Jonathan Austin: That’s Entertainment!

by Charles McGuigan 10.2015

Jonathan Austin is dressed like a priest, minus the Roman collar—black shirt, black pants, black shoes and black pork pie hat. Slight build, muscular, quick-talking as a street hawker, with an endless supply of one-liners no matter the occasion. Quips spill from his mouth as he begins to perform. He has a feathery touch that lofts bean bag balls into the air. One, two, three, four, and then five, and finally six. Impossible it seems as the balls follow one another in a blurry orbit in what is known among jugglers as a proper cascade. And it is a cascade, a circular and fluid waterfall of colored spheres.

We’re in the living room of my home in Bellevue, one block away from Jonathan’s boyhood home where he learned to juggle when he was just shy of becoming a teenager. “The nickname Jonathan the Juggler was given to me when I was living over in Northside,” he says. “We lived at 1421 Claremont Avenue.”

His first paid gig came on August 8, 1984 at a vacation bible school in Lakeside. He did five shows for the princely sum of fifteen dollars and thought he had arrived. “As soon as I did that show I just started doing shows all the time, as many as I could for whoever would hire me, money or no money,” Jonathan remembers.

At age fifteen, Kings Dominion hired Jonathan. “They hired jugglers for street entertainment so you’d entertain the lines,” Jonathan says.  

That same year, he wandered into One Eye Jacques in Carytown and met a man by the name of Woody Landers, who would serve as a mentor and more to Jonathan. “I saw him doing magic and it was one of those defining moments in life where it picked me up and threw me down,” he says. “So I just started hanging out there all the time, buying stuff.”

In those glorious days before Amazon, magicians could not order online. They had to actually go into a shop and engage with another human being. “It was actually much better to get it in person and know what you’re getting,” Jonathan says. “Woody was a pro and he was just real good at manipulation and card tricks and coin tricks. He would be perpetually performing and cracking jokes and one-liners and that kind of funny stuff.”

When I ask if Woody influenced his shtick, Jonathan nods enthusiastically and says, “Oh yes, very much so, even to this day. He taught me to always try to get the party going.”

The very first magic trick he ever learned was actually one of those novelty tricks you can buy at a magic shop. “It was a little finger guillotine,” Jonathan says. “You open the box, read the instructions and two minutes and sixteen seconds later you can do the trick.”

That’s what lured him into the art of legerdemain. There was satisfaction in possessing the ability to seemingly change the laws of physics. Contradicting reality, altering matter. All illusion, but so convincing people would believe it in spite of their rational minds. “It’s still what gets me thirty-one years later, mystifying people,” Jonathan says. “It doesn’t get old. The same is true with juggling.” 

When I ask him what his two favorite magic tricks are he shows me.

“Will you light up a cigarette for me?”

Which is what I do.

“Okay, now can I borrow your jacket?” he asks and I nod as he picks up a Harris tweed jacket draped over a chair back. 

“One assumes you wear this on a regular basis?”

“When it gets cooler, sure.”

“What is it made of?”

“Wool,” I say.

And then he turns the shoulders of the jacket into a sort of funnel that disappears into his partially clenched fist and with his other hand he raises the lit cigarette and points toward that funnel of wool. At that moment I know where he’s going with this.

“Is this your smoking jacket?” says Jonathan with a staccato laugh. “Or maybe I should ask if it’s a blazer.” With each word the cigarette gets closer to the jacket. “Remember three things when you put this thing back on: Stop, drop and roll,” he says. “You’re watching every angle now, right?”

And at that moment he stabs the lit cigarette into the jacket and quickly clenches his fist.

“Hocus pocus, chicken bones choke us,” he says. “Watch everything now.  Yoko Ono, Sonny Bono. You’re watching everything.”

“Yes I am.” 

Then he releases his grip on the jacket and the cigarette is gone and there’s no damage to the wool. I am standing less than two feet from him, and have watched his every move. 

“And would you believe the cigarette has now vanished right before your eyes, ears, nose.”

“Wait a minute, how the hell did you do that? That was amazing.”

“You liked it?” says Jonathan. “I’m glad you did. And for my next trick . . . the invisible deck.”

Jonathan holds up nothing in his hand, though he appears to be gripping a deck of playing cards.  

“I have an invisible pack of cards,” he says, and then, in a stage aside. adds, “I sell these too. We do pass the savings on to you.  I’m going to take the deck out of the box, you can watch every move.” And he pulls nothing out of nothing and then invites me to pick a card out of the invisible deck which he has fanned out. I do as instructed and hold an invisible card. I initially think of the three of clubs but then at the last nanosecond I change it to the Jack of diamonds.

“Now, once again, it can be any card you please,” Jonathan says. “Fifty-two choices. Now I’m going to turn them over. You put it down wherever you want, I won’t look. Okay, now, I’m going to hand you the cards.”

I take the invisible deck from him and slip them into the invisible box and tamp the invisible lid flap shut.

 “Now when I count to three just throw them here and I’ll catch them,” he says. And when he says three I toss them over to him, this invisible deck, but when that deck reaches his hand, it materializes. 

“Now, as you can see the cards are here,” Jonathan says. “Nothing planned, nothing rehearsed. That is the truth. If I’m lying, I’m dying. Not here to waste somebody’s time, especially a man of your caliber. Now for the first time so everybody can hear. Which card was it?”

“Jack of diamonds,” I say.

“Now you could have picked any card you wanted?”

I nod. 

“Nothing planned,” he says. “No power of suggestion or anything like that?”

I shake my head.

“Now I’m going to take them out of the box, slowly, dramatically,” says Jonathan. “You said the Jack of diamonds. If you look, every card is face up. Now if you look even closer, smack dab in the middle of the deck you can see one card that is face down. Nothing planned, nothing rehearsed. You could have picked any card you had wanted but you said the Jack of diamonds.”

He stops for a second and then says, “Have you ever had one of those days when nothing goes right?” pauses, then flips the card over. “Fortunately, this is not one of them.” 

And there it is—the Jack of diamonds. 

“So that trick and the cigarette trick are my all-time favorites,” says Jonathan. “I learned them within the first five years after I started doing magic.”

When Jonathan first started juggling in earnest he was a student at New Community School on Hermitage Road. “I had dyslexia and went there from eighth through twelfth grade,” he says. “New Community was fantastic and I graduated in 1989.” While in school there, Jonathan took up the unicycle, another element he would incorporate into his act. He even rode his unicycle to school.

After high school graduation, Jonathan had what he calls an early mid-life crisis. He left his job at Kings Dominion and spent the summer juggling at Busch Gardens. In the fall he went up to New York and spent a year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.  “I did some shows in Central Park and definitely kept my chops up with the juggling,” he says. The following May he got a job at Disney World, where would work for the next three years. “I’d work about four or five months each year, May through September,” he says. “It was a great feeling to be on board with the number one tourist attraction of the world, if you will. I was the street juggler in the Magic Kingdom and it was fantastic. You’d do a twenty-minute bit and then have an hour break. It keeps you on your toes.”

In September of 1992 Jonathan moved back to Richmond and has been here ever since except for a number of out-of-state gigs (he’s performed in twenty states and in Canada) and a stint as entertainer on a cruise ship. 

Most of his work through the years has been free-lance. “And once again, I’m pretty old school,” he says. “To this day I just pass out business cards after shows. I do lots of house parties, shows for law firms and special events. Lots of stuff I’ve gone to for years--Easter on Parade, Watermelon Festival, the Irish Festival.”

When I ask Jonathan if he considers himself primarily a magician or a juggler, he shakes his head. “I’m more into performing,” he explains. “The people I saw starting out at the impressionable age of fifteen or sixteen when I realized this is what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, were guys like Penn and Teller who are more philosophers than magicians, if you will. I look at the magic, the juggling and the unicycling as probably less than ten percent of what I do. The other ninety percent is the entertainment, the one-liners, the jokes, getting the party going and trying to make other people feel good. I’ve seen plenty of jugglers who couldn’t juggle that well, but boy were they entertaining. And I’ve seen plenty that could juggle better than anyone else and they were just boring to watch after a minute and thirty-six seconds.” 

Jonathan’s style of showmanship was influenced by comics from another era. “Old -school ones from the fifties and sixties,” he says. “Borsht Belt comedians like Hennie Youngman and Sid Caesar. Guys like Johnny Carson, Bob Hope. And nowadays, to me, most comedians don’t have jokes. They kind of tell funny stories. I like the old Carson/ Letterman set-up punchline. Within sixteen seconds you’re done with it. You’re not telling some funny story about your wedding or in-laws or something.” Jonathan’s rapid-fire one-liners certainly propel his shows along at a brisk pace and that finally is what appeals to the audience. He’s found the perfect way of fusing the best elements of juggling, magic and comedy to create true performance art.

He can juggle anything from bowling balls to flaming torches to razor-sharp machetes, and can ride a ten-foot tall unicycle doing almost anything you can think of. What’s more, as with everything he does, Jonathan makes it seem effortless. But this, too: Funny. 

“I try to make people happy and keep them entertained,” Jonathan Austin says. “That’s what it’s all about. It never gets old when I’m performing and I make someone feel like a kid again and forget their jadedness and cynicism, if you will.  Always upbeat. This interview will be over when the prescription runs out. You should see the rest of my family. I heard this morning I was coming to Belleview and I was like wait a second I’m not going back there again. I’m always upbeat and happy because life is just too short to be any other way. I started doing this and enjoyed the attention and thirty years later I still love it. And people are still cheering me on and not throwing tomatoes at me.”