Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

WHEN FilAm Justin Rivera performs on stage, it’s the crowd’s laughter and faces full of surprises that keep him going.

"It’s that feeling I love," says Rivera. "I love watching their faces and seeing them laugh or shocked at something I do. It reminds me of being a kid again, like seeing a magic trick that totally fools you for the first time."

People will have a chance to see this rising 25-year-old magician from Chino Hills when he opens the Comedy for a Cause event at the Glendale Civic Auditorium this Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 7pm. The charity event benefits a Filipino founded nonprofit organization called Angels of the Valley Hospice Foundation.

Fresh from his first national TV appearance on Comedy Central’s "The Gong Show with Dave Attell", Rivera is on his way up in the entertainment world. Besides performing on Comedy Central, he’s performed with comedians Jo Koy, Edwin San Juan, Ron Josol, Joey Guila and ABS-CBN’s Slanted Comedy show for MYX-TV.

But unlike Koy, San Juan and Guila, Rivera is a comedian with a twist. Rivera is a comedy magician.

"You don’t see a lot of us out there," he says. "Some people have said that my style of comedy is an ethnic version of the Amazing Jonathan but with less blood and better magic."

And he admits that it’s a fine line to keep the audience laughing and surprised during a performance.

Rivera learned how to do magic when he was six years old. He recalls that from a very young age, he was drawn to magicians Lance Burton and David Copperfield. Recognizing this, his parents, originally from Manila, bought him a magic starter kit from a toy store and the precocious six-year-old couldn’t stop tinkering with it.

"It was just the amazement," he says. "When I would watch them, their tricks would just totally fool me and I just had to know how to do it and how to perform it. It’s like a puzzle. You look at it and you want to solve it and do it yourself."

By the time he was seven years old, Rivera was already performing in front of his second grade elementary class. For Halloween, Rivera would dress up as his favorite magician wearing a top hat, cape and bow tie. At 12, Rivera was charging $75 an hour to perform his magic act at birthday shows and family parties.

But it was when he was 13 that took his magic act to a whole new different level.

Hanging out with a few friends at a magic shop, a person recognized Rivera’s act and advised him to join the Magic Castle’s Junior Program.

The Magic Castle Junior Society is an exclusive program for promising young magicians between the ages of 13 and 20.