Entertainment

How David Blaine Regurgitated Three Live Frogs

Published on: February 15, 2017 at 9:30 AM
By Stacey Cole

David Blaine might not be a wizard like Harry Potter who can cast magic with the help of a wand, but he is an artist who has revolutionized magic through his acts of illusions and feats of endurance.

David Blaine gained popularity by featuring in David Blaine: Street Magic , an NBC television documentary in which the magician astonished pedestrians by performing street magic and guerilla magic. Apart from using card magic and his impressive manual dexterity, Blaine also relied on mentalism to perform tricks that left people dumbfounded.

People were also impressed with David Blaine’s confidence, his friendly attitude, and his cool demeanor while performing his magic tricks. Later, the magician gained international recognition when he performed daring feats like “Vertigo” and “Frozen in Time.”

Vertigo was a feat in which David Blaine remained on a 100-foot pillar for 35 hours, after which time he jumped down to the landing platform. During the “Frozen in Time” performance, Blaine was encased in a large block of ice amidst a crowd of curious fans who had thronged to New York’s Times Square to watch the mysterious performer to stay in the ice block for 63 hours. The feat proved to be both physically and mentally challenging, as David Blaine’s health was affected; he was transported to the hospital after completing the feat.

“Vertigo” and “Frozen in Time” were neither magic tricks nor acts of mentalism, but rather a display of the magician’s strong will and unmatched endurance. In 2006, the daredevil magician successfully performed a feat called “Drowned Alive” in which he was chained and kept submerged at a depth of eight feet in a water-filled sphere for seven days, with his hands bound by handcuffs. Being electrified and catching a .22-caliber bullet are other stunts that have charmed the magician’s audience and fans.

David Blaine’s daring feats often expose him to danger. However, his various medical emergencies have not deterred his performing spirit, and the magician continues to entertain and thrill his audiences by performing magic and amazing feats on ABC’s David Blaine: Beyond Magic . E! Online reports that David Blaine’s ABC show includes his usual magic tricks like bullet catching , card tricks, mind reading, and swallowing objects.

In a recent episode of the ABC popular magic show, David Blaine performed magic tricks for special guests that included celebrities like Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Drake, Dave Chappelle, Stephen Curry, Margot Robbie, Jennifer Lawrence, and Emma Stone. The ABC special was an hour-long show in which the special guests were able to personally watch and test Blaine’s dexterity and magical skills.

Apart from performing his usual magic tricks, David Blaine entertained the guests with other amazing tricks like eating an entire glass. Blaine also demonstrated a disappearing trick in which he made a cell phone disappear by throwing it from the roof. Later, he made the cell phone reappear once again when a guest found the cell phone in the purse.

But, as Billboard reported, the showstopping moment came when David Blaine managed to regurgitate three live frogs after proving that his mouth was empty. His guests were shocked and bewildered when Dave Chappelle drew a frog on a sheet of paper, and Blaine coughed out three live frogs , one after another, to confirm his knowledge of the animal that Chappelle had drawn.

Watch it all play out here.

According to Vulture , David Blaine spent years learning how to swallow and regurgitate living frogs.

The magician revealed that he first got the idea from a book written by the great Harry Houdini. However, while the book noted that Houdini had performed a regurgitation trick, there were no clues left as to how the trick was performed. To find out, David Blaine spent several years putting posters up around Liberia, trying to track down the one person that he thought could teach him what he wanted to know.

As it turns out, a “water spouter” was rumored to be living in Liberia: a person who had learned how to store a gallon of water in his stomach to enable him to bring back more water from each trip to his family’s nearest water well when he was a child.

“[He] learned how to do it for survival, because they were so poor where he grew up and lived in Liberia, so that when they went to the well they could only bring back a certain amount of water. But if he could put the water inside [his stomach] and fill the bucket up he could go back with more.”

It took several years before the water spouter, whose name turned out to be Winston, was tracked down and convinced to reveal his secret to David Blaine.

Armed with the secret of how to store and regurgitate a gallon of water from his stomach, Blaine then had to figure out how to take the feat to the next level, by bringing up an object floating in the water without bringing up the water itself.

“I realized there’s a way to control my stomach to bring the fish or the frog up with nothing and that was by doing bronchoscopies and checking out where bingo balls would float in my stomach. So then we converted it from a human aquarium feat into magic.”

[Featured Image by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images]

TAGGED:
Share This Article