James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87.
About James Randi in brief
James Randi was a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic. Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87. He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Before his retirement, JREF sponsored the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, which offered a prize of one million US dollars to eligible applicants who could demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event under test conditions agreed to by both parties. In his 20s, Randi posed as an astrologer, and to establish that they merely were doing simple tricks, he briefly wrote an astrological column in the Canadian tabloid Midnight under the name ‘Zo-ran’ Randi once claimed that Jesus Christ was a religious nut-air, a claim that he disputed, but was never picked for a children’s revival in Detroit. He appeared regularly on the New York-based children’s television series Wonderama from 1959 to 1967. He often defended paranormal claims, including that of James W. Moseley, the archbishop of New York, who said on his show that Randi had said on the show that Jesus was a Jesus-air-air freak. He also hosted numerous television specials and went on several world tours. He died of a heart attack at the age of 87, and is survived by his wife, two daughters, and a son. He is buried in a private cemetery in Toronto, Ontario, where he used to live with his wife.
He had a younger brother and sister, Marie Alice, and George Randall Zwinge. He took up magic after seeing Harry Blackstone Sr. and reading conjuring books while spending 13 months in a body cast following a bicycle accident. He initially presented himself under his real name, Randall Zwingse, which he later dropped in favor of ‘The Amazing Randi’ He was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, famously exposing fraudulent faith healer Peter Popoff, and was occasionally featured on the television program Penn & Teller: Bullshit! He appeared live on NBC’s Today show in 1956, breaking what was said to be Harry Houdini’s record of 93 minutes in a sealed metal coffin that had been submerged in a hotel swimming pool, though Randi called attention to the fact that he was much younger than Houdni had been when he established the original record in 1926. He later appeared on the Long John Nebel program on New York City radio station WOR, and did character voices for commercials. After Nebel moved to WNBC in 1962, he was given Nebel’s time slot on The AmazingRandi Show from 1967 to 1968. He stated that he quit WOR over complaints from the then-friend James Mosely over complaints that he had claimed that ‘Jesus Christ’ had never picked a New York archbishop for the 1950s revival of The Magic Clowns.
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This page is based on the article James Randi published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
