John Edward Szeles, the comedian and magician who combined jokes with ersatz gore in his stage character as the Amazing Johnathan, died Tuesday at his home in Henderson, Nev., outside of Las Vegas. He was 63.
His death was confirmed by Michael Peters, an undertaker at the Palm Cheyenne Mortuary in Las Vegas, who said Mr Szeles’ care report showed he had end-stage heart failure.
The wife of Mr. Szeles, Anastasia Synn, a magician and entertainer, had said on Twitter that he had been admitted to a hospice.
In 2014, Mr Szeles said he consulted doctors after he began to feel dizzy and breathless. He learned he had a heart condition, and doctors told him he had 12 to 15 months to live, according to his website.
The death “didn’t happen,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2018. “I waited another year, then it was another year. I was waiting, so I went back to work.”
mr. Szeles, who described himself as the ‘Freddy Krueger of comedy’, deftly mixed genres into his routines. In one act in the 1990s, he worked in harmless vaudevillian jokes, such as one in which he complained of a mole on his neck, then turned his back to the audience to reveal a stuffed rodent. Minutes later, he pretended to cut off his own arm and cut his own eye out to eat it.
In an interview with DailyExpertNews in 1998, Mr. Szeles said he initially wanted to be a magician but had to add comedy to his act because “my magic was so clumsy.”
His father, an artist, didn’t want him to “become normal,” he said, supporting his ambitions to become an entertainer.
“He wanted me to go for comedy, for entertainment,” said Mr. Szeles. “I think he lived a little bit because of me.”
John Edward Szeles was born on September 9, 1958 in Detroit, the youngest of three children of Doreen Szeles and Edward Szeles, who designed tanks and military equipment. The family moved to Fraser, Michigan, where John attended Bethlehem Lutheran School and Fraser High School. He was a below average student, according to a biography on his website.
He started out as a street performer in San Francisco in the 1970s, sharpening his act on Fisherman’s Wharf. He became so popular that crowds would take to the streets.
Mr. Szeles then went on to work in nightclubs and colleges in the 1980s, performing for President Ronald Reagan in 1986. By the 1990s, he had achieved great cult status after appearing on Comedy Central.
In 2001, Mr. Szeles toured and took a two-year stay at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. According to his website, he stayed in town and performed regularly for 13 years.
Then, during a performance in 2014, he told the audience that he had one year to live. The announcement came after more than 10 minutes of jokes about his early years as a recording artist and lighthearted stories about his upbringing in Michigan. Some in the audience believed he was still joking and giggling.
“It’s not a joke,” he said, and then he started to cry. “It’s very scary. My heart is failing.”
“I can’t do shows anymore,” he added, “because my legs are stuck and my hands are stuck” — a catastrophic scenario for a magician, he said.
He said he had retired and had his “business in order.”
His illness did not hinder his penchant for jokes and dark humor.
In “The Amazing Johnathan Documentary,” a 2019 documentary, Mr. Szeles to play with the filmmaker, Ben Berman, when he meets Mr. Szeles started following up after announcing that he was ill.
The film shows Mr. Szeles smoking methamphetamine, giving access to competing documentary filmmakers, and acting so unpredictably that Mr. Berman wondered if Mr. Szeles even had a terminal illness.
mr. Szeles “is up to something cruel and selfish, but to our absorption he is also clever,” critic Wesley Morris wrote in a review of the film for The Times. “Szeles will be Berman’s opponent. They’re both going to make this movie, come what may, in Berman’s case, Szeles throws him in the head.”
Complete information on the survivors of Mr. Szeles was not immediately available.
Mr. Szeles performed sporadically through 2019, according to his website, which listed performances in Boston, Utah and the UK.
In 2017, he appeared in Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle in Royal Oak, Michigan. In an interview with the news site MLive.com, he described how he still performed a “floating zombie ball” trick that had been part of his act since he was 16.
“That never left my show,” said Mr. Szeles. “I haven’t found a better ending.”
Alyssa Lukpat reporting contributed.