The Jerx Calamity Sentence
/In 1961, during Richard Feynman’s first lecture teaching introductory physics at CalTech, he made the following remarks:
If—in some cataclysm—all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
Now, I’ve already had one successful blog that disappeared into the ether 15 years ago. So there are no guarantees this one will always be here.
So today I want to focus on the Jerx Calamity Sentence. This is the one sentence that would allow you to reconstruct a lot of ideas from this blog if you were to work backwards from the central idea contained in the sentence. It’s a sentiment I’ve expressed before, but perhaps didn’t put all the weight on it that I should have.
And that sentence is this:
The experience of MAGIC is created by the gap between what the spectator knows to be true and what feels real to them in the moment.
For me this has been the most useful definition for a “magical experience” or the “the feeling of magic.”
If we expand the calamity sentence slightly, we get these two concepts:
1. The feeling of magic is founded on disbelief. If what they believe is possible is in line with what they feel they’re experiencing, you don’t have magic.
2. You can increase the power of the magic experience by creating a greater gap between what they know is true and what seems real in the moment.
So this isn’t just a definition, it’s actionable.
We can widen the gap in two ways:
1 - Making our premises more unbelievable.
and/or
2 - Making the experience feel more real.
Making the premise more unbelievable is sort of self-explanatory:
“I knew which hand held the coin by reading your body language.” Believable and possible. If you do it well enough that it feels real, they’re like to believe it is real. It may be impressive, but that’s not going to overwhelm someone with a feeling of magic.
“I can know which hand you put the coin in five times in a row because of my powers of ESP.” Less believable, but still mildly plausible. While it seems unlikely that someone could intuit which hand someone would place a coin in, it doesn’t have the ring of something absolutely impossible. The gap is there, but it doesn’t feel very profound.
“I knew which hand you’d put the coin in five times in a row because this is my 12th time living this day, and you always hide the coin in the same sequence.” This is unbelievable and impossible. But if you are able to build up the premise enough and support it in a way that it feels real—even if just briefly—then you’ll have that strong, otherworldly, magical moment.
Making the experience feel more real is done by:
A) Stripping away anything that feels false (other than the premise) or performative. So no heavy-handed patter; canned jokes; or unjustified, convoluted processes.
and
B) Adding elements to your presentation that reinforce the premise, beyond what is necessary for the performance. These are things I call “extra-presentational techniques,” (hooks, reps, imps, buy-ins, etc). These techniques make the experience feel emotionally more real to people because they go beyond what is necessary if what they were seeing was “just a trick.”
Not every trick I do reaches the level of being truly “magical.” That’s a tough bar to clear. Often I fall short, but that doesn’t mean the trick wasn’t a fun or fascinating or exciting or unique or funny or intriguing or mystifying experience.
But when I do reach the goal of something that goes beyond fun and fooling to some level of “enchanting,” it’s because I’ve hit the sweet spot described in that sentence. The real magic feeling comes out of the harmony in the duet between their rational mind saying, “This isn’t real,” and their irrational mind saying, “Holy hell, this is happening!”