Farewell To The Amazing Randi

Edan Tasca

On October 20, one of the skeptical community’s fiercest members, James “The Amazing” Randi, died of natural causes. He was 92. Born in Toronto in 1928, Randall James Hamilton Zwinge was skeptical from a young age, having quit summer school as a child because his teachers couldn’t offer proof of the teachings of the Anglican Church. He started performing magic as a teenager under the name The Amazing Randi. Later he would add escape-artistry to his performances, eventually reaching a zenith with his audacious 1976 stunt of escaping a straight jacket while suspended upside down over Niagara Falls.

By the 1970s he had also gained international fame by publicly investigating the claims of alleged psychic Uri Geller, culminating in his 1982 book The Truth About Uri Geller. In preparation for what is a now-legendary Geller appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Randi counselled Carson to have the show produce its own materials for Geller’s tricks, and to not let Geller or his handlers near the materials before the appearance. Geller was off his game as a result, and wasn’t able to produce any of the effects he was usually able to.

In a bizarre twist, however, the appearance seemed to have the opposite effect than what Randi intended. Geller’s star seemed to be rising further, with increasing fascination about his supposed psychic powers. Randi decided that more was required to properly show such tricks for what they are — tricks. Thus, in 1976 he co-founded the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), with founding members Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, which in 1991 merged with a humanist organization to became the Center for Inquiry (CFI) that we know today.

The feud with Geller peaked in 1991 when Geller sued Randi and CSICOP for $15 million. The suit failed, but CSICOP leadership became uncomfortable with the fierceness of Randi’s criticisms of Geller and its potential for attracting litigation. Randi resigned from CSICOP rather than curb his public skepticism.

In 1996, Randi founded the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a non-profit aimed at offering grants to “promote critical thinking and investigate claims of the paranormal, pseudoscientific, and supernatural.” Johnny Carson was a major sponsor. JREF took up a challenge that Randi devised in 1964, when he offered $1000 to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal ability under proper investigative conditions. Through JREF, the offer was now $1 million, and formally named the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. It ended in 2015, when Randi retired from JREF. No one ever won the prize.

The JREF also hosted The Amaz!ng Meeting, a yearly gathering of skeptics, often including prominent speakers such as Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, and Adam Savage. These annual meetings began in 2003, the same year Randi was the first recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award, which celebrates excellence in “science, scholarship, education or entertainment” from an individual who “publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead.”

Magic act Penn & Teller have credited Randi as one of their inspirations. He has appeared on their Penn & Teller: Bullshit! series, in which they “hunt down purveyors of bullshit everywhere [they] can.” Commenting about their hero’s death, Jillette tweeted, “You invented us.”

Randi authored 10 books, including Houdini, His Life and Art (co-written with boxing historian Bert Sugar), Flim Flam, The Faith Healers, and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. He was a member of the LGBTQ community, having come out in 2010. He married his husband in 2013.

Randi’s death is a tremendous loss for the LGBTQ community, for Canada, for the world’s skeptical community. And it is a tremendous loss for CFIC. He invented us.