Canned Responses

Your favorite magician, Joshua Jay, wrote an article on how to respond to common questions magicians get over on the Vanishing Inc. blog. Do you have your own go-to answers for those common questions mentioned in that article, i.e., “Will you tell me how you did that?” “Can you saw me in half right now?” “Can you make my wife disappear?” —CM

Hmm… “Can you saw me in half right now?” Is that really a question magicians get asked a lot? I mean, sure, maybe after watching a Joshua Jay performance you say it. In the way that you’d say, “Can you please kill me now?”

Magicians are funny. They all perform tricks in a similar manner, and then they get similar responses from their audiences, and then they ask, “What’s a good response we can all give to these common questions we’re getting based on our indistinguishable performances?”

A canned performance leads to canned responses requiring canned answers.

You can avoid a lot of this sort of thing based on the way you interact with your audience when you perform. If you’re a professional doing tablehopping or walkaround magic, you might have no choice but to deal with these questions. It’s the nature of the business. And I think Josh’s article was geared towards people performing in more formal/professional circumstances, because the vast majority of these are professional-only questions.

“Can you make my wife disappear?” “Can you make the check disappear?” If you’re getting those types of questions in a social situation, you’re fucked. Because these are the questions people ask when they feel absolutely no connection with the performer and with what they just saw. That’s somewhat understandable if you’re their table-side restaurant magician and they just feel the need to say something at the end of your performance. But if you invited a friend to meet up for coffee and you’ve crafted some cool trick to show her and when you’re done she says, “Can you make the check disappear?” you just have to leave and keep walking until you hit the ocean and then continue walking until you drown yourself.

So, no, I don’t have answers to most of those questions, because they never come up.

The only one that really does come up is this:

“How did you do that?”

Here’s the important thing to understand: Usually, this question does not require a response. It is just a standard exclamation, like saying, “Wow,” or, “No way.” If you respond with an answer—”Very well, indeed!” or “If I told you, I’d have to kill”—then you are suggesting you have canned responses to questions in casual situations and that you’re incapable of differentiating between an off-the-cuff remark and a genuine request for information.

Of course, occasionally, a spectator really does ask “Can you tell me how you did that?” And they really want to know. If your magic is performed in a manner which is meant to highlight you as the magician, and you accomplish it with the snap of your fingers or the wave of a wand, then you are kind of stuck.

When you set it up as, “I’m the magician, and I have these powers,” there’s almost no other way that it can go other than the ping-pong back-and-forth of…

Magician: Ta-daa!

Spectator: How did you do that?

Magician: Very well, indeed!

Spectator: No, seriously. How did you know what I was thinking of?

Magician: Can you keep a secret? So can I!

Spectator: Can I look at the wallet?

Magician: Why don’t I show you something even more interesting.

The traditional magician/spectator dynamic is one where the spectator really only has a couple options when the trick is over:

1 - Praise you.

2 - Question you.

As a social magician, performing for the same people or groups of people over time, I can teach them that neither of these options are satisfying. I’ve found that shifting from a magician-centric approach to a story-centric approach tends to make both these choices lead to dead-ends for the spectator.

Let’s say I’m using a Haunted Deck. If I use a magician-centric approach and say I can cut the deck with my mind, then they can really only respond with, “Wow, you’re amazing!” or “Tell me how it’s done.”

But, if I use a story-centric approach and say this deck belonged to my grandma and it’s a very special deck to me because we used to play cribbage together. She passed away almost 20 years ago now, but every year on this date (the day she died) she sends me a sign that she’s still looking out for me. I ask grandma for a sign and then she cuts the deck to her favorite card.

Now, if the spectator says, “Wow, you’re amazing!” I reply with, “Huh? Amazing because I have a dead grandmother? What does that mean? Lots of people have dead grandmothers.”

If they say, “Tell me how it’s done.” I act as if I misunderstand the question. “I don’t know. I guess on the anniversary of your death your spectral energy is more powerful, allowing you to move physical objects. As long as they’re not too heavy, of course. That’s what the ghost experts say, at least.”

I simply just maintain the premise after the trick itself is completed. You can do this if your premise/story is strong. You can’t do this with a weak story like, “I have magical powers.”

Soon spectators learn that I don’t want praise, and questioning the “how” of the trick will get them nowhere. This forces them to either A) just sit with the mystery for longer—which is what my analytical-minded friends tend to do. Or B) engage with the fiction as if it were real—which is what my creative friends tend to do. Both of those are good options, as far as I’m concerned.

So that’s how I recommend answering the “How did you do that” question in social situations. Lean into the premise you established. The reason I do this is not to get them to believe the premise. I just want to get them to focus on the idea that it’s not the trick alone—and if it fooled them and how it works—that’s important. What’s important is how that trick fits into the story and the experience that they just had. The way you get people to understand that is by bringing it back to the premise, rather than with a clever comeback or by moving on to something else.