It has been said that seeing is believing and no where is that truer than in the Sahara’s Congo Room where The Amazing Johnathan appears nightly.

From the moment the comedy magician walks out on stage, he offers a crystal clear, streak-free picture of “bizarrely funny” – even if he’s not, at that particular moment, gulping down Windex.

The proof is in the pouring -- Amazing is as Amazing does. With a bonafide don’t-try-this-at-home unique act billed as “where magic and comedy collide,” the impact seems to have produced a mutant offspring of Penn & Teller (if there could ever be such a thing), but one who focuses more on getting laughs.

Nightly packed houses watch The Amazing Johnathan, among various other miraculous feats, eat razor blades, put a knife through his arm, put a pencil in his ear that comes out his nose, and swig Windex. Now even without the help of his trusty assistant, The Psychic Tanya, Johnathan himself can see clearly into the future – his original two-week run that began in June 2001 at a downtown hotel property just keeps going and going and going and going from one successful long-term gig to another.

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“I think that maybe people want to see an edgier act,” the 48-year-old Johnathan says. “There are more people my age coming to Las Vegas. For edgy, they’ve now got “Blue Man Group” and me – I’m really edgy and as politically incorrect as I can be. I’m not waving a flag and saying that I love the audience and I’m not worried about offending people --someone is always offended about something. There are people who just want to have fun and my act is all a joke – it’s all in fun. There is a line you can cross that goes from being mean-spirited funny to offensive. I don’t cross that line, which is why I’m different.”

The Amazing Johnathan, who, razor blades aside, keeps audiences on their toes with his razor-sharp wit, unexpected magic and signature special effects, describes himself as a magician who uses props. His fast, furious and extremely funny approach earned him rave reviews from national TV shows such as “Late Night with David Letterman” and Rolling Stone Magazine referred to him as “one of the best comics working today.” Among his honors, he is a two-time winner of the International Magic Award for “Best Comedy Magician.”

“Penn & Teller come the closest to what I do, but they are more in the magic mode and don’t go for the comedy the way that I do,” Johnathan explains. “There are two real magic tricks in my show and the rest is spoof. I’ve taken most of the blood stuff out because it’s a pain to clean up and I don’t need the shock value anymore. My demographic is very wide -- people 10 years old to 65 years old. I do use the “f” word in the show, however.”.

Each of The Amazing Johnathan’s shows is preceded by interactive audience comedy (via a live video camera and a BIG screen). Then, with the persona of a big kid who is doing what he shouldn’t be doing, Johnathan and his new assistant, The Psychic Tanya, put on a hilarious – and much of it, off-the-cuff – performance that varies from night to night.

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“She’s so much better than any of my previous assistants,” Johnathan says about Tanya. “The last ones were girlfriends who would go on the road with me who had to work because I couldn’t afford them.”

Tanya is Penny Wiggins, an actress and standup comic from Los Angeles. She has amazing timing with me and she’s a goofball, so there is a lot of spontaneity every night. We get more repeat business than any other show in Las Vegas. There are people who come to see us every time they come to town.”

Johnathan, who writes all of his own material, says that he puts in new things whenever he gets bored, which amounts to about 10 minutes of new material a month. Always setting out to be outrageous, he says that he has to be “pushed off a cliff” to write, in a moment something akin to shock therapy.

“I go through spurts,” he acknowledges. “I went through a major nasty divorce several years ago and I was ready to quit the business. I didn’t feel funny anymore; it was the reaction to the shock of being left. It was therapeutic for me to come out with a new show instead of bullets. I threw myself into the new show and wrote more material than I ever did in my life. Back in the 1970’s, I got hooked on cocaine and half the material I have now is because I was stoned and writing great stuff. Then, when I got off drugs in the 1980’s, the experience of being straight made me write more material. Every five years or so, something happens to make me do it.”

Johnathan says that with Penny now in the show, he doesn’t need the tragic element anymore to help him create. Rather, after all these years, he finally has someone he can play off of. He likes being at one hotel for a long-term run because being in one place allows him to build props that he doesn’t have to worry about taking on the road. Wanting the show to become a “must-see,” he gives “Blue Man Group” the credit for breaking ground in Las Vegas for an artist such as him.

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There is no doubt that Johnathan has come quite far from his auspicious beginnings, halfway across the country, to be exact. A native of East Detroit, Michigan, he was 16 years old when he wandered into a magic shop and became hooked. He began trying to perfect his craft in high school talent shows but didn’t have very much luck.

“Every time I did a show, something would go wrong,” Johnathan proclaims. “Once I entered a talent show and did six tricks and every one went wrong – the doves kept escaping from where they were supposed to be and things like that. It was pretty humiliating. My parents, friends and cousins were there and no one even came backstage to say they were sorry. They all made a beeline for home.”

By the time he was a senior in high school, Johnathan had put magic away. Then in 1976, he went to visit a friend in Los Angeles and stayed until he ran out of cash. Hitchhiking from L.A. to San Francisco. he met a young street performer named Harry Anderson, who was performing magic at Fisherman’s Wharf. Johnathan stood and watched with amazement as the huge crowds put $200-$300 into the hat that was passed each time Anderson put on a show.

It was then that Johnathan realized that he should be adding comedy to his magic since that’s what he had been inadvertently doing anyway. So for the next two or three years, he developed his style on the street, along with some talented young performers named Robin Williams, Shields & Yarnell, and Wayland Flowers and Madame, who showed up every once in a while to perform.

“I created this manic, fast-paced, energetic character,” Johnathan says, referring to the persona he still uses today. “I had to move quickly on the street because there were shops all around and I had to keep people’s attention for 15-20 minutes when they wanted to be somewhere else. I had to be like an accident that they would pull over to see. I did 10 shows a day and got pretty good pretty fast. I worked Thursday to Sunday when the crowds were there and made about $500 a week.”

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Johnathan began living from McDonald’s to McDonald’s and when his shows started getting really good and the crowds really big, he suddenly found himself getting arrested a lot. The businesses on Fisherman’s Wharf would start calling the police because they wanted to get rid of the street performers who were keeping the crowds out of the shops. Johnathan got busted three times for obstruction and, each time, his friends had to come and bail him out.

“I moved indoors during the comedy club explosion that hit in 1980-81,” Johnathan recalls. “I performed at The Boarding House and The Holy City Zoo in San Francisco and at all the new comedy clubs that Dana Carvey and Robin Williams started out in. In fact, I was standing at the bar when Robin came in waving his first “Mork & Mindy” contract for $2500 a week.”

Even for that time, The Amazing Johnathan was a pretty unusual act. For the next 15-20 years, he played the comedy club circuit, eventually becoming a headliner. In fact, Tom and Roseanne became his opening act. Television then entered the picture, with Johnathan making appearances on such national shows as “Thicke of the Night” and HBO’s “Young Comedians.” David Letterman spotted him on the latter and invited Johnathan to appear on his show. That led into the comedy magician’s own specials on HBO and Showtime. But when the Comedy Central network started, it pushed The Amazing Johnathan over the edge.

“Ten years ago, I did a Comedy Central special and it jump-started my career,” Johnathan says. “The network told me that it was the most requested special of all time. In the clubs, I started selling out weekend after weekend and was able to name my own price. I rode off that special for a two–year period because Comedy Central aired it once a week. Then I decided to get out of the comedy clubs. I got my own TV show but I decided that I wanted a Penn & Teller kind of draw, not a sitcom. I wanted to go into live performance.”

In 2001, Johnathan made the decision to burn all of his bridges with the comedy clubs, making sure that he could never go back. He then booked a string of theater dates to coincide with his second Comedy Central special and was about to go out on tour when the Golden Nugget approached him with their amazing offer. And the rest is Amazing history.

“My show has become a Vegas tradition,” Johnathan sums up. “It’s one that I think will be here for a long time to come.”