Hypnosis is an interesting subject, and definitely not the same as NLP, but as they both have similar intentions, you could say that there's a bit of an overlap.
I learnt self hypnosis about 30 years ago, and the guy who taught it, gave me a set of trigger words that took me into the hypnotic state, and I could then concentrate on the programming I wanted to give myself. This was completely different to the self hypnosis tapes that have just one specific task that you buy them for, but in the end, I didn't use it for a couple of years, and couldn't get the trigger words to work properly any longer.
What gets shown on stage is really a demonstration of how "susceptible" some people are to hypnotic suggestions, and these people will take suggestions far more readily than the normal people that can filter out what they are happy doing, and what they won't go along with, but about 15 years ago, I allowed myself to be used as a guinea pig on stage for a demonstration of the differences between hypnosis and mesmerism, and that was a bit of a shock to say the least.
The hypnosis demonstration counted me down, and I went into a hypnotic state, and then did a bit of arm raising and simple exercises to show I was hypnotised. But in the demonstration of memsmerism, he started doing arm movements over me and in front of me, and I just dropped into a much deeper state in seconds - and I was shocked at how easily he did it. I'd have loved to have learnt how to do it, but lost contact with the instructor, and haven't managed to find him since.