Where I Go: My Life as a Mentalist

For 20 Years, I’ve Wowed Audiences by Reading Minds—and Making the Impossible Possible

Twenty-three years into my career as a stand-up comedian and television comedy writer, a colleague recommended I go see his cousin, one of America’s top mentalists (a.k.a. mind readers) perform in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York.

Back then, in 2002, I did not know, exactly, what a mentalist was. But the performance changed my life.

The mentalist asked my wife at the time and another woman—someone we did not know—to get up from the audience, to stand about 8 feet apart in the performance area, and to close their …