Daniel Martin: Comedian, magician, pickpocket

Jordyn Bottrell, Staff Writer

S.A.B’s latest trick was bringing Daniel Martin to Ramsey Theater on Oct. 15. Martin was named Southwest the Magazine’s 2015 Entertainer of the Year, as a magician and comedian.

“I don’t sing, I don’t dance, I do one thing, and I do it pretty damn well…I magish.” Martin said of his entertaining skills.

He said that he had been practicing magic since he was six years old.

Martin’s signature move seemed to be pretending to botch a trick, and then preforming another more mind boggling one. He also used a variety of crowd volunteers to help present his tricks to the crowd.

When he asked a volunteer to name his favorite pop, the student said “Mountain Dew.” However, Martin pulled an empty Pepsi can out of a brown paper bag labeled with a question mark. He quickly turned the students’ disappointment around by pouring pop out of that seemingly empty same can.

Most performers try to ignore audience members on their phones, but Martin called out a student from the crown who was texting during his show. He asked her to come up to the stage, where he took a few selfies on the phone, and proceeded to put it into a balloon and blow it up. After teasing her more about texting during a performance, he handed back her the spit covered cell phone.

Pickpocketing is one of Martin’s special tricks. He asked a student volunteer to come on stage, and while he distracted the audience with a disappearing ball trick, he somehow managed to take the student’s debit card, credit card, and several gift cards out of his jeans and out of his wallet without the audience or the student ever noticing.

After pickpocketing the volunteer, he returned the cards, and turned a one dollar bill into a twenty dollar bill and let him keep it.

Martin’s final trick began with him telling the audience the three goals he made before he went on stage that night. The first one was “perform for cool peeps”, the second was “be on ‘MTV Cribs’” and the third was “receive a standing ovation.”

As the audience guessed, he did end up achieving all of those goals.

Martin showed the audience a recently filmed segment of the reality show “MTV Cribs” that he was starring in. While he walked through the house he stopped to show the audience the contents of his fridge. Inside was a single Mountain Dew.

The first audience member who mentioned that his favorite pop was Mountain Dew could be heard throughout the theater cheering.

Other strange occurrences during that video included Martin reading off his license plate number, which happened to correspond with the serial number of the dollar bill that a student volunteered to him earlier in the show.

Martin is currently on a 200 show tour, and will soon be on an episode of Jimmy Fallon. Follow him on Twitter @iamdanielmartin.