Have you ever wanted to feel as if your ass was on fire, and that the only way to get some comfort was to rub your posterior back and forth on a stage in front of 100 or so people? No? How about watching a friend do it while you sit back and laugh your guts out? Aha!
Anthony Cools, the uncensored hypnotist from that boringly polite country to the north, will have your hapless pal do that, not to mention play some air-violin (funnier than it sounds) and make sweet, sweet love to a chair (funnier than you can imagine). As you read this interview, you'll feel your eyelids get heavy, you're getting sleepy …
Have any of your volunteers from the audience ever done anything unexpected or went further than planned?
I saw a guy pop off a prosthetic leg and "stump" on the chair once in Gulfport [Mississippi]. I've seen gay guys come out of the closet. I've seen some pretty bizarre things. Because it's very spontaneous and depends on audience participation, I don't think there's a night that goes by that I'm not shocked by something happening.
At the end of the show, you shake the participants' hands and give them orgasms. The night I was there, there was a woman who had been on stage 14, 16 times. Do people get addicted to that?
Yes, they do. Any female that's turned hypno-ho … yeah … it's a very peaceful, relaxing, wonderful feeling that cannot be put into words. It's something that everybody should really discover for themselves.
So you can give a woman an orgasm that's 1,000 times more intense than any she's ever had by just touching her hand. Have you gotten any marriage proposals?
I get it all the time! People blatantly go to me and say, "I don't give a shit what you do to me, that handshake's well worth it!" I've seen it all. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. And, well, I'd do it again.
What has been your worst hypnotic experience?
I've had some fairly lame audiences at times. But that's basically it, so "No." … If you come with an open mind and you're willing to have some fun, you're going to have the best time ever at this show. If you come up there with this preconceived notion that you're not going to enjoy yourself, if you find offense in screwing furniture—which they're not—then don't. Stay at home.
At the end of the show, you offer to help people stop smoking, lose weight, or stop biting their fingernails through hypnosis.
I want people to know first off that what they're seeing is a very real experience. That what's happening before their eyes is actually what's happening, and I want them to know that hypnosis is actually designed to help people. It was discovered by Freud to help people with phobias and it's been used to help people quit smoking, weight loss, etcetera, whatever the therapeutic use may be. I just want people to know that that's what it was originally there for. I perverted it into my show, and I'm very pleased with the way I perverted it into my show.
If you were interviewing yourself, what would you ask yourself?
If I were to ask myself one question, I would say, "Anthony, what are you trying to accomplish? What is your goal with hypnosis?"
And what would your answer be?
My answer would probably be, when I die and I leave this earth, to be remembered like the Houdini of magic. I'd like to be remembered as the Anthony Cools of hypnosis.