My Conversation with Dai Vernon: Part 2

In yesterday’s post, I told you how Dai Vernon contacted me via a Ouija board and told me his old saying that “the best effects can be described in one sentence,” is no longer applicable. How—in the 21st century—having an effect that can be described in one sentence is the exact same as having an effect that is easily google-able. And that we have to suspect that anyone who is truly fooled and captured by an effect is likely to google it later.

This was what sent me spiraling. And I asked Dai what the purpose of performing was if people just want to google and figure out the secret? Why bother creating a magical experience for them if their natural inclination was to undermine it?

“Oh, you’re misunderstanding things,” he said. “Think of it like this. Imagine you gave your wife a card for your 20th anniversary. And inside the card you wrote her a little note. Just a couple of sentences. And they were the most romantic, heartwarming words she’d ever read. They were so beautiful that she almost couldn’t believe you wrote them because you usually don’t express yourself like that. Later that evening she thinks, ‘Okay… I just have to know. Is this his own original sentiment or did he get it from somewhere else? Did I really inspire these words?’ So she googles what you wrote to see if it pops up somewhere online. What is it she’s hoping to find?

“Or,” he continued, “let’s make an even simpler comparison and keep it in the magic realm. A woman is lying on a table on stage and the magician makes her vanish. The audience thinks, ‘Hmm.,.. she’s probably under the table, hidden by the tablecloth.’ Right as they’re thinking that, the magician walks around the table, and grabs a corner of the tablecloth. And just at the moment that the Peter Gabriel song reaches its crescendo, he whips the tablecloth away. What do you think the audience wants to see? Do they want to know how it’s done and see the woman crouching beneath the table? Or do they want to see nothing but four bare table legs and the glimmering scrim in the background?”

“So you’re saying….,” I trailed off. Not exactly putting it all together yet.

“You’re asking why you should bother doing magic if you have to concern yourself with the audience googling an effect after it’s done. But the stage magician doesn’t ask himself why he should bother doing the trick if he has to concern himself with the audience wondering what’s under the table. He just creates the trick in such a way that the audience can look under the table. And he does this because he knows the audience will suspect the woman is there but actually they don’t want to find the woman under the table.

“The wife googles the husband’s love note hoping to get no results. Only by doing that can she be certain that what she has is special and unique.

“And it’s my belief that when a spectator googles a trick after you’re done—they may not know it—but this is what they’d really like to find…”

“So they want to be fooled?” I asked.

“That’s probably not the wording I would use,” Dai said. “What I would say is that people—on some level—want to experience a unique, unexplainable mystery in a safe and fun setting. Who wouldn’t want that?

“Sure, if they feel like you’re trying to make them feel stupid or to lord your genius over them, then they may want to figure out your trick in order to take you down a notch. But if you present them with something really enjoyable and fascinating—that isn’t just about your specialness—then I would look at them googling the trick as them trying to discern if what they just experienced was truly as wonderful as it initially seemed.”

“Just like the person looking under the table for the girl,” I said.

“Exactly. They need to look for a potential answer in order to contextualize how to feel about what they saw. If they get 50,000 results—even if they don’t learn the precise method—they may think of it as a cool trick, but probably not much more. It’s just something a bunch of magicians all over the world are doing. It’s nothing to get too worked up about. But if they get no results, then it’s going to fee like a rare, intimate, personal experience.”

“As magicians, we must expect people to try to put in a bare minimum of thought and effort in order to figure a trick out. In 2020, googling something is almost the least amount of effort someone could employ to figure something out.”

It was all clear to me now. “And that’s why you say we should no longer strive to have effects that can be described in one sentence. Because those are the most google-able effects we have.” The Ouija board nodded up and down. “Sooo… but wait… what’s the alternative? Convoluted effects? That doesn’t seem like a good option either.”

“No,” Dai said. “It’s not. I sometimes worry that magic is headed in a direction where magicians will start gravitating towards complicated multi-phase effects, because at least those can’t be unravelled with an obvious google search. But that’s not the answer. I think the answer is to put the effects in simple and compelling contexts that can help camouflage the effect, in a way. If you craft an experience for the person that feels like more than just the trick itself, you can sometimes charm and misdirect the person away from the basic effect. You can’t do it with every trick. Ring-flite, for example, might be one of those tricks that is doomed to forever be a simple google search away from being seen as ‘just a trick’ to the spectators. But a lot of tricks can be expanded on in a way that prevents that sort of thing. Do you know what you should read?”

Me: What’s that?

Dai: There’s this site called The Jerx.

Me: Uhm, Dai…

Dai: It’s great. The best writing on magic in the history of the art, and honestly, second place is not even close.

Me: Here’s the thing…

Dai: You’ll see him do this throughout his work. (You have to become a supporter though, to get the really good stuff. I don’t think he’s taking on any new ones at the moment, however.) You should see how he builds an effect up and how he builds it out. It’s really something. A true genius. I can’t say enough good things about him.

Me: Dai, I’m him.

Dai: You’re him? Him who?

Me: I’m the guy who writes the Jerx. I told you at the beginning I write a magic blog.

Dai: Yeah, but you told me your name was Susan.

Me: That’s when I was trying to coerce you into the Ouija-equivalent of cybersex. I thought you’d be more interested if I was female. But unbeknownst to you, I was going to put my beautiful dong through the hole in the planchette and see if you could move it around enough to get me off phantasmagorically. As I sit here now, spelling out this idea letter by letter, I can almost see how it might sound a little stupid to some people. But you can’t blame me for wanting to get freaky with the spirit of the finest close-up magician of the 20th century. Can you?

Me: Can you, Dai?

Me: Dai?