Piff The Magic Dragon (full interview)
0:00:00
We have a rare opportunity to sit with a gentleman called Piff the Magic Dragon and talk about him, his life, and I want to talk about Mr. Piffles as well, and his show at the Flamingo here in Las Vegas. How are you?
0:00:14
I'm very good, thank you. Good. Now, unfortunately, I have to start with an apology. Okay. Mr. Piffles could not be here. Oh, no. He is a celebrity, and we just have to deal with that okay it's their world and we live
0:00:28
in it when I saw your show about a week or so ago I noticed that he's kind of
0:00:34
above it all he and and the other he knows it that's the other thing not only is he above it all but he knows it and he actually here and honestly I am tired of being treated like an employee like his handmaiden it's about time that I got some recognition to exactly I literally carry that dog you understand Yes, you do without me. He I mean he'd be fine, but okay, maybe I should you're right. I'm just gonna okay forget it Mr.. Pivots if you're listening all is forgiven just come back Yeah, I couldn't help but notice that he seems unaffected by all of it. He sleeps through life, doesn't he? We did a show, and let me tell you how I got Piffles. Piffles is a rescue dog. So I was doing my very first hour-long show in Edinburgh. There's a fringe festival, the Edinburgh festival, it's in August in the UK, and it's like a trade show for comedians. It's where you go up, you do your show, and maybe you get spotted, and that's how you get work. So the first year I go up, you have to do an hour. I had maybe 40 minutes of material. And I was like, I need something else in the show. The girl who was running the venue, she had a chihuahua. And I said, hey, can I put your chihuahua on my show? And we did, and it killed. So I was like, I've got to get me a chihuahua. And so she went out, and she found this rescue dog and he was a wreck. He was like, you know, his hair was all matted, his eyes were covered in this brown gunk, his teeth were rotting, he'd been like kicked around by kids. So every time a kid would go near him, he'd growl and things. And for three months I was just dragging this, you know, drowned rat of a dog around London. And what have I done? But slowly he got better because I took him to the vets and I, you know, got him groomed and I put him on some good food. After three months he started looking like a prince. And he developed this comedy timing and this attitude on stage, this deadpan, you know, where he would be completely indifferent to whatever was happening to the point where he would fall asleep on stage in front of twenty thousand people you know doing my act and i would go to my case where he had a little bed and he would sleep in my case he'd be snoring i'd put the microphone in the case he'd be snoring in front of twenty thousand people that's great what a gift
0:03:06
that is a gift that actually steals any show
0:03:09
he's basically like a furry paperweight
0:03:12
So now tell me about your start. You're from the United Kingdom?
0:03:19
Yes. I grew up in South East London.
0:03:22
Okay. And what did you start, how did you get into what you're doing?
0:03:27
Yeah, I mean, it's like looking backwards I can tell you. Okay. like chance and luck and stupidity. So I hated magic when I was growing up. In the UK we had a couple of magicians I didn't like. They were like, oh we're much cleverer than you and you're an idiot and all that sort of stuff. So I didn't like it. But when I was 15 they showed a program and it was called Stuff the White Rabbit and it was these close-up magicians from all over the world a lot of them American David Williamson was on it was a great magician Matt King I think was on on on one of the episodes and They were doing these card tricks, and I was like oh, I quite like these card tricks, so I'd watch the show Learn how to do these tricks, and then I would do it to my friends, so I really like close-up magic. So then, you know, I went to university and I was like getting what I thought was a backup career in case the magic didn't work out.
0:04:34
And what backup career was that?
0:04:36
It was computer science.
0:04:37
Okay.
0:04:38
But I was dreadful at it, so it was no backup. It was just me not being good at something. So I sort of really learned close-up magic. When I was at university, I would work in bars and restaurants doing card tricks for the people there for tips or for a little bit of cash and that's how I paid my way through college and then when I finished university I went I'm gonna do this full-time and as soon as I started doing it full-time I realized that magic is not really like show business you know it's like there it is at like you know you have show business and you have these things on the fringes mm-hmm you know like juggling or or magical clowning whatever and Magic was one of those things because it was it was basically the catering industry Mm-hmm, you know you'd work bar mitzvahs. You'd work these like corporate dinners birthday parties meet-and-greet events and your job was to mix and mingle and Entertain people in between the courses or in between the speeches so you were interrupting people for a living. You know, and once I was in a very small restaurant in Croydon, which is already a bad place to be, and I walked up to a table of two and I said, hello, I'm a magician, would you like to see a card trick? And the guy scraped his chair back across his tile floor. The whole restaurant stopped, looked at us, this guy stood up and he said, My wife has just asked me for a divorce. Do you really think I want to see some effing magic? He didn't say effing. He didn't feel the need to censor himself. I feel like I'm on a very nice, you know, platform here so I will. But he did not. And I said, No, no you don't, do you? Because she just made half your house disappear. And he didn't take that well. And that's what I found, was that I was doing magic, and I was doing jokes to people. And I was, we call it splitting the room, which is where half the people like it, half the people hate it. Now, if you're on stage, and you've got 100 people, 50 people laughing is a lot of people.
0:06:49
Yes.
0:06:50
You know, it sounds like you're doing well. If you're doing a table and there's four people, two of them don't laugh, that's a problem. So I got fired from everywhere that I was working and I became unemployable. I was down to my last one or two gigs, I didn't have enough money and I was like, I've got to get out of here. And I went to a party around this time, it was a costume party, and I said to my sister, I don't have a costume to wear. She said, I have a dragon outfit under my bed. Under her bed? Under her bed. Now I asked no further questions, and neither should you, because it's my sister. Let's let that mystery stay buried. So I say, great, I'll wear the dragon outfit I cross London in a dragon outfit on public transport I didn't drive so I'm on the buses I'm on the trains I'm on the tubes across London in a dragon outfit I arrive at the party no one else is in costume that's funny just me I go to my friend I said what did you do to me she said well you know we just thought it was a bit immature if I'm in a dragon now, I'm like yeah, really? You think? So now, for once, I'm appropriately grumpy, you know. Because usually, inside I would feel happy, it's just my face would read grumpy. I did a wedding once, and this guy was like, what is your problem? And I was like, nothing, I'm in a good mood. He was like, you look like the Eeyore of magic. And then he fired me, because he was the groom.
0:08:26
Okay.
0:08:27
So at this party for once I've got an excuse to be grumpy. I'm drinking red wine in the corner, my other friend comes up to me, she says, this is funny. She says, you should do this in your act, you could be Piff the Magic Dragon. I said, wait, I could be Puff the Magic Dragon. You might have heard of my older brother, Steve. And I was like, that's not a bad joke. joke so you know a couple of months goes by I'm losing all my work and I'm like I wonder whether that thing would work so I try an open mic night kills mm-hmm now with comedy and I've done a bit of comedy before come on it takes you like a year two years to even like become bad because you're learning how to be in front of an audience had to talk all of that stuff. But I'd learn all that by doing magic. And I also had material, because I had routines. So I'd done the hard part of this, and now I'd just found the icing on the cake, the framing, that made it all work. So it was very quick after that. In the next year, it sort of shot up. I go to Edinburgh and I do this gig you know, where I'm like, I need Mr. Piffles and I need a dog, so I got Mr. Piffles and he was like the missing piece of the puzzle you know because he was like, I was this grumpy dragon you know, and I've got this like adorable chihuahua so that brings me to neutral so as soon as the two of us teamed up, everything sort of came together and we started going places.
0:10:08
That was great. When I saw your show, I couldn't help but notice that the grumpy thing was really great and very creative. You don't just walk out and do tricks and tell jokes. You're very creative about what you do. The night I was there, you caught a guy almost ringside that was totally deadpan and shined the light on him with the flashlight. It was great
0:10:29
What I love about being in Vegas and also about my job, but specifically Vegas is I get to do What some people think is the same thing every night, but it's not because I use you know Vegas here I use I think six or seven people on the road. We have a very different tour show I use 17 people in that show. So I'm interacting with 17 personalities and each one of them is going to give me, you know, either trouble, they're going to be, you know, a lox, or they're going to be great to work with. You know, so I've got three different scenarios, so it's like I always want people to come and see the show and feel like, hey, I was at the night when this happened. You know, so each show feels unique and like special.
0:11:16
The other thing that really impressed me was you got together with a couple during the show and you ended up getting her ring. At the end of the show you put them back together with the ring. Along the way you took the guy's $100 bill and he's got this look like, I'm going to kill this guy.
0:11:36
Vegas is a loss leader. Yeah. You know, that's the only, I work for tips. It doesn't happen in magic much. It happens in comedy all the time. In comedy, you know, people can be, you can be angry, you can be a sad comic, you can be deadpan, you can be happy, you can be all the human emotions. In magic, for some reason, it seems like you can be David Copperfield, you know, or like a kind of comic magician who's like, hey, you know Jerry Seinfeld has a line about comedians, it's like, here's a quote and now it's gone, you're an idiot. Yeah. You know, there's that. So I always wanted to see if I could do something else with it and be like a real, it's funny, by putting on a dragon outfit, I could be more myself and more human than I would be without it because I can never punch down.
0:12:28
Yeah, there was a guy that used to showcase around Las Vegas in little bars and lounges. His name was something like Morty the Magician. But he wore like a Dracula costume and none of his tricks worked. That was the act. And it was actually very funny. We've had people like that through the years and then of course we get to me one of the most clever
0:12:51
Things is Penn and Teller. Well, they're the they're the goats, you know, they are You know, if you look back through magical history, I don't think that there's been anyone like them because They're so original. Mm-hmm They're still working at the same pace that they were working at the beginning and they'd be doing it for I don't know 45 years and they're still coming up with game-changing magic Mm-hmm they come in with new methods which in magic. You know it's like it's like being a Carpenter and inventing a new tool mm-hmm you know being a musician and inventing a new instrument. They're still doing that
0:13:30
Yeah, I had the pleasure of touring for a couple of years with Harry Blackstone jr.. Yeah, and we would do court did you do the Super Bowl show no I didn't well I missed that one I was a tough gig yeah but I did I was able to do one with him where we did a corporate event for IBM yeah and the big trick was to turn a tiger into an IBM mainframe right and I actually saw how some of it worked yeah so we had a ceremony backstage where Harry swore me to secrecy. Right. Yeah. But how did it work? No thank you.
0:14:06
Here's the thing, here's the thing, it's like, you know, the other thing about me is I don't want to be around a tiger. Right. It's a tiger. It's like I saw a Vegas magician on Letterman and you know he produced a tiger and he was definitely being dragged around stage by that tiger. He was not leading the tiger around the stage. The tiger was leading him around the stage. It was so obvious Letterman could see it too and was rapidly introducing the commercial break so he could get to safety.
0:14:40
I knew someone for a long time that's moved back to California that was an animal handler. He refused to work with tigers. He said, because you're working with a 600 pound cat right they have the mind of a cat right they do whatever they want to do yeah I went to
0:14:59
the vets once with pitfalls and you know pitfalls is four and a half pounds yeah I rarely put a collar on him I rarely walk him by a lead so I'm walking he's in my arms the vet leaps out of his chair backs himself against the wall. He's like whoa you're gonna get a color on that thing Really, I'm like obvious the guy's like yeah. He's a wolf don't let him fool you Like he may he may look like a chihuahua, but inside. He's a wolf. They're all wolves Let me tell you the worst bite. I ever got it was from a chihuahua I've still got the scars and I was like yes, so I guess you know all tigers are cats all dogs are wolves actually he's proud that vet probably never saw pitfalls on stage No, you're right and honestly it was offstage is a different matter. Which is which is really funny like we went to see Earlier on when I early on when I was in Vegas we we met Shania Twain Uh-huh, and she was she can't she can see the original show. I was in which is called Which is called Vegas nocturne a rose rabbit lie mm-hmm and in it? I shot piffles out of a cannon and I did this whole routine with him being a bullet was like a bullet catch right where he was the bullet and She loved it And she came in afterwards and met piffles and I was very nice and invited us to see her show so we said I'd love to and She has a security guy who arranges everything. So he rang me up, he's like, this is what you're gonna do, you're gonna sit up here, do this or that. And I said, oh, he's at first, and bring piffles. And I was like, bring piffles? He was like, bring piffles. And I said, what, you want me in a dragon outfit too? You're not joking.
0:16:41
Yeah.
0:16:42
He goes, let me check. I'm like, no, wait, don't check. He comes back, yeah, she wants you in the dragon outfit. So we're sitting in the Coliseum, me in my dragon outfit, with Mr Piffles in his dragon outfit too. I'm like, oh God. And in the middle of the show, Shania goes, by the way, I have a very special guest in this evening. And I'm like, oh, who's here? Who's here tonight? She said, please welcome up onto the stage Piff the Magic Dragon. So we come up and we do a campfire sing-along with Shania Twain, me and Piffles, okay? She loves Piffles and I'm like, this is great, what a great moment in my life. Then I go back to my seat, Shania Twain brings out a horse on the stage, Piffles loses it. Loses it! He's like barking, you know, he's going, I can't, you know, like trying to like catch him, he's like trying to like savage this chihuahua, this horse which is on stage. I have to remove myself from the room with Mr. Pibbles. Now, that's not a guy leaving the show. That's a guy in a dragon outfit, taking a barking dog out of Shania Twain's show. I don't think she ever forgave me.
0:17:51
So speaking of shows, tell them about how you got on to AGT and the first time we saw
0:17:57
you. So like I said, I moved to Vegas in 2013 to be a small part of Vegas knockdown. I signed a 10-year contract, moved my life here and started to love Las Vegas, you know really love it. I thought maybe I like it. I really loved it you know, like I said, I was adopted by Penn and Teller and they became buddies of mine and everyone in the magic community Lance Bird from David Copperfield, Matt King, all these great guys sort of like Matt King brought me over for Thanksgiving. I love being in Vegas. My show then closed after seven months. And I'm like, oh, hang on a minute. No one knows who I am. I'm in America, and all I can do now is middle spots at comedy clubs for a hundred bucks a show. This is a problem. So I was talking to my friend about this. I went for a year with that work. Wow. Yeah, and I was speaking to my friend, and she said, I said, I don't know what I'm going to do. And she says, well, what needs to happen? And I said, well, in the next three months, I need to become incredibly successful, become known nationally, and get my own show in Las Vegas. And she said to me, that doesn't sound very likely. And I said, I agree. But you know what happened? I went on America's Got Talent. I got given the golden buzz by Neil Patrick Harris. I got all the way to the finals. I thought it would be hilarious to shoot Mr. Pivar's out of a cannon and lose because Terry Fator had a billboard in Vegas that said, Terry Fator, the winner of America's Got Talent. And I thought it would be hilarious to say, Piff the Magic Dragon, the loser of America's Got Talent. And, you know, by the time you get to the finals, you've got the maximum exposure. Oh, sure. So I'd become nationally known when I shot Mr. Perkins' Canon and the very next day I got a show at the Flamingo, Monday through Wednesday, because I was touring, you know we'd make all these touring offers, touring Thursday through Sunday and so a month later this billboard went up, Piff the Magic Dragon, the loser of America's Got Talent and we'd been at the Flamingo now for seven years. We spent five years in the, when I started it was called Bugsy's Cabaret, then they renamed it the Prithpa Magic Dragon Theatre, then the pandemic hit, we were down for six months, but I was like when we open we're going to have to open socially distanced. So we made a brand new show to go in the big showroom on the off chance that they wanted us to do that and luckily in October, October 1 I think, they called us and said okay we want you to restart at the end of October. So we restarted in the big room this time and you know it's a 50 people, 6% capacity. So we were allowed you know we had to do 10 shows a week just to break even, just to make no money, but we did it and suddenly, not suddenly, slowly the city came back and by June, July 2021 we were selling out in that room and we've been there ever since so we just celebrated our seventh year at the Flamingo and Piffle's his birthday and and when we started the show about the same time so Piffle's also just turned 15 Wow yeah
0:21:03
So he's doing pretty good halfway there Piffle's have any children no He doesn't have the equipment anymore either You know, you mentioned Terry Fader. I had the pleasure of interviewing Terry about 10 years ago. I like Terry a lot. And I asked him about his journey and he said, well, I'm a 26-year overnight success. He said, I worked for this. And the funny part about him is that he won the contest. They had to get him a show, but they didn't know how. They never worked with a ventriloquist right so they actually they released him from his deal Right and he had already been hired by Steve Wynn. Yeah to do the mirage
0:21:45
That's the crazy thing in this you know it's like it's like talent it Terry Terry Faye is actually one of the most talented Yes, but people have ever seen you know, but talent's not enough You know you have talent and then you have skill and they have craft you know and Terry's got all of them, but um often other people have talent
0:22:06
But they don't know what to do with it the oddest thing about my interview with Terry Yeah, was that he's so good at what he does that I caught myself talking to the frog yeah, and not him
0:22:15
I it's so weird isn't it with yeah, it's very weird, but you know for me I don't have much talent, but I do have a lot of determination and and graft and Pam would be fine with me saying this and it's also the same. It's like we want to be in show business. So we're going to do whatever we can with whatever we have to get there and that's how I feel. I came up in the UK for many years and I went, I came to Vegas, I worked hard here and like I say, in 2015 when I went on the show, I had nothing. I did not have all of my backup plans and Plan B's, they'd all failed. So it was like, hey, this will go broke. And luckily it hit.
0:23:02
Well hopefully you won't need a Plan B ever.
0:23:04
I hope so.
0:23:05
And you know, I really have to be honest with you. I've been in Las Vegas now for 47 years. And I worked for 40 years as a musician on the strip in the showrooms So I've kind of seen everything and I haven't enjoyed a show the way I enjoyed your good a long long time Oh, that's very kind because of the creativity the craft everything you talked about is in your show
0:23:27
You know people we you know I hear this one thing I hear a lot is people say I hate magic, but I like this mm-hmm You know and it's kind of how I feel about magic. You know I really don't like 99% of magic. I like Penn and Teller, David Copperfield has got like the best tricks in magic, Matt King. Lance Burton used to be, he doesn't even show anymore. Lance Burton was great. But that's four people. That's like me saying I like four singers out of all the singers in the world. That would mean I don't like music.
0:24:02
Mm-hmm.
0:24:03
So, you know, it's very nice to hear that. I appreciate that.
0:24:07
Yeah, Lance did everything in groups of 13. Right. He did 13 years, had 13 illusions, 13 people on stage. That was his lucky number.
0:24:17
Wow.
0:24:18
Yeah. I had a chance to work with him musically for a little while.
0:24:22
Now he lives in a farm in Kentucky? Yeah, well, he's very much a southern gentleman. That's his thing now. He's the reason I met jade really yeah He asked me to do a gig you know again like when I was super broke And you know I was like does it pay anything right and he said well. It's not much, and I was I take it and I Was the male you know like guest star because it was like they had a cast and jade was the female guest star and You know I I And you know, I was talking to her before the show and it must have been funny and a little bit charming because when I went on stage I bombed. So it definitely wasn't the act. The act did not win her over. And then I harassed her until she went out for dinner with me. And we were together ever since. It's been coming up nine years. Oh, that's wonderful. She has a lot of energy. Yeah, that's funny It's funny like we've evolved the show has changed so much over the years Now I think it's kind of like the last three or four years. It's reached its maturity Mm-hmm, but um you know we both like evolved our characters. You know since AGT I don't know we must have done like 5,000 shows. That's stupid and So you know you do it you really hone it and I've refined what I do a lot and she's found this great great character Mm-hmm. She's just kind of over-the-top Super excited so happy to be here, which is a great contrast to me and especially to the dog who is You know Absent in his in his consciousness. Yeah, the only thing he didn't do in the show when I saw you was he didn't yawn No, he didn't yawn. Sometimes he does. There's a little bit when I try and get him to do a card trick. Yeah. Try and get him to like high five a card and sometimes he yawns at me. Which is perfect. It is, it's
0:26:12
perfect. I mean animals are fun. Yeah. And I'm really glad you're able to come in. Your
0:26:17
show is at the Flamingo, what nights? At the moment it's Thursday through Monday but we change that schedule through the year. So we do five nights a week.
0:26:27
How about a website?
0:26:29
PiffTheMagicDragon.com
0:26:30
That's simple.
0:26:31
Just Google Piff the Magic Dragon. That's true. When I started, right, there was a very famous magician called Billy McComb and he said to me, let me see your business card. You know, give me your business card. And I didn't have one and he chewed me out. He chewed me out for half an hour. You, in this industry, it's all about being able to be contacted, being able to, you know, like, Bill, gotta get hold of you, you gotta have your, you know, you gotta be ready for the gig at all times. And I was like, I don't wanna have a business card. I was like, you know what, Billy? I wanna get it so that you don't need a business card to find me. You know, you just see me once and you can find me. And at that time, I didn't have any of this stuff. And looking back years later, now I don't have a business card. I just say, Piff the Magic Dragon, Google it.
0:27:17
Sure, exactly. I worked with a comedian who's now passed away years ago. One of the jokes in his act was, you're in Las Vegas and it says Dean, Frank, Sammy, you know exactly who it is. He said, I wanna be so famous that they put up a blank sign and everybody knows I'm there.
0:27:33
Yeah, exactly. He said, until that happens, I'm changing my name to free buffet But I want to thank you for coming in it's very kind of you to spend some time so much time I'm glad we could do this and I plan on seeing your show again. I love it me too I enjoyed it. Do you watch videos of the show not very often because Honestly, I spend so much time looking at my stupid face You know you have to like you always like working on the next thing so there's always marketing and you know I mean, I always remember Penn telling this great story a woman came up to him once and said Are you surprised that you're you're on the side of the? Las Vegas Hotel, you know in in whatever is a hundred foot tall Mm-hmm is and Pem was like no because I was at the meeting That's good. You know and it's like it's like yeah, I've seen enough of myself for a while.
0:28:28
Okay.
0:28:29
Okay. Well, thank you again for being here.
0:28:31
Thanks very much for having me.
0:28:33
And I want to thank all of you for listening. And I want you to always listen to 91.5 Jazz and More and keep listening and get out and see Piff the Magic Dragon at the Flamingo. What time is the show?
0:28:45
7 p.m.
0:28:46
All right. Get there early so you get in. And this is Nashen, and you know me from the Morning Groove at 91.5 Jazz and More. And this is Nashen, and you know me from the Morning Groove at 91.5 Jazz and More.
0:28:55
Thank you.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
