"Piff has become one of my favorite magicians," Penn Jillette of Pen and Teller wrote about Piff the Magic Dragon. Courtesy photo

Magician and comedian John van der Put, better known as Piff the Magic Dragon, is an English fellow from London who adopted his dragon persona by accident. Invited to attend a fancy-dress party, and wondering what to wear, his sister offered him her dragon costume.

So he turned up as a dragon to discover no one else was wearing fancy dress. Stewing by himself in a corner feeling grumpy, an idea formed.

Fuse magic, humor and a grumpy dragon. His sidekick dog, Mr. Piffles, was added after he was told he needed a gimmick — as if the dragon costume wasn’t enough. Thus his act expanded to include a rescue chihuahua, and finally a lovely assistant, Jade Simone, now his fiancée.

“Sadly, it was true,” says van der Put about needing to add a dog to his magic act. “Just me in a dragon outfit wasn’t doing the business at the beginning. It needed a dog to come along and give it some humanity.”

And he added some glamour. “Jade, she’s my Las Vegas showgirl,” he says. “She’s fantastic and puts much needed energy into the show. We did an episode of ‘Queer Eye’ on Netflix and we got engaged on that show.”

So did he actually cultivate this grumpy dragon persona? “No, what happened was that was my actual persona,” he explains. “I just needed a way to make it socially acceptable, and that was by wearing a dragon outfit.”

A headliner at Vegas’ Flamingo Hotel, Piff will bring his latest “Clone Tour” to the Maui Arts & Cultural Center on March 22. It co-stars a cloned version of Mr. Piffles.

“I had a dog in my show for 15 years,” he says. “I got him as a rescue. My show wasn’t very good when he wasn’t in it before that. So then he came into it, and suddenly I got this whole new career, and we did probably 5,000 appearances together.”

After Mr. Piffles died, “we tried to get a couple of dogs to replace him and they were all terrible,” he continues. “They just couldn’t do the show. In 2022, I ended up cloning Mr. Piffles. We got his DNA extracted and sent it to the laboratory. They cloned this dog, and we got this little puppy. He’s cute and a lot of fun, but we didn’t know if it was going to work out, and as he started getting older, suddenly, we were like, ‘Oh, my God, this is just like Mr. Piffles.’ It’s like Piffles was when I first got him. It’s just not only is he identical, but we started training him properly and he behaves exactly like the original Mr. Piffles. It’s crazy.”

Winding back in time, after the debut of the original Mr. Piffles, van der Put decided to try his luck in America. “It’s just like Las Vegas is the capital of magic,” he says. “It’s like the Mecca. I was touring the UK all the time doing my tricks. But when I got serious, I was, we’re going to have to do this in America. It’s where Penn and Teller, David Copperfield, all the greats hang out.”

He ended up making Vegas his home. “I love it,” he says. “I’m a cold-blooded reptile. I love the sun. I love a bit of desert living.”

A Las Vegas Entertainment Guide review of his show praised: “Think of when you watched a Monty Python movie which incorporated slapstick with genuine comical insanity. His quick wit is stellar while engaging with the audience throughout the show.”

On his journey to magic stardom he impressed Penn and Teller, appearing on the first season of “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” where magicians from all over the world perform a trick that Penn Jillette and Teller try to deduce how it’s executed.

In the foreword to van der Put’s new book “Piff the Magic Book,” Jillette wrote: “I saw Piff for the first time when he walked onto our stage to do our show in the U.K. He opened with a dragon sneeze of fire, and then he did a baffling card trick. There’s a rule about comedy magicians — they aren’t funny, and they aren’t baffling. Piff is different. Piff had the audience screaming in laughter, and he fooled the pants off every one of them. Piff has become one of my favorite magicians.”

He also made it on “America’s Got Talent,” getting to the finale in 2015. But he didn’t fare so well auditioning for “Britain’s Got Talent.”

“It was a disaster, and they never showed it,” he says. “For the record, I would like to say that it was not my fault. Some of the judges weren’t very well behaved.”

Asked the secret to being a really good magician, he responds: “It sounds dumb, but the magic has to be really good. It has to be completely impossible, and once you have that, then it’s like how you present it. So you’ve got to find a way that’s different and that people love. For me, that was a dragon suit and making it really funny.”

He says he’s always thinking of new tricks. “We’ve always got these ideas. An example, for a long time, we were trying to find a way to make the dog pee any drink the audience would name. So if they named like a Budweiser, he would pee a Budweiser. It took like three years and Teller got involved as well, and we finally made it happen. That trick’s in the Vegas show, because we do all different tricks on the road.”

And as for the timeless lure of magic?

“I think it’s one of the few things that still brings a sense of wonder. In these days, when everyone’s so cynical about everything, it’s nice to have a little bit of wonder.”

Piff the Magic Dragon and Mr. Piffles perform at 7:30 p.m. March 22 at the MACC’s Castle Theater. Tickets are $25, $45, $55, $65 and $125, plus applicable fees.