The Traditional/Social Performing Divide: Part One

I said I wasn’t going to wade back into the EDCeipt drama anymore. And it really wasn’t my intention to do so. Despite the fact that I recently learned the girl I’ve been dating online for the past two and a half years was really Michael Weber catfishing me. And now, not only have I lost the person that I thought was my soulmate, he also has all these sexy pictures of me that he’s threatening to release as part of a new website he and Trono are working on where they rate magician’s genitals on a scale of 1 to 100. The site is called MagiciansGenitalRatings.com. That’s got to be illegal, right? And how fucking unoriginal is that website name? Ugh.

I actually don’t have more to talk about in regards to the drama surrounding this trick, but I have been getting a few emails asking if I have any thoughts on how to deal with some potential weaknesses in the trick itself. I have some thoughts. But it will take a while to get to it.

One of those emails I received was from Edward H. who said,

“[Regarding the receipts themselves] The Tyvek receipts feel strange, the stores aren’t common to my area, the addresses are far away, the prices are all wrong.

[…]

How do people get their spectators not to notice these things? On facebook they said people don’t look at the receipts that closely but the trick REQUIRES them to look at them closely. Am I being gaslit? I’d accept that maybe I’m just a bad magician but I’ve had people comment on some of these issues before I’ve even really started the trick.”

I’m going to help clarify what’s going on here. I think what’s causing the issue here is not about whether you are a a good or bad magician. The issue here is caused by whether you’re performing in a social style or a traditional style.

When ProCaps came out, I wrote a post about Uncanny Valley props. These are props that are designed to look like common objects, but they don’t quite reach that standard. And because they’re somewhat off, they might as well be all the way off. Because a bottle cap that does something magical is going to be suspect to begin with. And if it’s not clearly normal and examinable then it doesn’t matter that it’s an “everyday” object. It will just come off as a fake everyday object.

After that post I received three emails from people who said things like, “You were wrong about ProCaps. I use these at my restaurant gig and rarely does anyone question them.”

If that’s the only feedback I’d heard, I would have posted here that maybe my initial impression was wrong.

But I also received a bunch of emails that said something along the lines of, “I thought you were being overly cautious when you said people would notice something odd about the cap [or the stack of coins] but you were right.”

And there was a clear trend on the people who were having a good experience with the trick and those who weren’t.

The people who wrote to say they liked it were performing the trick professionally. The people for whom the trick didn’t work well for were performing it socially.

Now, because my site is written from the perspective of a social magician—and a large portion of my audience performs socially rather than professionally—I was getting much more negative feedback about that trick. If this was a blog about performing magic professionally, the feedback about the trick may have leaned positive.

A very rudimentary assessment of this feedback might have someone say, “Ah, the lowly amateurs didn’t like the trick because they’re not as good as the professionals who can pull it off well.”

But that’s not what’s going on here.

Here’s what’s happening. Traditional magic is a capital-P “Performance.” It’s a separate thing from the normal interaction you’re having with someone. For the period of time the trick takes, you are clearly “The Performer.”

In Social Magic, the magic trick is a more casual affair. The dynamic isn’t “performer and audience” it’s “you and your friend.”

And it’s because of this that everything is judged differently by the people to whom you’re showing the trick.

For this post, let’s consider a simple example. Imagine a standard magic line. “Hold out your hand… no, the clean one. Oh… that was the clean one.”

You can say this in a professional show and people may think it’s funny or not, but they won’t be confused by it.

You can also say it if you’re showing someone a trick in a traditional way in your living room. Again, they may think it’s funny or not funny, but as long as it’s in context of a PERFORMANCE it will come off as your SCRIPTED JOKE that’s part of the PATTER for your MAGIC TRICK. They can categorize this sort of statement.

But if you’re performing in the casual/social style, this line is going to confuse people because it doesn’t fit with that style of the interaction.

Imagine I’m casually chatting with a friend over coffee. I ask her if I ever talked about all the time I spent trying to bend metal with my mind when I was a kid. Like months and months in 5th grade. I could never get it to work. But then for like a six weeks when I hit puberty I could do it. But the ability left just as quick as it came. But sometimes, like if I look at a picture of Elle McPherson on the cover of the 1988 issue of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue…

I get some of that energy flowing again and I can sometimes get it to work just a little bit. I pull up the picture on my phone. I ask for a quarter. I ask her to hold out her hand. “No, the clean one. Oh, that was the clean one.”

Do you see how out-of-step that is with the social style of performance? The style that’s supposed to replicate a real human interaction?

Any scripted, jokey line is going to feel out of place in that style. And it’s not because my friend thinks this story I’m telling them is true. It’s just incongruous and doesn’t fit with a naturalistic style of performing.

You can imagine a dream sequence on the Simpsons. You can imagine a dream sequence on The Big Bang Theory. But you can also feel how out-of-place a dream sequence would be on The Office, yes? Why? They’re all just half-hour sitcoms. They’re all clearly fictional. Why can’t the The Office have a dream sequence? Or a laugh track? Or a flashback to when Michael Scott was a kid? Because those things don’t fit with the mockumentary style.

That’s what’s going on here. There are certain things (props, tricks, lines) that work perfectly fine in certain styles of performance but they don’t mesh well with others.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at this distinction further and hopefully have a better understanding of why certain props and tricks are great for performing in the social style and why others are much harder to work with. And how this translates into some talented magicians thinking a particular trick is great, while other talented magicians can think it’s unworkable.