer Blaine mentioned on Jimmy Fallon was Mac Norton, who was active in the 1910s.
He was known as the human aquarium because he would swallow a dozen creatures — frogs
and goldfish — before bringing them back up one by one.
In his 1920 Book, escape artist Harry Houdini recalled a time when Norton “could not account
for the entire flock” after a performance and “looked very much scared.”
With David, he’s absolutely fearless.
Absolutely Fearless. Like... incredibly.
He has no fear.
The thing to understand about David Blaine is that when he wants to do something with
his body, he’ll do it.
This is a man who held his breath for 17 minutes.
Back in 2010, Blaine was on the show Iconoclasts, where he showed artist Chuck Close the clip
of Hadji Ali’s kerosene trick.
He said nobody has done it since.
“It’s real but nobody’s been able to do it since.”
Three years later, he was doing it on Jimmy Kimmel.
So he already mastered controlled regurgitation.
But swallowing liquids is a lot easier than swallowing frogs.
Our gag reflex pushes unusually large objects back toward the front of the mouth to
prevent choking.
Like sword swallowers, Blaine had to learn through practice to overcome the gag reflex.
His new special shows him practicing with small potatoes.
It’s similar to a method described by the Great Waldo, he was a performer in the 1940s and 50s,
who regurgitating goldfish and even rodents. Which he would drug with cigarette smoke.
According to the writer Daniel Mannix in his 1951 memoir, The Great Waldo trained his stomach
muscles by swallowing a small potato on a string.
Regurgitators have learned to voluntarily open the upper esophageal sphincter,
a band of muscle at the top of the esophagus that keeps stuff down, away from our windpipe.
At the same time, they contract muscles in the abdomen to create upward pressure on the
contents of the stomach and the lower esophagus.
A drink of water can help re-open the channel.
And with enough practice, they can control precisely where the item goes.
I can hold things there.
I can hold things down here.
The thing is I start pointing to things when I try to explain to a doctor and they think
I’m making things up and they go ‘that’s not even possible.’
I’m like, ‘I’m not a doctor.
I just know how it feels.’
The stomach secretes gastric juices that include hydrochloric acid.
Not a great environment for a live animal that’s already enduring abnormally high
temperatures.
Maybe Blaine dilutes the acid with water or other substances, or maybe he keeps the frogs
in his esophagus.
That’s presumably what the Great Waldo did to keep the mice alive.
But now that he’s proven he can really swallow and regurgitate a frog...
Let’s hope he never does it again.