Dear Jerxy: More is Less

Dear Jerxy: I've found your posts about spectators googling tricks to be fascinating, and there have been a ton of stupid responses. While I agree that you can't charm someone into not googling a trick, I do think there is some nuance in the difference between amateur and professional performers.

I live in Chicago now, and a few months ago a neighbor was telling me about when he and his fiance went to the Chicago Magic Lounge and had a wonderful time. I asked if he remembered who he saw - he said no. I asked if he remembered any good tricks - he said he enjoyed the close-up tricks at his table, but he was unable to describe any effects that he saw. After a night of drinking and seeing a huge variety of magic, he wasn't able to pick out any details, and hence had nothing to google. He was just left remembering how he felt. I know that I want my magic to be more memorable than the venue, but his experience was still positive.

I think a lot of professional performers like Bill Malone or Chad Long have this effect on people, too. Even if you see them at a party and they're the only performer you see, there's so much strong magic coming at you that it's hard to remember what the effects were when you try to google it the next day. But at the same time, lay people who have seen them perform remember their shows and talk about them ecstatically. I think (or hope) that when people write to you to say that lay people won't google something if the performance was good, they mean that certain performance styles make it difficult for spectators to remember each distinct trick and therefore more difficult to google.

But in an amateur performance, you're unlikely to perform 10 minutes of card magic with jokes sprinkled in. In fact, if you do, it will probably feel awkward. But if you were to perform just Bill in Lemon, you'll have a strong reaction but the audience will easily remember it and google it.

Since you recently wrote about Anniversary Waltz, this is actually the trick that got me thinking about Google-abliity. A few years ago, I was doing a walk-around gig with four other magicians in New York. Early on in the night, I did Anniversary Waltz for a couple. Two hours later, they came up to me and said that they were impressed with the trick, and he had tried to google it and found nothing. He said he tried changing the phrasing 10 times and still wasn't able to find it. He tried things like "cards melting together magic trick" and "merging cards in hands magic trick". Maybe there are some laypeople who can keep at it until they find the trick on Google, but after someone told me they spent a considerable amount of time trying to find this trick and he was unsuccessful, I'm convinced that there's something about my scripting for that trick that makes people google the wrong things. But the other thing I learned is that if someone tries to google something and can't, it makes the trick even more memorable and special than if they had decided not to google it.

I'm mostly curious to hear your thoughts about the first point - that some magicians perform google-able tricks but the pace of their performance prevents people from remembering enough to google the tricks.

Signed,
Could Unfettered Magic Reduce Audience Googling?

Dear CUMRAG: Yes, absolutely. I’m going to get back around to your point, but here’s something that I think is very important for magicians to understand, regardless of how they feel about google-ability or anything like that: The experience of seeing one trick is wildly different than the experience of seeing three or five or ten tricks.

This is something I struggle with, even though I know for certain that it’s true:

The overall impact of the magic tricks you perform for an audience is not cumulative.

If you show someone a strong magic trick, and follow it up with another strong magic trick, I believe you have slightly weakened the overall experience.

Think of it like this (substitute in the sexes that are appropriate)… Hopefully you’ve had the experience of going out to a party or a bar or something and meeting an incredible woman there. Let’s say she’s gorgeous and you have an instant rapport with her. There is a ton of chemistry and a good amount of sexual tension, and in a blink, 90 minutes have passed. She gives you her number so you can meet up that weekend. When you leave the bar you’re smiling like a jackass, you tip your hat to strangers on the street, and practically dance your way home. When you get home you look her up on Instagram and maybe google her name to see what else you can find about her. You’re completely infatuated.

But now imagine you went to a party and met a group of four women who you had similar feelings for. They were all beautiful, and you felt great chemistry with all of them. Is that interaction four times as impactful? Is it even as exciting as feeling that connection with one person? I would say no. Sure, it’s exciting in the, “Dear Penthouse Forum, you’re not going to believe what happened to me” type of scenario. But I don’t think it gets your heart pumping like one person would. The fact that it happened with four people just makes it seem like it couldn’t be that special.

I think this is what happens when you string together multiple strong tricks as well. Your spectators’ focus gets fractured. The amazement doesn’t build, it gets split off in different directions.

Going back to CUMRAG’s point, does performing multiple tricks affect a spectator’s likelihood of seeking out more information about a trick? Yes, definitely. People don't google tricks just because they were fooled. They also have to be a little obsessed with what they saw. When a professional magician says, "Nobody googles my tricks!" I believe him. Doing three tricks over 5 minutes in a restaurant or 8 tricks in a 45 minute parlor show is less likely to create that obsession over one particular trick. The professional's goal is to entertain and also to build up his own brand. For those purposes, more magic tricks probably is better (to an extent). It's more entertainment, more climaxes, and more reasons to be impressed by the performer.

Ssome amateurs have similar goals: being seen as "entertaining" and a certain amount of self-aggrandizement is the goal.

But personally I want to use magic to craft seemingly unique and amazing experiences. I want to leave them with one particular story or memory that they can't stop thinking about. With that goal in mind, it doesn't make sense to do a bunch of amazing tricks at once. Will doing a number of tricks lessen their likelihood of searching out more information about any particular trick? Yes, it will. But at the cost of lessening the impact of the effects generally, so it's not a good trade-off. It's much better, in my opinion, to focus your efforts on presenting the effect in a way that makes it ungoogleable.

This doesn't mean I only ever perform one trick. I'm not always going for a home-run when I show someone magic. Sometimes the goal is simply to keep people entertained for a little while. In that instance I will show people a few different "good" tricks. And other times I'll show people a couple of good tricks followed by one amazing one. Usually I'll introduce it by saying something like, "Those tricks were just typical sleight-of-hand type stuff. I've had an interest in that since I was a kid. But do you want to see something really weird that I just learned? This is the sort of thing you won't find in any magic book" So in this case the "good" tricks are being used as some mild entertainment and to set them up for something much more powerful. The good tricks will likely be forgotten about, but they set a baseline for what to expect and make the amazing effect seem all that much more-so.

So I'm not saying you should always only perform just one trick. I'm just saying I wouldn't recommend stringing together a bunch of amazing tricks because ultimately it's going to lessen the impact they would have individually—when they are the focus of the interaction, rather than just a part of it.