A Magician's Guide to Exploiting Failure Pt. 1

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While the subject of failure in mentalism may be up for debate, in traditional magic, it’s not the sort of thing anyone really advocates for. It would seem there is little to be gained from failure in magic. If your double lift splits or your coin shell falls off your half-dollar into your spectator’s lap, it’s hard to paint that as being a good thing in any respect.

That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but there are ways to artfully use failure to add another layer to your performances.

Over the next couple of posts I’m going to talk about two of those ways. Today’s post is about…

The Magical Failure

“I’m going to make your card vanish,” you say. You place it on the table and rub it with your hand. You lift your hand and it’s still there. “Shit.”

“Is it smaller,” your friend asks?

“Is it?” you say, and pick it up and hold it next to another card. “Yeah, a little, I guess,” you say, unimpressed. “It’s supposed to completely vanish.”

This trick—which just requires a force, a top change, and a bridge-sized deck of Bicycle cards—is an example of a “Magical Failure.” You’ve failed, but something impossible has still happened.

Another example. In the past I’ve used the technique described in this post to perform this…

I force a four on someone, “With just a flick of my finger I will split the 4 into four aces,” I say. I hit the 4 and it splits into an Ace and a 3. “What the hell,” I say, and pick up the three and sort of scratch at the edge like I’m trying to figure out why it didn’t split into its component aces. “These things are $8 a piece. Stupid Ellusionist garbage. This is the third one that hasn’t worked right.”

Depending on the person you’re performing for, your reaction to the “failure,” and the nature of the trick itself, these Magical Failures may or may not come across as genuine failures. Your audience may be 98% sure that it was just a trick and you planned for that to happen. That’s okay. A 2% doubt is good enough to toy with their minds a little.

The more you use this technique on someone, the more likely they are to see as something you’ve planned. That’s fine. It’s still a fun presentational conceit. And if you’re like me, and you’re stubborn, and you never cop to it, they can never be completely sure.

In my experience, the keys to making a Magical Failure ring true are these:

  1. Perform for someone who hasn’t see you do too much magic.

  2. Prepare them for a something big, and then do something subtle. Ex: “I’m going to make this dollar bill levitate with my mind.” You strain for a while and eventually the bill shifts a little bit on the table.

  3. Keep your reactions contained. Don’t go too big. Express minor frustration/disappointment/confusion. “Damn. Why is this so hard?” And then move on. They may say something like, “Hey, but the bill still moved. That was pretty crazy.” You completely dismiss this. “No… you see, it’s supposed to float up like three feet. The guy who taught me made it look so easy. But he also meditates like six hours a day.”

In the next post I’ll explore another type of failure that I use in my interactions. While Magical Failures give people some magic in the hopes of messing with their minds a little bit, what I’ll discuss on Monday gives people NO magic, but can screw with their head even more intensely.