Interview – Piff the Magic Dragon on the Power of Costumes and Small Dogs
“It’s like a magic show for people who don’t like magic shows.” This is how Piff the Magic Dragon sums up his act for people who haven’t seen it before. For starters, Piff performs in a multicoloured dragon onesie. And his magician’s assistant is a tiny white chihuahua named Mr. Piffles.
I caught up with Piff via Zoom, shortly after he arrived in Illinois for his show there that night. Born in London as John van der Put, Piff became obsessed with magic when he was 14. “I saw some magicians do close-up magic and it just blew my mind,” he says. “I spent a long time practicing it. And I loved how I could make people feel the way that I did when I first saw magic. And then I just never really looked back. I was like, ‘I’d rather do this than settle down and get a job.’”
However, as Piff began to practice close-up magic professionally, he struggled with audience interaction. Close-up magicians have to walk the room, doing tricks at each table, but Piff’s deadpan sense of humour and what he calls his “resting bitch face” didn’t play well with the public. He spent nearly a decade performing at bar mitzvahs, weddings, and corporate events, but “got fired everywhere.”
The turning point came when he got invited to a costume party and turned up in a dragon outfit he borrowed from his sister – only to find that no one else was wearing a costume. That night, Piff discovered that when he was wearing a costume, people suddenly found his grumpiness amusing, instead of unpleasant. A friend joked that he should start wearing the costume to do magic. Piff took the idea and ran with it, to great effect.
Piff went on to break sales records at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009, wow TV audiences on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2011, tour with Mumford & Sons in 2012, and make his first of many appearances on America’s Got Talent in 2015. Later that year, Piff began a residency at Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel, where he has since performed thousands of shows.
Piff thinks his costume has a disarming effect. “You know, magicians, they tend to be all polished, like snake oil salesmen,” he says. That’s the superpower of the dragon suit: “Being able to be one hundred percent myself.” He draws a parallel to comedians. “Comedians are there to tell the truth. Whereas magicians are there to do the opposite. This helps me be a bit more like a comedian. And Mr. Piffles just adds another layer of adorability to this whole thing.”
Mr. Piffles is Piff’s other secret weapon: a chihuahua he rescued 15 years ago, who became his on-stage assistant. “Piffles has done three thousand shows, at least,” Piff says. “He’s almost 17. And a couple of years ago, we were like, he’s getting older and older, and we want to give him a break. We tried a few other dogs, and it was a disaster, so we did the only sensible thing and cloned him. And it’s amazing, it’s like having old Piffles back in the show.”
Piff is entirely serious. After adopting two other dogs (Twoey had stage fright and Threeodore was “too fat to fit in the props”), he really did clone Mr. Piffles, hence the title of his North American tour: “It Cost $60,000 To Clone My Dog And Now I Need To Make The Money Back.” Or IC$60,000TCMDANINTMTMB, for short, he jokes.
The new dog is named Fourtune because he cost so much more than his predecessors. He’s now almost two years old, the same age Mr. Piffles was when he started in the show and Piff says he’s “taken to it like a duck to water.”
You can catch Piff the Magic Dragon and Fourtune at the River Rock Casino in Richmond on Friday, November 1 and at the Great Canadian Casino in Coquitlam on Saturday, November 2. Tickets are available here.
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