A coffinlike contraption with pointed steel spikes that Howard Thurston used to impale his assistants has its contemporary counterpart in Copperfield's "table of death" trick.
Real tension is skilfully stoked, before our hero performs a jaws-of-death trick you'd pay to see from Houdini himself, never mind an impostor comedian.
Like many Soviet-era performers, he doesn't consider Cirque du Soleil a "real" circus — there are too many fancy masks and costumes, too much high-tech scenery, and not enough death-defying tricks, he says.
The manner of his death, being tricked out of a protected reserve so that a wealthy American tourist could kill him, has catapulted Cecil the lion to global fame in the space of less than a week.
While toying with the timeless, he also retells ancient legends: where Death was tricked and trapped, why Jesus made fig trees fruit twice a year, how the chicken managed to marry a princess.
Stood atop your Wii Balance Board (if you have one), and utilising various flicks of the Wii remote, quite remarkable and death-defying tricks can be done – from a simple "melon" to a spinal-trauma-threatening "barrel".
Although the Jacobi boys, before their father's death, go trick-or-treating at the homes of Thomas Mann and Gregory Peck, they hook up with neighborhood kids who teach them racist and anti-Semitic slurs.
A German supermarket chain has come up with something a great deal starker; it's the story of an elderly man, sick of being on his own at Christmas, who fakes his own death to trick his adult children into visiting.
Unlike them, I don't promote death-defying tricks.
It's easy to enjoy the sport for its death-defying tricks and its sparkly glamor.
