I feel like I need to start this post with a disclaimer that I have met Nikola Arkane multiple times, got on just fine with her and while I don’t know her well enough to arrogantly describe her as a friend, she is an acquaintance that I have almost entirely positive feelings towards.
Which is why when I needed one, she made a perfect nemesis.
Much like my earlier post on hatred as a motivating factor, I feel like recasting a person whose success you are envious of as a villain in your head allows a much stronger drive to defeat and surpass them than any kind of aspirational idolisation might offer. It didn’t really work out¹ so I am currently nemesisless, but in the peak of her villain era there was one thing she did about 5 years ago that I really didn’t agree with, and I want to contrast and compare it to something which is happening right now, as a kind of learning exercise.
Fizz Wizz Pop
Nikola got her start as a children’s entertainer playing a character called Fizz Wizz Pop. I bought her book about this era of her career and learned absolutely nothing because I fucking hate kids and had no interest in ever leaving them happier than I found them. I met her after she started dating Tom Stone and pivoted to close-up. During my villain era I did wonder if maybe he opened a few doors, but in hindsight I just think good for her².
However, in the year 2020, a funny little thing happened. You might have heard of it; a playful little global pandemic called COVID 19. Arguably it’s still going on, but for the dust couple of years we had hundreds of thousands of deaths and a blanket government health warning to stay indoors and, if you had to leave the house, 10ft away from other human beings. Some magicians saw this as an opportunity and started doing online shows, either ticketed zoom sessions or free public livestreams. Nikola did the latter but not satisfied with just trotting out her usual material, she did a weekly show, each of which had a completely different theme!
Themes like Harry Potter, Chinese New Year and Egypt. Astoundingly, at the time, Harry Potter was probably the least problematic one of those.
I mentioned that using makeup to look more Egyptian or Asian was a bad look. I really hope I’m not there only person who told her this fact because it seemed to have a profound emotional impact on her, and that is not the way I intended to defeat my unrequited nemesis. If that post on her blog is to be believed, she still thinks what she did was fine, I still think it was, at best, cringe. She also did a blog post about her process for creating themed shows. I think maybe she was so proud of having succeeded in the process of making the shows that the criticism of the choice of theme was like flicking away the bottom of an elaborate house of cards. The phrase used on the internet is awful taste, great execution.
Anyway, that was five years ago, water under the bridge and she was distinctly back in her own Irish culture when she appeared on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us in 2024. The reason I bring it up is because I wanted to contrast and compare her character theme acts to a more recent phenomenon I am absolutely obsessed with.
Criss Anel
I first encountered Tyler Sherwin as a recommended Youtube Short. It’s worth saying that, while I can speak highly of the character of Nikola Arkane, I have never met Tyler Sherwin in person. If the guy gets me too’d or turns out to be a monster, don’t come looking for any commentary for me. I only know the public face, and what a public face it is.
That recommmended YouTube short had Tyler appearing as a parody of Criss Angel, called Criss Anel. Then a few days later he was doing a parody of David Copperfield called David Cockerfield. Then a few days later he was doing a parody of David Blaine called David Lame. Then he switched it up a bit and he was a wrestling themed magician called John Pena, based ok John Cena. This was only one of many WWE characters he would introduce. He would also be The Kock (The Rock), Hulk Blogan (Hulk Hogan), Dic Flair (Ric Flair) and the Undie Taker (The Undertaker),
Most recently I’ve seen him stray into the territory of drag with Crissy Anel, and Harley Queef (Harley Quinn) and just last night as I write this I watched him take on alien form As Zorbon the Probester, after which there was a teaser for his show as Marilyn Man-hoe (Marilyn Monroe).
Let me explain a little how all this works. Tyler streams on a service called Kick, which I’ve never been on but as far as I can tell it functions similarly to Omegle (formerly Chat Roulette) in that a bunch of people login all around rhe world and the site randomly connects strangers into a one on one videochat. I don’t know what their terms of service are like but Omegle was mostly famous for teenagers being annoying and guys masturbating. As I understand, Omegle was also a platform used by many now famous femboy streamers such as F1nn5ter.
The point is you can do pretty much anything on there, so Tyler started doing the equivalent of a walk around close up magic show, except instead of walking around he would perform for whoever connected to him on Kick. The most important thing however is that he would record his stream and the audiences stream simultaneously, in order to upload them onto YouTube, usually as shorts.
There are two main differences between this style of livestream magic and the model Nikola Arkane used.
Nikola was essentially recreating a stage, parlour or cabaret setup. A set, scripted show to camera, performed once for an audience who opted to tune in to a 10-20 minute magic show. Tyler on the other hand was performing closeup magic with maybe a few bits of stage flair for around 4 minutes at most, repeating the same act to each small audience, allowing him to pick and choose which performances would make rhe best content on YouTube (and presumably other socials).
The other big difference is that while Nikola Arkane did children’s magic, the first words out of Tyler Sherwin’s mouth are “Do you know who I am” and “How old are you?”. He won’t even introduce himself unless he knows the people watching are over 18. I have held back on linking to any of his videos until this point, but you may have gussed from the character names listed above that his magic is, at its core, very adult³.
Whereas the parlour show format requires a full script and bespoke props every time, Tyler has managed to hone his show down to a perfect sequence for the best reactions, using a very small combination of repeating elements. That sequence is settling out as:
- Hook
- Introduction
- Card Selection
- What’s my name?
- Scripted Intro
- Fakeout 1
- Fakeout 2
- Revelation
- Kicker
The hook is sharpie up the nose and out of the mouth. It’s a 2 second visual effect that knocks people offguard the second Tyler appears on screen. One problem with performing on a platform which randomly connects people is that either participant can quit at any moment, so he needs to show something which will make people sit up, pay attention and want to see what happens next.
The introduction is when he asks their age, while holding a magic wand to giant penis gimmick. If they’re not old enough for his show, I presume they only ever see rhe wand part. This is where he says his character name as he reveals the testicles on the deployed fake penis.
On the internet a slip force is a perfect way to get a card selected, and seems perfectly natural. Once the card is chosen he then says “What’s my name?” giving him the opportunity to check in on that attention the audience is supposed to be paying.
The scripted intro is then played in the form of a pre-recorded voiceover, sometimes with an accompanying pre-recorded video, and this is part of the genius of the act which I’ll get back to.
There’s a classic saying in magic which is that if you have 10 ways to force a card and 1 way to reveal it, you have one trick, whereas if you have 1 way to force a card and 10 ways to reveal it, you have 10 tricks. Tyler gets a lot of mileage out of a single card force by doing 3 revelations, the first two of which are a combination of him either getting it wrong or producing a card in a magical way which has a middle finger on it. The fact that he can do three revelations for one selection keeps the act rolling in a way which three selections wouldn’t. Either way both ‘mistakes’ are done either using a magical way of producing the card or a way which plays into his character or his character’s character⁴ for humour.
Then finally he produces their actual card, gets his applause and does a final kicker gag, such as kissing the nun.
I’d love to see one of his performances live but I have no idea of the probabilities involved in getting to see him on livestream 1 on 1.
It’s interesting to contrast and compare Tyler against Nikola’s theme shows, because both of them adopted a loose role but mostly maintained their own personality and both livestreamed their acts, but one was child friendly and the otherone is distinctly not, and one maintains the same basic routine construction while the other was written bespoke from scratch each time.
But one other big difference is that Nikola is a live conjuring purist, whereas Tyler does those video segments I mentioned.
Camera Tricks
I know a lot of people will disagree with me here. I have a lot of opinions about the use of technology in magic, mostly about the permanence or believability of anything done on a phone, but my most controversial opinion is about use of camera tricks on zoom shows. Magic on video is always going to be less honest in its presentation than magic in person, simply because the camera cannot be as easily fooled as the eye. As such a whole host of techniques which could never be done face to face exist to replace classic pillars such as misdirection and crossing the gaze. Adjusting the white balance to better facilitate black art or having things just out of frame is part of the stock in trade of the livestream magician.
Rather than using technology to do a trick in a regular setting, these are physical workarounds to the technical limitations of the form. Tyler enhances some of his shows by cutting to a little video intro after which you might think you’re cutting back to a live stream, but it can instead be a prerecorded segment so that he doesn’t have to fire off a card fountain every 5 minutes. The pre-recorded segments, often with green screen overlays for effect, are filmed in the same room he streams from, so they feel live, and with graphic effects to transition back to the live feed at the end, like an explosion, he can use a minute of prerecorded footage to do a costume change or prepare a big prop. Honestly its an ingenious way to use time efficiently in a one man show. My personal favourite is this inception like masterpiece in which Criss Anel’s feed appears to cut out before the reveal and goes to apparently another streamer who asks what card they just selected as if he’s going to reveal it, but the card he’s holding uses a green screen effect to go back to Criss, who does a fakeout reveal, and when the camera pulls back to the other streamer his skeleton explodes out of his body and the stream cuts back to Criss Anel, who uses a little “in case of emergency” box in order to show their card, but when he pulls the lever he blows up, and when the smoke clears he is seen collapsed in the corner with their card printed on his underwear.
In magic I strive to leave people questioning which parts of my act were real, and Tyler leaves people questioning which parts of the livestream were real. That’s peak form for magic over video as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, that’s an aside, we were talking about characters.
In Conclusion
Crude humour aside, the biggest difference between Nikola and Tyler’s character work in my mind is that Nikola selected broad character class such as pirate or ancient Egyptian and was herself in that archetype. Tyler on the other hand picked a specific person to be, such as Criss Angel or John Cena, and performed as a parody of that one person, with a name and everything.
The huge advantage of the latter is that you will only ever really upset one person, rather than an entire nationality or social justice movement. Well… I guess tehcnically it could still backfire.
I hope Tyler is self aware enough to not do like a Jackie Chan or Barack Obama or something.
But he got away with playing Jesus in the early days so who knows what he can get away with?
¹ My health got bad so the prospects of me fulfilling any of my magical career goals (residency, Edinburgh Fringe show, spot at the magic castle, lecture at Blackpool) fell to zero. At that point no amount of motivation was going to help. It’s also worth noting that at no point did Nikola ever know that I had a fierce rivalry with her. During her time as my nemesis I even recommended her for a few local gigs and gave her pointers on a few sleights she posted on insta while she was learning them.
² Lesbianism gets you nowhere in this business, but even if I slobbed on David Copperfield’s nob for an opportunity to perform in Vegas it would still be on me to not totally fuck it up on opening night. Similarly regardless of their personal chemistry, Tom Stone’s first love is magic and I’m pretty sure he would not involve Nikola in his shows if she wasn’t good enough.
³ That is to say, the kind of adult that really appeals to teenage boys, jokes about sex, willies and bums, with a little mild nudity and low quality imitation phalluses.
⁴ So we all know the quote “A magician is an actor playing the role of a magician” from Jean Eugene Robert Houdin. This was originally about the importance of motivation in movements but I think it also taps into the fact that most magicians create a hightened fictionalised version of themselves to perform as. As such a magician who takes on a character could be said to be be playing themselves playing that character. Tyler Sherwin has a style of his own which he wraps his character acts around, which is why his shows feel very cohesive regardless of whether hes playing a magician, a heavyweight championship wrestler, a female comic book villain, or an alien.