Monday Mailbag #49
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I’m new to the site and have been reading a few posts per day for a couple months now. The amount of information on the site is really overhwelming.
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What do you feel is the most easily implementable advice that will have the greatest impact on the performance of magic for an amateur? —EB
I will give you two related pieces of advice that you can implement instantly and have an immediate impact on your performances.
Those pieces of advice are:
Slow down
Don’t make jokes.
Slow Down - Your instinct is likely to rush to the climax. It’s understandable because that’s the “interesting part.” As magicians we decry the part of the trick where cards are being dealt in piles or counted or whatever the process of the trick might entail. And thus we try to barrel through that part to the point where the magic can finally happen. This gets you in a bad habit of not putting effort into the process of the trick, because that’s the part you’re trying to get through as quickly as possible anyway.
Don’t make jokes - Have fun, be funny, and make funny comments that come to you in the moment—if that’s part of your personality. But don’t have canned jokes you insert into your patter. You want the interaction to feel genuine, not scripted. Whatever you may gain by a laugh on a scripted joke you will lose more by making everything feel more premeditated.
You’re the one showing the trick so it’s up to you to frame the interaction. Speeding through it or forcing in jokes makes it seem like you feel apologetic for wasting their time with this thing.
Watch this lady give airplane safety instructions. She goes through as quickly as possible with a bunch of added jokes.
You might think, “That’s great! She made the whole thing entertaining.” I agree with you, but what she didn’t do was make you give a shit about the actual safety instructions. Even if you had never heard safety instructions before, you would know not to care too much about them. You would know they were a formality. Her speed and humor was her apology for making you sit through this mandated safety speech.
Instead, imagine you’d never been on a plane before. And this flight attendant sits you down one-on-one, leaned in close, and took great pains to focus your attention on the safety instructions. She walked you through how to use the belt buckle step-by-step. “I need you to focus. This is going to be super important,” she tells you, as she guides you through the way to use the life vest. For the rest of the flight you’re going to be on edge, head on a swivel, looking around ready to pounce into action because the instructions were delivered to you as if they were something important.
I’m not suggesting you be somber or move at a glacial pace when presenting magic. I’m just saying a good way to get people fascinated with the trick is to present it in the way you would something fascinating. If you had something really worthwhile to show them, you wouldn’t rush through it, and you wouldn’t add a bunch of dull jokes.
What post of yours generated the most negative response? —RC
Hmmm, that would probably be the post where I disagreed with Tommy Wonder’s thoughts on misdirection. I thought his ideas were a little too caught up in semantics. And beyond that I think his notion of directing their attention away from a move with something “thoroughly intriguing” is the wrong way to go (particularly in informal performances). If I want to misdirect someone attention, I’d much rather do it with something forgettable (adjusting my glasses) rather than something “interesting.” In my opinion, if you’re trying to misdirect what someone is looking at, you want something that is as unmemorable as possible, while still working consistently. Striking that balance is the hard part.
Now, the truth is Tommy and I were just coming from very different performing perspectives. And I think the kind of heavily choreographed misdirection he talks about does work well with long routines and in formal shows. But I don’t perform formally. And the fact he thought a multi-phase routine where the same thing happens 7 times in a row was a good choice for a talk show appearance, suggests maybe performing in more informal/interactive situations wasn’t his strength. (And yes, obviously the tubby host in the too-small glasses was no help with him getting through the routine. But the host wasn’t nearly as “hard” on Tommy as he was with this boy, and that kid never stopped singing.)
Now, because I’m me, and Tommy Wonder was Tommy Wonder, just the fact that I was disagreeing with him was considered blasphemous by some. So that garnered quite a bit of negative feedback. It didn’t bother me. I don’t mind when people disagree with me. I’m happy to learn more about things and change my mind. In this case though, the feedback was just more or less, “Who do you think you are!?” Which is actually a really ineffective way of arguing. Because you’re not saying, “Here are the reasons why you’re wrong.” It’s simply, “You must be wrong because you disagree with someone I like.”
Now, while that post got the most negative feedback, the follow-up post, Practical Misdirection for the Amateur Magician is easily in the top 2% for positive feedback on this site. With one magician calling it “some of the best actionable advice on misdirection ever written.” And the person who provided that quote was another Tommy Wonder-level magical genius, so Who do you think you are!? if you disagree with him.
Let’s say in your 100 Trick Repertoire you have the Invisible Deck but you have multiple presentations for it.
Do you class the Invisible Deck or the presentations as the factor taking up space in your repertoire.—CE
I would keep this as one listing in my 100 Trick Repertoire. The reason for that is I have 21 different presentations for the Invisible Deck that I’ve used in the past three years. And I wouldn’t want to list them all separately because it would take up too much space or just list a couple and forget about the other ones. So I have a main Invisible Deck entry and then a list of the presentations below it. When I’m “rehearsing” my repertoire, it’s just a matter of reminding myself of the ideas behind each presentation with the ID. I don’t actually bother performing them in rehearsal.
This is possible because—despite the wide variety of presentations with the Invisible Deck—the handling is almost always the exact same (spread the deck, separate at the card). This makes it a “Blank Slate Effect” in my terminology. And those types of effects generally only take up one “position” in my repertoire.
Now, conversely, let’s say I had two tricks with a Svengali deck. Those two tricks would require two separate listings because it would be quite likely that the tricks themselves would have different handling and choreography of action and all of that. So I would want to practice each one separately.