#25: Dan Sperry (Season 5)
The last of the "expectations weren't that high for him" acts, Dan Sperry made his way into the semifinals in Season 5 during the Youtube round, which was, with the exception of Jackie Evancho, very disappointing.
In fact, most people probably voted for Sperry, not because his magic was any good, but because he managed to freak out Howie Mandel with a breath mint and some dental floss.
After Mandel had forced so many terrible acts upon America, and after he had, with each passing week, demonstrated such obsessive devotion to these awful acts that he could not even shut up about how much he loved them, it was probably really refreshing for America to force on Mandel an act they knew he wouldn't like.
Still, just like Elliot Zimet and many others before him, it became painfully evident in the semifinals that Dan Sperry was neither creative nor edgy.
For the semifinals, Sperry tried to deliver another "shocking" performance that involved severing Nick Cannon's arm and tattooing his autograph onto it. Unfortunately, the way Sperry decided to perform this illusion relied on one of the most shallow, blatant and completely unforgivable "tricks" imagineable.
It's been pointed out on the Examiner before that it can give away and subsequently ruin an act if the moment of the swap is immediately evident, even if it is done seamlessly or in less than a second.
Dan Sperry's moment of the swap relied, literally, on his cover marching in front of him slowly at center stage. While everyone was leaning in to their televisions to see if they could tell what Sperry was doing, his assistant suddenly cut in front of him, ever so slowly, marching for supposedly no reason whatsoever from one side of the stage to the next.
It was such an obvious ploy that the collective groans from the AGT audience could have registered a 1.1 on the Richter scale.
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