Magician entertains and informs student at the same time.

Brian Brushwood and his “Bizarre” magic show visited Southern at 7 p.m. on January 31 and performed in Taylor Hall Auditorium.

Brushwood started out his show with several fire eating tricks that received good feedback from the crowd.

And along with his humorous antics made for an exciting night several students said.

“Very entertaining, he easily captivated his audience through his act,” said Isaac Murphy, freshman pre-med major. “I was very impressed with what he did. But my favorite part was when I volunteered to go up on stage and he picked out the exact word that I was thinking.”

Murphy was referring to a part of Brushwood’s act where he had a volunteer pick a random book, a random page, then a random word and then guessed exactly what the word was.

Overall, Graham Dickinson, senior personal finance planning major and event coordinator, said there was a successful turnout at the show, adding there was between 300 and 400 students.

The show ended up being almost two and a half hours long and consisted of two parts.

The first part was focused on “Bizarre” magic like Brushwood using a hammer to smash a concrete block on his head and then hammering a nail into his nose.

He also shoved a nail into one eye socket and pulled it out of the other.

Another crowd favorite was Brushwood’s feat of escaping a straightjacket in less than two minutes.

But it wasn’t the actual trick itself that got the best reaction, but rather all of the events leading up to it.

He pulled three volunteers up on stage, one being Matt “Hot Dog” Collier, senior health promotion and wellness major.

The three volunteers helped the magician put on the straightjacket which led to several laughs as the students watched for the results.

“Overall the show was flippin’ amazing,” Collier said. “But my favorite part was getting to squeeze the guts out of that dude with his straightjacket.”

After the first hour the magician took a 10-minute break then returned for his “Scams, Sasquatch and the Supernatural” part of the show.

This is where he explains short changing scams, how spiritualism is a scam and how a lot of industries work off of the uninformed public through playing the game of odds.

“If you’re not a mathematician or a casino owner then you probably don’t know very much about odds,” Brushwood said.

Brushwood explained the fact that there is an 85 percent chance two out of 35 people have the same birthday.

And how scam artist use those odds against unsuspecting marks.

“You remember when things go right,” Brushwood said.

He went on to explain how a “psychic” can say multiple things wrong before he gets one right, but the ones being conned only noticed the times he got it right.

“I do this because I believe in the critical thinking message of the show,” Brushwood said.

For more information please visit www.shwood.com.