LATE NIGHT — 1970s — As TV dumbed down and grasped for viewers, you never knew who would show up. On Carson. On Merv. Or early evening on Who Knows Who. One guy recited everything backwards. Another detached his sleeve and buzzed “The Star Spangled Banner” on his bare arm. A third put a paper bag on his head and went as “The Unknown Comic.” All had short careers.

But one guest, with shoulder length hair and a trim suit, had the strangest talent. He threw cards.

Ordinary playing cards, hurled like knives, zipped across the stage. An ace of spades sliced through thick paper. A jack of diamonds cut a cigarette held in clenched teeth. A queen of clubs chunked into a watermelon.

The Guinness Book of World Records cited Ricky Jay for throwing a playing card as fast as a major league pitcher. 90 mph. But while Late Night’s other one-trick ponies faded from view, Ricky Jay went on to become an “American Master.” Because along with throwing cards, there was almost nothing he could not do with a deck in his deft hands. Watch:

“To say that “Ricky Jay does card tricks,” a New Yorker profile wrote, “is a characterization as inadequate as ‘Sonny Rollins plays tenor saxophone.’” In a career that started at age seven and continued for sixty years, Jay was “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive.”

“Sophisticated,” Steve Martin said of Jay. “You don’t feel like you’re being amused. You feel like something larger is happening. Something that goes back maybe 2,000 years.”

It all began, as so much magic does, in Brooklyn. Ricky Jay Potash began doing magic tricks at age four. His parents were not amused. “My parents just didn’t get it and didn’t get me,” Jay recalled. But his grandfather was “an amateur magician on a pretty serious level.” So Ricky found himself welcomed into the eccentric company of Manhattan magicians. Slydini. Al Flosso. Cardini. Each was “something from an era that no longer exists,” Jay recalled. “The end of vaudeville. It just was wonderful, breathtaking.”

At seven, Ricky debuted on TV, doing tricks on a pet show. He never stopped performing. When his grandfather died, 16-year-old Ricky left home and went where all good magicians go — to the Catskills. There he tended bar, did tricks for customers and continued his love affair with a deck of cards.

“Cards are like living, breathing human beings. I suppose because they give you real pleasure. You sit in a room with them for ten or fifteen hours a day and they become your friends. Particularly very lonely people.”

Like all master magicians, Jay never revealed his secrets, so no one knows how he learned to defy wind resistance and hurl an ace at 90 mph. But by 1970, his forte allowed him to leave college for TV. He soon turned this singular trick into a book.

Cards as Weapons is now a collector’s item. The book’s wry humor and fanciful imagination has Jay using playing cards to perform surgery and hunt wild game. But once TV tired of his trick, Jay refused to disappear. Instead, he doubled down on sleight of hand and went to Hollywood.

In a dozen movies, Jay caricatured himself, playing slightly shady but amusing card sharks and con men. In the 1990s, he took his act to Broadway, performing Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, Ricky Jay: On the Stem, and Ricky Jay: A Rogue's Gallery, all directed by his friend, playwright David Mamet.

Though most consider sleight of hand to be merely astonishing, Jay took his craft very seriously. Fascinated by eccentric performers like himself, he began to research their long and buried history. “Early on, I knew I didn’t want to do the kind of magic other people were doing. So I started buying old books to look for material.”

Jay put his research into a second book, Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. The sardonic history tells the true stories of some of the strangest performers ever to grace the American stage. How could we have forgotten:

— The Great Malini, who conjured up blocks of ice from thin air;

— Clarence Willard, who extended his spine to grow six inches in full view of the audience;

— Arthur Lloyd, the Human Card Index, who upon audience request pulled any printed item out of his pockets.

Jay’s expertise gave him a second career — as “a serious scholar. I think he knows more about the history of American conjuring than anyone else,” the president of American Antiquarian Society noted. Until his death in 2018, Jay lectured on magic and its outré history, speaking at Ivy League colleges and major museums. His consulting company, Deceptive Practices, touted “Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”

Yet it always came back to cards. Holding them in your hand, Jay said on PBS’ “American Masters,” is “a meditative thing, just sitting there shuffling cards for hours and thinking about them. It’s almost infinite what one can do with them.”

CARDS AS WONDERS