Mr. Szeles, who performed steadily in Las Vegas, smoothly incorporated vaudevillian jokes and bloody magic tricks into his act.
John Edward Szeles, the comedian and magician who combined jokes with ersatz gore in his stage persona as the Amazing Johnathan, died on Tuesday at his home in Henderson, Nev., outside Las Vegas. He was 63. His death was confirmed by Michael Peters, a funeral arranger at Palm Cheyenne Mortuary in Las Vegas, who said that Mr. Szeles’s hospice care report showed he had end-stage heart failure. Mr. Szeles’s wife, Anastasia Synn, a magician and entertainer, had said on Twitter that he had been under hospice care. In 2014, Mr. Szeles said that he consulted doctors after he began feeling dizzy and out of breath. He learned he had heart disease, with doctors telling him he had 12 to 15 months to live, according to his website. Death “didn’t happen,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2018. “I waited another year, and then it was another year. I was sitting and waiting around so I went back to work.” Mr. Szeles, who described himself as the “Freddy Krueger of comedy,” deftly mixed genres in his routines. In one act in the 1990s, he incorporated harmless vaudevillian jokes, like one in which he complained about a mole on his neck, then turned his back to the audience to reveal a stuffed rodent. Minutes later, he pretended to slice off his own arm, and to cut out his own eye and eat it. In an interview with The New York Times in 1998, Mr. Szeles said he initially wanted to be a magician but had to add comedy to his act because “my magic was so inept.
