Mailbag: Thinking Like A Magician

If I had read your thoughts on Pro Caps before today [Sunday] it would have saved me $40 and some embarrassment. I got my Pro Caps on Friday and tried them out last night at a bonfire dinner we have in our neighborhood.

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I did end up getting called out twice on the caps in the four times I performed it. I knew they wouldn’t pass inspection or anything like that and I knew they didn’t exactly match a normal bottle cap, but that seemed to be thinking like a magician. I wouldn’t say it was magician’s guilt because I hadn’t read your post yet so I was highly confident going into the night. My last performance of the trick got the strongest reaction of the night but afterwards I almost knocked the gimmick off the table and my neighbor’s aunt said, “Oops. Don’t lose your special cap.” I was very tempted to toss it in the fire and say “Oh there’s nothing special about it.” But I chickened out at the end.

It would be good if you could partner up with Murphy’s or whomever and you could get effects pre-release to give your comments to us. You’re one of the few voices in magic that I trust to give an honest opinion. —JS

I appreciate the thought, but you may be confused about how magic marketing/promotion works if you think Murphy’s would want to partner up with me because I would give an “honest” opinion about things…that’s not what they’re looking for.

I don’t really have any more thoughts on Pro Caps. I don’t own a set and don’t see myself getting one. Hopefully the people who pick it up end up enjoying it. That’s pretty much my only thought on it at this point.

But I do want to dive into something you mentioned in your email: Thinking Like A Magician.

In the magic world we’re frequently being told, “Don’t think like a magician.”

Do these bottle caps look a little off? Maybe. But only a magician would notice that. You have to stop thinking like a magician.

Is this a big, bulky weird looking wallet unlike anything anyone carries in the real world? Don’t worry about it. Stop thinking like a magician.

You’re worried that the deck can’t be examined after the color change? That’s “magician’s guilt.” Stop thinking like a magician.

I have important information for all of you. As someone who has been involved with more testing of magic tricks than any human who has ever lived on the planet, there is no such thing as “thinking like a magician.” You’re not concerned about the bottle cap looking not-quite-right because you’re thinking like a magician. It’s because you’re thinking like someone with a couple functioning brain cells.

In the early testing days, we looked at the Ambitious Card to see what spectator’s ideas were in regards to how the trick was done.

The vast majority of the time, they suggested the possibility of some kind of trick deck.

Maybe it’s our performance, we thought. So we showed people Bill Malone, Doc Eason, Tommy Wonder and others performing the Ambitious Card. It didn’t matter who the audience was. It didn’t matter which performer they saw. “Trick cards” or “Trick deck” was always one of the top guessed methods.

We would soon learn that unless you controlled for it in some way, audiences almost always assumed a “trick” something was involved. A pen went through a bill? Trick pen. Coins jumped from hand to hand? Trick coins. One sponge ball became two? Well, it must be some kind of trick sponge ball that pulls apart, of course!

Questioning how much an audience will accept the normalcy of an object used in an effect is not “thinking like a magician.” In fact, it suggests a foundational understanding of how laymen think.

Any props that play a primary role in your effect will be questioned. You can get around this by using borrowed objects, examinable objects, and switches to make it feel like everything is normal. But you can’t get around it with wishful thinking.

How important this is to you may be something that comes down to the professional/amateur divide as well. If you’re a professional magician (or are performing in a professional style) people expect you to have your magic props with you. Do they probably know there’s something funky about your bottle caps? Yes. People don’t just carry bottle caps with them. In the same way they probably know there’s something funky about the box Copperfield put the girl in on stage. They allow for that in the professional performance because a professional performance is all artifice. Is the bottle cap fake? Sure. And the joke the magician just made was something he’s said 1000 times before. It’s all fake.

Social magic is less forgiving in that way. The whole goal of it is that the magic moment feels like part of a casual interaction. “Normal” objects have to really ring true as normal objects. What you say shouldn’t feel scripted. The moment should seem unrehearsed.

For the social magician, you can’t underestimate your audience’s suspicions. You need to anticipate them and adjust for them.

You might hope, “If I’m a great enough magician, that will get them not to question the objects I use.” But you have it backwards. You can’t get people to see you as a “great magician” until they get past their innate suspicions about the objects you use.