David Copperfield, originally David Kotkin, (born September 16, 1956, Metuchen, New Jersey, U.S.), American entertainer, one of the best-known stage illusionists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Copperfield is the first to admit that he entered show business to overcome his shyness with the opposite sex; he started out at age 10 as a ventriloquist. Switching to magic, he billed himself as Davino before adopting his more familiar Dickensian stage name (ironically, he claimed that he was never able to read Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield all the way through, finding the work “too dark” for his tastes).