About Boris Cherniak — The Incredible Boris
Every recording in this shop is written and voiced by one person. Not a script library, not a stock narrator, not an algorithm. Here's who you're listening to.
Hypnotising people since 1982
I started performing hypnosis in 1982. In the years since I've performed more than 10,000 shows in over 35 countries — theatres, corporate stages, universities, cruise ships, and rooms where nobody believed a word of it until fifteen minutes in.
Along the way, television: regular talk show appearances including Maury, The Howie Mandel Show and The Robert Irvine Show, and my own half-hour special, Comics. My performances have been watched tens of millions of times online. In 2023 I joined the cast of HYPROV, the Las Vegas touring show that combines hypnosis with improv comedy alongside Colin Mochrie of Whose Line Is It Anyway?
The other half of the background
Before and alongside the stage work, I studied computing and psychology at Seneca College, York University and the University of Toronto. The psychology is the obvious half — it's the difference between knowing that a suggestion works and knowing why, and it's what stops a recording being a collection of nice-sounding phrases.
The computing half is less obvious and, honestly, more useful than it sounds. Both disciplines are about the same thing: what happens when you give a system precise instructions, and how badly things go when the instruction is ambiguous. That is exactly the problem in writing a hypnotic suggestion. "Don't think about the cigarette" is a badly specified instruction, and the mind executes it the way a machine would — by loading the cigarette first.
What I actually believe about all this
Here is the idea the whole shop rests on. A mind is a machine that has been programmed, mostly by accident, and it can be reprogrammed on purpose. Nobody sat down and decided you would want a biscuit at four o'clock or freeze in front of a microphone. A routine got written by repetition and has been running unmodified ever since, because nothing ever overwrote it.
That reframe does something valuable before any hypnosis happens: it moves the problem out of the category of moral failure. You are not weak. You are running old code. And code can be rewritten — precisely, deliberately, through repetition — which is exactly what a recording is for.
I should be straight with you that this is a working model rather than neuroscience. A brain is not literally a computer; it has no clean split between hardware and software, and you cannot delete a memory. But held loosely, the metaphor points at the two things that genuinely change behaviour — precision and repetition — and it does so without making you the villain of the story.
And the reason it's funny
People assume the comedy is a separate career from the serious work. It isn't. Laughter is how I get the message in, because a relaxed and amused mind absorbs things a tense, self-critical one refuses.
There's research behind that instinct — humour activates the brain's dopamine reward system, funny material measurably improves short-term memory performance while lowering cortisol, and appropriate humour improves retention in classrooms. But I knew it from the stage first. The problems people bring to hypnosis are the ones they're most ashamed of, and solemnity feeds the shame that holds the pattern in place. Get someone laughing at the absurd logic of the craving — at the pattern, never at the person — and the grip loosens before a single suggestion has been made.
Combining computing, psychology and comedy sounds like three unrelated careers. From where I stand it's one method: work out what the program is, write a better one precisely, and use laughter to get past the door it would otherwise bounce off.
If you found this shop because you saw me somewhere and wondered whether the same thing could work on you at home — that's exactly why these recordings exist.
Why a comedy hypnotist makes serious recordings
It's a fair question, so here's the honest answer. Stage hypnosis and self-hypnosis recordings use the same underlying mechanism: focused attention, then suggestion. The difference is entirely in what the suggestion is for. A show suggests you've forgotten your own name for ninety seconds. A recording suggests that reaching for a cigarette no longer feels like relief.
What 10,000 live shows give you that no classroom can is calibration. On a stage the feedback is instant and public — you find out within seconds whether a phrase landed, and you learn what words actually do to people rather than what the textbook says they should. Four decades of that is a strange kind of training, but it is training, and it's audible in a well-written script.
Training and credentials
In 2008 I completed the Registered Hypnotherapist curriculum at the Harvard Institute of Hypnosis — a private hypnotherapy school, not affiliated with Harvard University — and was recognised as a fully qualified Client-Centered Hypnotherapist.
Worth stating plainly, because the name invites the assumption: the institute is an independent hypnotherapy school. It has no connection to Harvard University or its medical school. I would rather tell you that myself than have you wonder.
Professional memberships
- National Guild of Hypnotists
- Association of Registered Clinical Hypnotherapists
- International Stage Hypnotists Association
Formal training matters, but so does the other kind. 10,000 live shows is 10,000 experiments in which words land and which don't, run in front of audiences who give you the result immediately and without mercy. No classroom offers that.
What I won't tell you
That hypnosis is magic, that it works on everyone, or that a recording replaces a doctor. It doesn't. I've written a long, honest page about what hypnosis MP3s can and can't do, including the research that doesn't support my profession as strongly as I'd like. Read that before you buy anything.
Elsewhere
- incredibleboris.com — live shows, keynotes and booking
- Full biography
- TV appearances and show footage
- Watch clips here