Relatability

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Here’s my pal, Mike Hanford, “getting in his head during a self-tape audition.”

What makes this funny isn’t necessarily the mistakes he’s making, but his frustration with his own mistakes. You don’t need to be an actor who has had to self-tape an audition to find it funny. Many people have been in a situation where they had to recite or repeat something and found themselves talking without thinking or getting lost in their heads. Or even if you’ve never had that particular situation, we can all relate to the frustration of continually messing up something that shouldn’t be difficult.

The impact of a piece of art or entertainment is predicated on our ability to relate to it.

Magic has a relatability issue. We try to make it look like we’re doing something that can’t be done (often something no one would ever care to do even if it could be done) and then we do our best to hide how we’re really doing it. They can’t relate to what we’re doing. They can’t relate to how we’re doing it. And often, they can’t relate to why anyone would bother doing it. To push past just fooling the audience and actually capture their imagination in some way, I think they need a performer they can empathize with, or at least some aspect of the performance they can identify with.

This is why, when I’m establishing my relationship with magic to others, the last thing I would want to be seen as is: The Magician with real powers. To me that’s a dead-end artistically and intellectually. Instead, I want them to see my relationship to magic as one of me as a student, a seeker, an enthusiast, a researcher, a historian, a collector. These are all roles they can relate to in some manner.

Similarly, when performing a trick, I very rarely want it to be a situation where the magic happens with a snap of the fingers. I usually want to approach it in some manner where the magical pay-off is strong, but we get there in a manner that the spectator can relate to. Consider the presentation I offered last week for Club Sandwich. The magic moments are the same, but they have a different feel to them because they’re more indirect. I performed it a couple times this weekend and the reactions were stronger than I had anticipated. And I think it was, in part, because when I’m sitting there smacking the deck against the table trying to get the trick to “work,” people could relate to that situation. Everyone has smacked their remote control against the palm of their hand trying to get it to work, or otherwise resorted to physical violence against an inanimate object as a last resort when it wasn’t functioning like they wanted it to.

If you find yourself with a trick that is fooling people but isn’t connecting with them, you may want to consider ways of making it less direct and instead more relatable. This isn’t the most intuitive way to approach things when trying to hone an effect. Usually we think, “How do I make the trick itself stronger?” But consider this: If a juggler is expertly juggling 10 balls to polite applause from the audience, it’s unlikely that adding an 11th ball is going to ramp up the response in any significant way. The truth is, audiences would rather watch someone fail and struggle and crack some jokes and fail again and finally overcome with three balls than watch them expertly juggle twelve balls without breaking a sweat.