Mac King Comedy Magic Show

Comedy / Magic / Family

Season: Ongoing

The Mac King Comedy Magic Show has been running at Excalibur Hotel and Casino since 2000, making it one of the longest-running one-man comedy magic shows in Las Vegas history and one of the few afternoon Strip shows to maintain consistent critical acclaim and audience loyalty for more than two decades. Mac King — the Kentucky-born magician whose combination of close-up sleight of hand, physical comedy, and self-deprecating storytelling created a distinct performance style that influenced a generation of comedy magicians — performs Tuesday through Saturday at 3:00 PM in the Thunderland Showroom, with tickets available through Ticketmaster, Vegas.com, Viator, and the Excalibur box office starting from $29 for general admission and $39 to $76 for premium seating. The 70-minute show runs without intermission. Since the show opened in 2000, King has performed nearly 10,000 shows for more than two million audience members — a volume of repetition that would grind most performers into autopilot, but that for King has produced a performance so thoroughly rehearsed and calibrated that every beat lands with clockwork precision. The comedy element is not incidental to the magic: King's humor and his sleight of hand operate together in a way that requires both to be executed at the same technical level. The jokes create misdirection that enables the tricks; the tricks punctuate the jokes with physical payoffs. The structure is genuinely integrated rather than comedy-with-magic-interludes or magic-with-comedy-interludes. The close-up magic at the core of King's show is technically demanding in a way that his low-key presentation style tends to obscure. Card manipulation, coin magic, rope effects, and audience participation sequences that appear to be simple are constructed from sleight of hand sequences that take years of daily practice to execute invisibly. The self-deprecating framing — King performs in a plaid suit, tells jokes at his own expense, and adopts a guileless Midwestern persona — is a deliberate performance strategy that directs audience attention away from his hands and toward his face, which is where comedic magic technique requires attention to focus. The result is a show where the magic is genuinely surprising even to guests who are watching for the methods, because the misdirection is psychological rather than purely spatial. The Thunderland Showroom at Excalibur holds approximately 400 guests across its main-floor seating area. The theater configuration — with tiered seating and a relatively low stage — creates an intimate sightline for close-up magic performance, and the moderate room size means King can make eye contact with audience members throughout the show rather than performing for an undifferentiated mass in an arena. The audience participation sequences bring individuals from the audience onto the stage for effects that put them at the center of the trick, creating personal memories for those guests and additional comedy material for the room when things go the way they inevitably go. Mac King has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, Penn and Teller: Fool Us, and Comedy Central specials, and holds multiple Las Vegas Review-Journal Best of Las Vegas awards across multiple years. He is recognized within the magic community as one of the most technically accomplished close-up performers in the world, with a level of craft that is visible to specialists who attend his shows specifically to study his technique. For general audiences, the show delivers what the best family-friendly Las Vegas entertainment has always delivered: material that works simultaneously on multiple levels — accessible enough for children to enjoy the visual spectacle and the physical comedy, sophisticated enough for adults to appreciate the technical artistry and the structural jokes. Tickets and logistics: The Thunderland Showroom is located inside Excalibur Hotel and Casino at 3850 South Las Vegas Boulevard, at the south end of the Strip. The Excalibur is easily accessible by the Las Vegas Monorail from Park MGM and MGM Grand, by rideshare, or by walking from the MGM Grand or New York-New York corridor. The show starts at 3:00 PM Tuesday through Saturday, with doors opening 30 minutes prior. For guests planning an afternoon in the south Strip area, the Mac King show pairs naturally with lunch at one of the Excalibur or MGM Grand dining options before showtime, or with a late-afternoon pool visit at one of the nearby hotel properties. The ticket price is among the lowest for any Strip production at this level of quality — at $29 for general admission, the Mac King Comedy Magic Show represents one of the strongest entertainment values in Las Vegas. The question of why Mac King's show has sustained audience interest across more than 25 years and nearly 10,000 performances is one that gets at the nature of great live performance. The magic itself — the card sleights, coin work, rope effects, and close-up impossibilities — is technically demanding and has not diminished in execution despite thousands of repetitions. The comedy, which depends on timing as much as material, is the product of years of refinement through direct audience testing. Each joke has been told enough times that King knows exactly how an Excalibur audience in April 2026 will respond to it, but the performance remains present and responsive rather than mechanical. The audience interaction sequences are particularly telling in this respect: King brings volunteers from the audience into scenarios that are structurally predictable for a performer who has done them thousands of times, but that feel entirely spontaneous and unrehearsed to the participant and to the rest of the room. That ability to manufacture spontaneity is a specific performing skill that is distinct from both magic technique and stand-up comedy timing, and it is one of the primary reasons King's show has retained its audience loyalty through two decades of Las Vegas entertainment market changes. The family-friendly positioning of the Mac King Comedy Magic Show gives it a distinct niche among Las Vegas productions that skew toward adult content or late-night entertainment. The 3:00 PM showtime places it in the afternoon entertainment category alongside celebrity chef restaurants, poolside entertainment, and museum experiences rather than in competition with the nightclub-adjacent evening productions. Families with children who are too young for the adult humor and late hours of the Strip's evening shows but who want a genuine Las Vegas entertainment experience — production lighting, a real stage, a performer with national television credits — find in Mac King's afternoon show exactly the kind of accessible, affordable, and genuinely entertaining option that is rare on the Strip. The Penn and Teller: Fool Us television credit is worth understanding in context: Fool Us is a show in which professional magicians attempt to fool Penn and Teller with their techniques, and the bar for fooling them is sufficiently high that most professional performers fail. Mac King has appeared on the program, which is an endorsement of his technical skill from two of the most knowledgeable magic specialists in the world. For audience members who come to the show with an active interest in the craft of magic — rather than as casual entertainment spectators — this credential provides reassurance that what they are seeing is genuine technical achievement rather than novelty. The Thunderland Showroom at Excalibur runs the Mac King show with consistent production quality: lighting rigs are calibrated for the specific tricks that require visual isolation; microphone levels are set for King's conversational performance style rather than for projected theatrical voices; the staging positions audience participants in view of the full room while maintaining the intimacy necessary for close-up work. These are production details that matter to a show built on sleight of hand, where the sight lines and lighting conditions can determine whether a technique works invisibly or is accidentally visible. That the show has maintained these standards across two-plus decades of daily performances reflects operational discipline that is unusual even for long-running Las Vegas productions. For visitors making a first trip to Las Vegas who are uncertain whether to prioritize the show or other afternoon Strip activities, the Mac King Comedy Magic Show offers a decision framework: the show is 70 minutes, starts at 3:00 PM, and ends by approximately 4:10 PM — leaving a full evening for dinner, nightclub guest list, or any other Strip activity without schedule compression. The low ticket price eliminates the buyer's remorse risk that accompanies premium-priced headliner productions. If the show is not exactly what a visitor expected, the financial commitment is modest and the time commitment is well under two hours. In practice, the show consistently outperforms expectations because the technical skill involved is genuinely impressive to audiences who arrive without specific knowledge of what close-up magic and comedy magic at this level look like when performed by a world-class practitioner. The reviews on Vegas.com and Viator reflect this pattern: the most common formulation is a visitor who booked the show on a whim or as a daytime activity and came away rating it among the highlights of their trip. Excalibur Hotel and Casino at 3850 South Las Vegas Boulevard is one of the most recognizable properties on the Strip, with its castle-themed exterior and its position at the southern end of the casino corridor between MGM Grand, New York-New York, and the Luxor. The Thunderland Showroom is accessible from the main casino floor with clear signage and a dedicated entry corridor. Valet parking is available at the Excalibur front entrance; self-parking is in the adjacent garage. The property is connected to New York-New York via pedestrian bridge, extending the post-show walkable nightlife options. For visitors staying at the south Strip hotels — MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur itself — the Mac King show is a walkable afternoon entertainment option that does not require rideshare or transportation planning. The combination of accessibility, entertainment quality, and price makes the Mac King Comedy Magic Show the strongest recommendation in the Las Vegas daytime entertainment category for adult visitors and family groups alike. What makes the Mac King show worth attention beyond its obvious entertainment value is what it demonstrates about the economics of Las Vegas afternoon entertainment. The Strip's major evening productions — Cirque du Soleil, headliner residencies, the Blue Man Group — price at $100 to $250 per ticket and rely on the scale and spectacle of large venues to justify those prices. Mac King's show does the opposite: it prices at $29 to $39 and relies on the intimacy of the Thunderland Showroom and the personal skill of a single performer to justify the attendance decision. The Excalibur Showroom is not a large-format space, and Mac King does not have the production budget to fill a large-format space. What he has instead is a 25-year performance record, television credits including Penn and Teller: Fool Us, and the accumulated refinement of 10,000 performances that have turned a genuinely talented close-up magician into one of the most technically accomplished and consistently entertaining performers working in Las Vegas. For first-time Las Vegas visitors who want to experience the city's entertainment culture but are not certain which production to prioritize, the Mac King Comedy Magic Show is the recommendation with the lowest risk and one of the highest likely satisfaction rates among all Strip productions across all price tiers. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster and Vegas.com for all performance dates through the end of 2026, with VIP seating upgrades available at the box office for premium front-section positioning in the Thunderland Showroom. The show has run continuously since 2000 with the exception of the 2020-2021 pandemic closure period, and its return to the schedule after that closure was met with an audience that demonstrated the sustained loyalty that a 25-year run generates.