“The truth began to dawn that no one wanted to play poker with a 12-year-old cardsharp,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Sydney, Australia, in 1996.

Instead he turned his dexterity with cards toward magic tricks. “I was pretty adept at palming,” he said in a video interview with Full Circle Magic. “I’ve always had large hands.”

He began hanging around comedy shops in Chicago, honing his skills. He worked briefly as a fire eater and sword swallower with a carnival sideshow, then in 1951 made the first of countless appearances in Las Vegas — not as a magician, but as bass harmonica player with the Harmonicats, a popular group at the time, filling in for an ill member.

He excelled on the harmonica and was knowledgeable about jazz, and he played with other bands besides the Harmonicats and even formed his own. But magic was the work that stuck. Doing a conventional magic act, he was booked into Playboy Clubs with a comedy team, which got him thinking about incorporating humor into his own routine.

In 1969 he introduced the Great Tomsoni, the Wizard of Warsaw, a self-important fellow who couldn’t get his tricks quite right — producing a bowling ball from beneath some scarves, for instance, when he was hoping for a rabbit.

He married Ms. Hayes, an actress with strong comedic skills, in 1973, and the act became the Great Tomsoni and Company.

A classic routine featured the Great Tomsoni making a series of doves materialize and disappear. Ms. Hayes, in the role of magician’s assistant, is also made to disappear, in a sense — the Great Tomsoni inadvertently pulls her dress off, causing her to run offstage. Her other duties included informing him, partway through the bit, that his fly was quite noticeably down.