Your Clueless Spectator Stories
/In this post I asked people to write in with their stories of clueless spectators. I got a good number of responses, however not all were what I’m referring to as “clueless.” Some were stories of dumb spectators. That’s something different. I like stories of dumb people too, but they’re not as interesting to me as a clueless spectator. Dumb people may mess up your trick. But they’d mess up their multiplication tables or an Arby’s order too. Fucking up is what they do.
“Clueless” spectators may be dumb. But sometimes they’re reasonably intelligent but just have a blind spot for magic. These are people who seem specifically clueless to even just the concept of what a trick is. They react to tricks in way that are almost impossible to prepare for.
There are certain elements that play into this. They might not have ever seen close-up magic before. They may be somewhat disengaged with the performance, so they’re not really following it like they should. Or they may be so unwilling to be fooled that they twist the experience in their head into one where they know what’s going on, when they really don’t.
I don’t know that there’s too much to be learned from clueless spectators. But it’s helpful to differentiate a clueless reaction from a bad reaction. I’ve had people not respond very well to a given trick, but then I find what sort of thing they like and I can get them really into certain types of magic. But a clueless response is really indicative of someone who will likely never be a particularly good magic audience. If you’re an amateur performer, I wouldn’t waste much time trying to find material that works for the clueless people in your life.
Here are some of your stories…
I was performing the linking finger rings in a show a few months ago. After the rings linked, I walked up to the first spectator to verify that her ring was on the chain and that it was truly linked. Her jaw was on the floor as she confirmed, "Yes, that's definitely my ring!" But her drunk husband said "No, that can't be your ring because yours isn't connected to two other rings." At first I thought he was being sarcastic, but it quickly became clear that he was just clueless. I dryly responded, "Yes, I've been doing magic tricks for the last 20 minutes, that might have something to do with it," and everyone had a good laugh. After the show, I was behind the curtain and I overheard him asking his wife about that trick because he still didn't understand.
Sometimes, a spectator will half-jokingly make a dumb guess ("Oh you must have hidden cameras," or "You guys are all in on it to screw with me"), but its rare that I get a spectator who says something whole-heartedly idiotic like in that story above. —KK
I had one clueless spectator who really stands out to me. She was a co-worker who was very interested when I started learning card magic. Some time later, I had gotten competent with David's Cull, and was using it to do Shuffle-Bored impromptu. So one day I was doing a couple tricks over coffee for a member of our organisation, and this co-worker was at her desk. Since she had was interested in the couple of tricks I showed her weeks prior, I asked if she could helps us with one.
When she came over, I had her shuffle the deck, and then used a Lennart Green type of presentation where I'm going to track the cards through some more shuffling, but this time face up and face down. First, I went through the deck, allegedly to concentrate on the order of the cards so I could track them through the next bit of shuffling. Of course, I was separating my stack for the coming reveal. I "cut" the cards and handed my stack to the guy, and the rest to her. They each shuffled, then the face up and face down bits, etc.
I told them the number of face down cards, number of black, number of clubs, and that all the clubs were even numbers. She pointed out that the three of clubs was in there, so not all even. I just shrugged and said I got close, so it was pretty good. She agreed.
But then the weird part happened. I asked her to look at a pad of paper over on my desk, the last page. As she went over, I said something like, "I did ok. Everything was right except the three of clubs." Naturally the last page had "except the three of clubs" written on it.
She paused a moment and then said, "Oh! So it's the same every time." I asked what she meant and she said it must be that any time you shuffle a deck of cards that way, you get the same result. Like she thought if you genuinely shuffle them (as she did at first), then two people each mix half-ish, then you shuffle the face up and face down bits, you'll automatically get the result we got. —LT
Here is one clueless spectator story that stood out for me from a long time ago. I was at a wedding reception and did a handful of card tricks for a bunch of friends of friends. At one point I did Invisible Palm Aces. After the next trick (be honest what is it), one guy said something along the lines of “you’re just palming the cards”, as if that would explain how two cards had changed in someone’s hands.
My own assessment —having had a lot of other cases over the years — is that many clueless spectator are the result of either a) the spectator wasn’t engaged in the trick to begin with and is basically zoning out or b) they find the experience of not having an answer so frustrating they just toss out any thing they can cling to, and decide that has to be the solution, even if it doesn’t make much sense. —AP
Did a coin bend in the spec's hand. When she opened her hand, her friends freak out. She turns to them and says "What's the big deal? I was squeezing as hard as I could." —AG
The following is a true story that haunts me to this day.
It was my first year in magic. I was 13. I was performing a show for my relatives. After I successfully transformed nickels to dimes (with a cool brass prop that I still use 49 years later), my Aunt Jeannie picked up one of the dimes.
Aunt Jeannie was neither retarded nor brain-damaged. Just dumb as a stump.
I watched in disbelief as she held the dime to her ear and shook it.
I shrieked, "What are you doing, Aunt Jeannie?"
She looked at me with a knowing smirk and said, "I know the nickel is inside the dime. I'm shaking it, trying to hear it rattle."
I was horrified and slack-jawed. I said nothing. I ended the show and beat a hasty retreat.
I couldn't comprehend how she couldn't understand that her satisfying solution was impossible. What the hell was going on inside of her head? —TF
When I wrote back to TF to suggest that clearly the woman was joking, he responded:
Nope. She was serious and certain that she busted me. She really was “a block, a stone, a less than senseless thing.”
On another occasion, a bunch of us kids were submerging our squirt guns in a tub of water to fill them. Jeannie put a balloon in the tub of water and was surprised that it didn’t fill with water! It works with squirt guns, why not water balloons?
Honest to God. That’s what makes it so chillingly horrible! This was in rural Cambridge Ohio. My relatives and most people there could have been extras in Deliverance. —TF
Didn’t happen to me, but I think it was David Roth who talked about a time he was doing a coins across, and got to the second coin, where he did the standard bit where you release the coin from classic palm to clink on the coin that’s already there. We think of this as the magic moment, but this one spectator looked up like she had caught him out and said “Oh—I heard it.” And for her that was the end. It wasn't magic that the coin travelled, because she heard it. —PM