Mustang graduate Ted Campbell thrilled Bill.
Campbell licked a 20-inch long branding iron before swallowing it while twirling two ropes Sept. 28 on NBC's “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno as William Shatner watched rubbing his own throat.
“It must be lonely on the prairie,” Shatner told Campbell. “Do you have a sister?”
“Stop with that,” Leno scolded Shatner, who is best known as Capt. James T. Kirk on “Star Trek” and Denny Crane on “Boston Legal.”
“That's pretty thrilling,” Shatner said. “That's a thrill.”
Campbell, a variety comic, usually sticks to swallowing swords, hammering nails into his nasal cavity, eating fire and slicing paper with bullwhips with precision. He's also known for asking audience members to stand on his chest as he lies shirtless on a bed of nails.
He said he changed his tricks up a bit, playing to Shatner's love of the west and his horse ranch.
During the bit, Leno asked Campbell if he liked horses. Campbell answered “Not particularly.”
“When I was a boy, I was bucked off a mule and landed on my head,” he replied, straight faced, playing his character.
Mustang roots
Campbell tells a joke: “When I was a little boy, I told my dad when I grow up I wanted to be a magician. He said I couldn't do both.”
All joking aside, Campbell said his father, an Oklahoma City police officer, and his mother, an accountant, did everything they could to help him reach his dream.
Campbell started out doing magic and card tricks for his classmates at Mustang Valley Elementary and Mustang Middle School.
He never thought about the “don't try this at home” arts until he was a preteen at the Oklahoma State Fair. His father was working security for the fair and gave him a few free ride tickets and $5 for lunch, warning him to not spend it at the sideshows.
As soon as he was out of sight, Campbell said he made a beeline for the sideshow tent.
“When I saw someone swallow a sword, eat fire and hammer a nail in their head, I said, 'Oh my God, that is real.' I fell in love with it,” he said.
Campbell started by reading every book on Houdini he could find and begged his father to use some of his Navy knot-tying skills to entangle him in rope so he could see if he could free himself.
“I'd flop around on the floor trying to get out of it,” Campbell said.
His father taught him how to pick handcuffs and brought home the boy's first straitjacket. Campbell still uses the straitjacket escape in his show.
“They were the most supportive parents in my crazy dream,” he said.
Earning his chops
Campbell seeded his dreams performing at local birthday parties and retirement centers. He performed with the Mustang High School drama club and competed in state contests, before graduating in 1989.
Campbell took center stage at county and state fairs and Frontier City. He said he performed in most of the local community theaters including five years with the Lucky Penny Players on the local library circuit.
He even donned clown makeup as the host of a local TV channel's kids club cartoon show.
Then Campbell started booking himself at local comedy clubs — he said he did it all by himself, acting as his own agent.
“I worked my way up to when I was on the road traveling,” he said.
Campbell became a regular at Six Flags St. Louis and then auditioned for several cruise lines. In 2002, he broke through to Carnival Cruise Lines and got to travel throughout the Caribbean, south to Hawaii and north to Alaska. Campbell also worked for Norwegian, Celebrity and Royal Caribbean.
“It's been great,” he said. “I saw more of the world than this old boy from Mustang thought he could see.”
More recently, Campbell said he's started to settle down in Orlando, where he still works for Walt Disney and Universal Studios. His wife Helen, a dancer he met on a ship, is retiring and working at the Gaylord Palms resort in entertainment.
Meanwhile, his own son, Camden who grew up in the Yukon area, is attending Logan Virginia Military Institute.
“My dad was a cop, I became a comic — my son is a military man,” he said. “It makes sense somehow.”
Don't try this
at home — seriously
The economy took a deep bite out of variety entertainment, and Campbell said even if he hadn't retired on his own, the cruise ships likely would have cut his act to save costs.
With so many people unemployed or worried about being laid off, he said it makes sense fewer Americans are taking vacations.
Then the Internet is overflowing with videos of people dabbling in the circus arts on their own without training or experience.
There's a lot of bad information surfacing, and while Campbell said he doesn't discourage aspiring performers from chasing their own dreams, they need to do their homework.
Campbell's most requested stunt is hammering a standard household nail up his nose, called Blockhead. The nail doesn't collapse, but is placed at a specific angle into the nasal cavity.
“The placement is extremely crucial,” he said.
When Campbell first started fire eating he said he did everything wrong from the materials he was using for his torches to the ignition fluid. He frequently singed his hair, and burned his lips and tongue until another professional set him straight.
Campbell said he still gets burned from time to time but not as bad.
“There is a lot more goes into it than you think,” he said.
The most rare and risky of Campbell's stunts is sword swallowing. Fewer than 100 artists are listed with the Sword Swallowers Association International because it is such a difficult skill to learn.
Campbell said it took him 10 years to learn the stunt. Again the sword doesn't collapse on itself.
The artist has to retrain all of the muscles in his esophagus and entering the stomach to relax to make room for the sword.
During the stunt, Campbell said the tip of his sword is inside his stomach.
Sword swallowers dull and lubricate the blade, but the object still passes down the esophagus, close to the lungs, heart and other organs. Mistakes can cause internal bleeding and, in some cases, death.
Campbell said he's mostly had some bruising, nothing that has needed medical attention, but that's because he researched and practiced for years before being able to achieve the stunt.
“I study the anatomy on my own, where it goes, how the body works,” he said.
Even after 20 years, Campbell said he still gets a kick out of watching his audience's reactions.
“I like making peoples' faces do things they don't know, and then making them laugh about it,” he said.