Scanning the crowd, a quirky man asks all students in the audience to raise their hand if they have a dollar bill on them. Some students throw their hands up in the air excitedly holding their dollar, while others glance at each other whispering “Is he going to take our money?”
Matthew Elfenbein, a sophomore film major, took that chance and was called onto the stage. With a huge smile, he introduced himself to Daniel Martin, magician and comedian.
On Thursday, July 18, Program Board hosted a free magic/comedy show featuring Daniel Martin. The show began around 8:30 p.m., and was held in the Live Oak Pavilion.
“It was awesome,” Elfenbein said. “It was a really cool show. His illusions and his jokes both went together very well.”
Elfenbein handed Martin his dollar, and Martin started to rip the dollar in half causing Elfenbein to shriek. Soon enough, he made the ripped dollar disappear.
The audience applauded the trick, but with every disappearing act comes the reappearance.
Toward the end Elfenbein’s loss of a dollar, Martin made the ripped dollar reappear inside of the microphone, sending out another roar of applause.
Of course, the dollar still came out ripped so the whole audience laughed as Elfenbein went back to his seat with two torn halves of a dollar.
“Let’s just say, I don’t care my dollar’s ripped in half anymore,” Elfenbein said after the show. “Earlier I was like ‘oh I don’t know.’ Now, I’m like ‘that’s okay.’ I would’ve given him a $20 after that show. Because he was phenomenal.”
Throughout the show Martin performed a variety of different acts such as making objects disappear and reappear, and having students call out very specific objects and surprising them by having it show up on his episode of MTV Cribs.
“[One of my favorite parts of the show] was the trick with the people disappearing and the mind reading because the place was just a riot during that,” Elfenbein said.
Martin had an act where he had two students up on stage so one of them could read the other’s mind by answering a series of questions, and then making the pair disappear.
The act began with sending one of the students out of the room, and letting him know Martin would be asking the other student a series of questions.
Once the student came back into the room, Martin began to ask him a series of questions. After every answer the student gave the crowd went wild, hooting, applauding and yelling phrases such as “Whoa!”
“The look on the kid’s face … priceless,” Elfenbein said.
The student “reading the other student’s mind” looked amazed, grinning widely from the start of the trick.
For his final trick, Martin covered the two students with sheets saying he was going to make them disappear. After he lifted up both sheets and revealed the empty chairs, the crowd went crazy, jumping out of their seats, pulling out their cameras, cheering and applauding.
“[I loved] the reaction,” Martin said. “It’s one of those pure, amazing reactions where two guys are onstage doing something amazing and the audience is just super thrilled to be a part of it. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.”
Martin has been doing magic since he was 6 years old. According to his website, Martin was rated one of the top 3 touring acts in the country in Campus Activities Magazine. Along with this he has been on CBS, NBC, WGN, VH1 and ESPN.
This event was one of Program Board’s Summer Splash events.
To find out about more events going on this summer, check out the Summer Splash Calendar.
