by Steve Spill
TIMOTHY LEARY’S BRAIN
Creating successful comedy and magic routines, and by successful I mean bits that are amazing, get laughs, applause, and are about something, is a trial-and-error proposition. There is no formula, no rules, and no shortcuts.
You think of something that might be interesting or funny or poignant or amazing or all of the above. You build or collect the props, you work out a method to do the trick and rehearse it, you write down what you want to say or do with the trick, and then you try it on stage. What your friends, or mom, or significant other thinks doesn’t matter much. You have to try it on stage in front of an audience of strangers.
If it doesn’t get laughs or applause and isn’t amazing, you try it again, tinker with it. If it isn’t what you want it to be, you throw it out and move on. Timothy Leary’s Brain was something I wanted to throw out, but like gum stuck to my shoe, I couldn’t get rid of it and move on because someone wanted me to do it on a TV special.
This was a routine I wrote and performed that was about sixties icon Timothy Leary and his “turn on, tune in, drop out” promotion of recreational drugs. Furthermore, it was about great artists lost to drug overdoses, like Lenny Bruce, Elvis, John Belushi, Jim Morrison . . .
The trick that I used to illustrate this dance of words and objects was my version of a classic known as the Chinese Rice Bowls, the same trick I used to watch the Magic Castle’s Charlie Miller do while he whistled. In the original, two cereal-size bowls are shown empty. One is filled with rice; the rice then instantly, magically doubles in quantity so it’s overflowing into the second bowl. The surprising climax comes when the rice suddenly vanishes and changes into cool, clean water, which is poured from bowl to bowl.
Being an artsy guy, I made what looked like a human brain, which I could split in two, and the brain halves worked the same as the Chinese Rice Bowls trick. The brain was hidden inside a gnarly-looking skull with a removable top. So I could take the skull top off, reach in, and take out my special Chinese Rice Bowls’ trick brain.
When I split the left and right brain apart, you could see emptiness inside the two halves. I said, “You know this is Leary’s actual brain, because you can see there’s nothing in it . . .” Instead of the rice used in the classic trick, “. . . to symbolize those we’ve lost to drug overdoses,” I used “freshly dug graveyard dirt.” The brain was rattled; instantly and magically the graveyard dirt doubled in quantity and overflowed into the second brain half. When the dirt suddenly vanished, instead of changing into cool, clean water, the graveyard dirt magically changed to blood, which I poured back and forth between the two brain halves.
In the eighties I was fortunate to be a regular performer at The Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach. Aside from my thrice annually one-week engagements, when in town I would do short guest spots two or three times a week to work on new material. I’d done my impaired sliced gray matter routine a half dozen times and was ready to throw it in the garbage and go back to the drawing board, when I was approached by a guy from KMEX, a local Spanish language TV station.
“The Brain would be absolutely perfect for our Day of the Dead TV special.”
“What’s Day of the Dead?”
“It’s a Mexican holiday where we reminisce about dead people and how they died. Do you speak Spanish?”
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Too bad; it pays two hundred seventy five bucks.”
“I have a friend who could translate and I can learn the bit phonetically.”
“Done and done. See you November 2.”
I had everything translated and phonetically written on a poster board, practiced, and got it down okay. But I didn’t really speak Spanish and certainly couldn’t do it without my cheat sheet.
At the studio my cue card was leaned against a bar stool, below the height of the cameras, so it was out of frame. With much trepidation I delivered my routine, and the rehearsal went fine. In fact, it was more than fine. To my great relief, the crew laughed and applauded, the director assured me that I had a great American accent. It seemed to me that Timothy Leary’s Brain got a lot better reaction in bad Spanish than it ever did in perfect English.
And then it came time for the actual Day of the Dead TV special performance. With cameras rolling, I was introduced as mago comediante Señor Steve Spill. The audience had been told to cheer with enthusiastic abandon. It was my first appearance on KMEX-TV. I felt such warmth and love. It was a sublime moment.
It was at this point that I noticed a blanket of foggy dry ice smoke creeping across the stage. Dry ice is expensive, so it hadn’t been there during the rehearsal, but it was now and it was completely obscuring the Spanish words I didn’t know. What few words I could see slightly above the foggy dry ice smoke were quickly becoming nothing more than dripping smears of black marker ink. I couldn’t read a thing and my performance had to come out on time to the second. No one could understand what I was saying, and the producer signaled me to “Talk slower.” As I was running out of time, the signal was “Talk faster.”
I struggled through the routine getting it all wrong and looking like a bonehead. There was deathly silence in the studio audience. A loud silence, a hundred sphincters were puckered. Who knows how many were puckered watching it at home on television? I had asked if I could do it again; they said no. There was no taping or filming ahead of time. While I was performing the audience was at home watching. The KMEX Day of the Dead TV special had been a live broadcast, no takeovers. That was the finish of my appearance on Mexican television and the finish of my Timothy Leary’s Brain routine.
TRIALS AND ERRORS
Like Timothy Leary’s Brain, below are stories in the continuing saga where I had an idea, worked up a method to do the trick, got the props together, scripted the routine, and rehearsed it. But on stage, in front of real breathing strangers, for one reason or another, it wasn’t a keeper. Instead, these were routines that turned out to be useless and insignificant. I’ve included them here because in one way or another I found them to be poetic.
Smoke on the Water—For this one I had a bunch of bells, they were the simple sound-making devices you held in your hand and shook to make them ring. There were eight bells. Each rang a different musical note in the scale. I handed one bell each to eight people in the audience.
In one hand I held a glass of water, and with my other I conducted the orchestra. With the index finger of my right hand, I quickly pointed one at a time to different bell holders. Following my instructions, when I pointed at them, they would ring their bell. When it worked right, the bell ringers played the song “Smoke on the Water,” by the British rock band Deep Purple. At the end of the song’s melodic hook, a puff of smoke burst from my glass of water.
I thought it was a clever bit and I had fun, but spent a ton of time working it out. When it went as intended, it was great, but sadly most of the time it didn’t, largely due to the ineptitude of the inebriated or otherwise impaired bell ringers.
Nose Hair—“Did you ever pull on a straggling nose hair that you just couldn’t seem to get out?” I once developed, and had a working prototype, of a tiny spool of thread gimmick, that could securely be hidden inside a nostril. When I pretended to pull a hair from my nose, I would pull on the end of the thread and it would unwind. It looked like I was pulling out a ten-foot hair!
Not a crowd pleaser.
Book Worm—I explained to the audience that prior to my appearance, I wrote one word on a white card and sealed it in an envelope. I taped the envelope to the mic stand so it was in full view. I asked a volunteer to join me on stage to assist in demonstrating my ability to “see into the future.”
I handed the helper a dictionary and asked her to examine it and make sure it was ordinary. She gave it back to me, and I handed her a cardboard container, the type you get take-out Chinese soup in, and had her thoroughly examine what was inside. It was full of live night crawlers, the type of earthworms commonly used as fish bait.
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br /> As I riffled through the pages of the dictionary I asked my helper to choose any worm and randomly drop that single live worm into the pages of the book, wherever she desired. As soon as she dropped the invertebrate crawler, I slammed the book shut . . . squishing the worm. The dictionary was then opened to that page; one word seemed to be underlined by the squished worm. I tore open the envelope and the predicted word was the very same one selected at random by the night crawler!
To me, the thing that made this trick great wasn’t the dictionary. It was, of course, the earthworms. Although funny, half the time the volunteers screamed, dumped the worms on the floor, tossed them at me or into the audience, or simply refused to pick one up in their hand. This made it impossible to finish the bit. Plus it wasn’t so easy to constantly have a fresh supply of live earthworms whenever and wherever I was performing. So, for those reasons, this one ended up in the scrap heap.
Baby Houdini—The Cabbage Patch Doll had a hard plastic head and a soft cloth body. I took the stuffing out of the body of one and replaced it with an inflatable teddy bear. The doll looked normal when blown up, but I could pull the air plug on the back and it would deflate like a balloon with a hole.
I introduced the blown-up doll as Baby Houdini, bound the hands with real handcuffs, the feet with steel chain and an iron padlock, then tied the cuffs and padlocked chain together with a thick rope. As I did this, I said “. . . in a moment I am going to ask everyone to join me in counting backwards from ten to one . . . ten, nine, eight, seven . . . First, I’d like to add that Baby Houdini is not carrying any concealed lock picks or canned ham keys . . . if anything goes wrong, we do have a trained paramedic GI Joe doll backstage . . .”
I held Baby Houdini by the head, “Okay baby! Escape!” As the audience counted backwards, the plug was pulled, the doll deflated like a spent balloon, and the connected rope, handcuffs, lock and chain, slipped off, the entire restraint assembly crashed on the floor in a heap. “Tah dah!” My girlfriend at the time thought it was a scream; it always made her hysterical, no matter how many times she saw it. About half the time audiences agreed with her, while the other half of the time the baby deflated along with my ego. Another one bites the dust.
Tainted Clam Mystery—I tried this bit out a few times while appearing at a Cape Cod comedy club that featured a raw bar full of locals cracking open shellfish that were caught that morning. A sack of fresh clams was introduced and a volunteer smelled the clams. Next I had the helper sample the foul aroma of a tainted clam. The rare tainted clam was mixed into the sack of fresh virgin-smelling clams.
The volunteer violently shook up the bag, further shuffling the tainted clam amongst the fresh ones, yet I, the talented one, was able to reach into the sack and instantly bring forth the tainted one. As a prize for assisting, the tainted clam was offered to my volunteer with a little cocktail sauce.
Removable Thumb—I’ve always liked the “teach a trick” premise. I started by doing the old grandpa-removing-the-thumb trick, using the normal method—the audience saw the back of my hand but didn’t see the thumb because it was bent into the palm, and by bending the thumb and fingers of the other hand just right, it looked like one hand took the thumb off the other, an old trick that everyone knows.
Then I gave a bogus, and what I thought was funny, method of how it was done. I held up a blue piece of cardboard, “It’s done with a camera trick; first my hand is photographed in front of a blue screen, then model technicians build a thumb, also filmed in front of a blue screen, moving like this.” At that point, I brought out a long wire with a fake thumb attached to the end and moved it in front of the blue cardboard. “A robot camera films everything, and after final optical printing, all the elements are put together and the final product looks like this . . .”
For the finish, I again performed the usual old grandpa removing the thumb bit. I thought the premise and execution was hilarious. Audiences responded with, “Meh” and “huh?”
Siegfried & Roy Reenactment—Sometimes performers appear larger-than-life on stage. That was particularly true of Siegfried & Roy. Not so true when I imitated them while using a tricky TV prop that was a pain in the drain to build, transport, and perform. The idea of the bit was that I would show those who couldn’t make it to Vegas how Siegfried magically changed a 650-pound Siberian tiger into Roy, and then made Roy vanish.
Wearing a huge Siegfried blond wig, and a humongous over-sized sparkly golden pouch that attached to the front of my crotch—just like the type Siegfried used to wear—I stood in front of a table with a VCR and TV on it. Playing on the TV was a video of a snarling tiger pacing back and forth. I acted like the TV was actually a cage with a live tiger in it, showing, pointing, and gesturing toward the tiger like a girly game show model displaying a new car. As the beautiful animal paced back and forth, I draped a cloth over the TV.
After some appropriate mysterious hand-waving, I whipped the cloth aside. The tiger had vanished from the TV screen and Roy burst into view. It was a great video of him laughing and jumping from some Disney special they had done. I triumphantly covered the TV a last time, more mysterious hand-waving, and when I whisked the cloth away, the TV had vanished. Funny and a great magic trick ending, right? This routine was more work to pull off than you’ll ever know, and it didn’t even get as good of an audience reaction as the Nose Hair or Book Worm bits.
Disgust is Contagious—In the eighties there were literally a hundred one-nighters in and around the Los Angeles vicinity. Restaurants, bars, hotels, bowling alleys, anywhere that was empty during the week put on a comedy show. I tried out this one in the lounge at the Whittier Hilton. If you were attending that night you would have seen me holding a large pitcher of milk.
“Perhaps some of you have seen the classic bit where a magician takes a sheet of newspaper, forms it into a cone, pours milk into the cone, and the milk disappears. I’ve developed a new way to do that trick, which I shall now attempt to show you, without gagging.”
I quickly drank the half-gallon pitcher of milk. Yep, this part of the routine was identical to the way I drank pitchers of beer in the old rock club act. Next I placed a metal bucket on the floor in front of me and very realistically threw up the half gallon of milk into the bucket. This wasn’t a little urp. I puked a half-gallon of milk like a fire hose, and said, “I’m glad I brought that up.” People with weak stomachs headed for the exit, and then I picked up the bucket of barf and threw the contents into the crazed audience, drenching many of them, with what was only a bucketful of confetti!
Before I even threw the confetti, as I threw up the milk, a few people in the audience did the same in response. I hadn’t expected any audience participation. The bartender yelled for the janitor and there was pandemonium. My hope was for a standing ovation. Instead, I got the smell of fresh alcohol-laced vomit. I guess what goes around comes around. Up to that point, this trick had never elicited more than a loud belch.
As a reward for reading this far in the book, I’m going to expose the three secrets that made this puke routine work so well. The first part is a prop called the Magic Milk Pitcher, which you can buy from a magic store or online, which will allow you to really drink only a cup of liquid but it will look like a half gallon. The Confetti Bucket, which allows you to pour in liquid and throw confetti out, is also available where finer magic props are sold. Now, the best part, the retching part, is my own invention, so without ruffling the feathers of any retailers, I can completely explain it to you . . . it’s done with a cleverly concealed hot water bottle filled with milk.
For those who want to know where on your person to cleverly conceal a hot water bottle filled with milk, and how to use it to simulate realistic vomiting, please buy my next book, which completely covers those questions. That’s a lie, but anytime I can get a laugh I’m not going to let the truth interfere with it. Now, where was I? Oh, yeah, I’m writing a book.
PART FIVE
ODDS AND ENDS
LIONS, AND TIGE
RS, AND BIRDS! OH, MY!
Although I’ve always loved creatures of all types, personally, with the exception of an occasional moth, I’ve never used live animals of any kind in my shows. None—neither rabbit nor bird nor tiger. I think animals make bad employees. They are unpredictable, and can die, attack, or poop on your suit at any moment. On the other hand, as anyone who has ever been to a circus or watched a TV chat show with guests from a zoo will tell you, whether you choose animals that swim, dig, creep, or fly, you can count on them pleasing any crowd.
October 3, 2003 was the date of the famous Siegfried & Roy Las Vegas incident where a 600-pound white tiger sank its teeth into Roy and dragged him offstage by the neck. At the time, the first of the numerous official explanations was that the tiger was frightened by a New Jersey woman’s big hair. The tiger might have started off meaning to give him a playful nip; we’ll never know, since nobody can ever really know what a tiger is thinking. I have appeared onstage with many acts that do work with animals, and also once had a near-death experience with a tiger.
In 1986 I started as a last-minute replacement in Spellbound at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, and went on to appear in the touring show through 1988 at Harrah’s Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada and Wild Coast Sun Casino Resort in South Africa. The Spellbound shows featured a group of leopards, black panthers, and Bengal tigers. The nucleus of this zoo was leased complete with trainers and handlers from a Hollywood showbiz agency specializing in large carnivorous felines.
One of the first things I appreciated from working in the Spellbound show was the nonsense of the common view that showbiz lions and tigers are beaten or drugged into submission—an idea so utterly wrong that it can only be held by someone who knows nothing whatsoever about the animals involved. A lot of people believed that the big cats on stage weren’t really dangerous because they were old or had had their teeth removed, but a 600-pound tiger can still gum you to death.