Hypnotist Freddie Justice put students into a trance and performed a comedic act on Sept. 26 in the Rice Auditorium. The event directly followed the Homecoming pep rally.

Justice started off the show by explaining what hypnosis was and how he did it.

He also talked to the Homecoming Royalty, specifically WSC senior Kelly Cliffords. Justice forgot Clifford’s name and proceeded to call him Kevin or “whatever that guy’s name is” throughout the night.

He asked for volunteers and walked around the auditorium while students raised their hands, hoping to be picked. Students picked went on stage and sat in their chairs placed there.

Justice chose junior Austin Kneifl to sit in a chair and be hypnotized.

“Before you get hypnotized, you’re sitting there and you kind of get nervous,” Kneifl said.

Once all the seats were filled, the show really began. He started by playing music that helped the participants relax as he talked them into the hypnotic trance.

“During [the hypnosis], you kind of calm down and you don’t feel nervous at all to be on stage,” Kneifl said. “It’s actually pretty cool.”

As soon as everyone was hypnotized, Justice went around and checked to see if everyone was asleep. There were a couple of students who couldn’t be hypnotized and were asked to go back to their original seats.

The first part of the act had the students pretending to be typists, workers that used jackhammers, their phones were vibrating and they couldn’t find it, a washer and then concluded with a fly buzzing around and hitting their foreheads, sending them back to sleep.

Throughout the act, students let Justice know that some students in the audience were also hypnotized. Those students came up to the stage as well.

After some of the audience members came up to the stage, he had all the participants pretending to watch a funny movie. Every time he touched one of the students, they thought the movie was ten times funnier and laughed harder.

When the movie hit intermission, he said the words “popcorn” and they automatically thought the students beside them had a bad smell. They had looks of disgust and some even gagged.

Intermission passed and the movie was now a sad one. The students looked like they would start crying until he let them know that it was no longer sad.

Intermission part two began the same but instead of their neighbors smelling bad, they did. The students had embarrassed looks on their faces as they smelled the inside of their shirts. Justice asked them what was happening as they sniffed themselves.

He put them back to sleep and proceeded into the next part. Justice had them all believe they were performing in a band and had the chance to win money if they did well. The students started playing random and different instruments rapidly, hoping to win the money.

Justice then started the “improvisational” part of the act. He handed out random objects like a small cowboy hat, two mirrors, duct tape, a box of Band-Aids and a police hat to some of the participants and told them what he wanted them to do with it. He also had two of the students believing they had no belly buttons.

“I go with wherever the flow is going to go,” said Justice. “I’m very improv based so I have a little bit of structure and then I just see where they’re going to take me.”

Justice went around the participants and asked them different questions. The two boys with the mirrors believed they were the most handsome guys around and couldn’t take their eyes off themselves.

“He made me look into a mirror and think I was the most attractive person there so I thought that was pretty funny,” Kneifl said. “I kind of felt like I looked pretty good.”

The girl with the box of Band-Aids stuck them to the boy sitting next to her throughout the act. The girl with the duct tape thought she was a balloon artist but with duct tape and the boy beside her was her assistant.

“I really liked when he gave everyone something to do,” said London Bercey, a coordinator for Homecoming week. “I loved the girl who was putting Band-Aids on the one guy’s face.”

Justice talked to the boy that he gave the tiny cowboy hat to and asked him who he was. He went on to explain his rodeo and cowboy training to the audience.

One of the highlights from the show was when he brought the girl with the police hat up. He had told her that she was the laughter cop and nobody was allowed to laugh. She explained why she was a police officer and said how much she hated laughter.

Justice then took her to the audience and told her that certain people were laughing. She went up to those students and started to yell at them about laughing.

“I think Brittany (the girl wearing the police hat) yelling at Kevin or Kelly or whatever his name is was one of my favorite [parts of] tonight,” said Justice.

To finish up the show, Justice took two of the guys named Colby and Angel and had them listen to “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. He had them believe they hated the song but when it played, they danced to it.

Colby, however, amazed everyone with his dance moves that he performed during the song. When the song stopped, the boys pretended that they hated the song until Justice said otherwise.

“Colby and his dancing was probably my number one,” said Justice. “I haven’t had someone spread out like that before.”

After the two dancers, Justice used a stuffed monkey and played different songs while making the monkey move. The students followed the monkey’s movements to the songs.

The show ended with Justice waking the participants up and telling them they would remember everything and feel refreshed and awake.

“I loved performing here,” said Justice. “It was a great crowd with great energy and sound.”