Illusionist sells the impossible

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Illusionist Michael Carbonaro doesn’t have much use for show-off magicians. To him, their acts are more about the magician and less about the magic.

Which is why, he says, he focuses the attention on the prank and not on himself on his truTV hidden-camera series “The Carbonaro Effect.”

“It’s very exciting to take magic into a new direction,” the 33-year-old native of Long Island, N.Y., said, “whereas a lot of times magic comes from a place of sort of ego, like, ‘Look what I can do that you can’t do.’ It kind of comes across that way a lot and you’re always trying to challenge the magician, you’re always trying to figure out how the magician is doing it.

“So the whole conceit to take the magician out of the equation and don’t even take responsibility for (the prank) and just sort of ride the moment with a real, unsuspecting public person who just witnessed something magical happen, it’s an awesome ride and we learn so much,” he continued. “You know, people are really willing to believe in impossible things, which is really beautiful.”

The premise of the half-hour series, which returns for its second season tonight, is Carbonaro as a clerk or employee somewhere in downtown Atlanta, talking to a customer about a particular item at his place of employment. In season one, that was the mummified cat that appeared to come to life at an ancient Egypt museum exhibit, the wedding-cake statuettes that appeared to change positions and even repair themselves when everyone’s back was turned or the self-tying shoelaces.

Season 2 promises more such seemingly impossible occurrences. In one preview, Carbonaro convinces a woman the hot tub in which she is sitting is filled with piranha.

The reactions, of course, are always priceless, but almost as entertaining are Carbonaro’s straight-faced, matter-of-fact explanations of the phenomena his victims think they just witnessed.

“My favorite kind of person,” Carbonaro said, “is somebody who has seen it happen and is amazed because it shouldn’t be happening, and then they wrestle with believing whether or not it just happened and how it could have happened.

“And it’s kind of cool that they believed it, but not as good as just watching voyeuristically, like the home viewer gets to do, these wheels turning, trying to compute how that could have just happened,” he continued. “And if some of that … selling it, some of the BS I give them, that brings them closer to believing it, that’s like the ultimate experience.”