Jerxian Trick Shots
/Look, no one is more disgusted than I am that I’m using the adjective “jerxian.” I just don’t quite know another way to succinctly describe something that is reminiscent of the ideas on this blog (other than “brilliant,” I mean).
Madison H., sent along this email recently…
I was on Facebook this morning and saw a video that I think does a good job of demonstrating your style outside of a magic context.
It’s a guy who is acting like he’s cursed to nail every basketball shot he takes.
Clearly, we all know it’s fiction, but he plays it as real. Clearly he doesn’t want us to REALLY believe in the fiction, but it doesn’t take a *wink wink* or *nudge nudge* for the audience to understand that he’s only saying that to make it entertaining. It’s impressive the shots he’s making, but it’s much more intriguing to watch than other “trick shot” videos because there’s a narrative of trying to miss woven in. This narrative allows him to get creative with his shots and do things that would never be considered the “normal” way to shoot a basketball, but we don’t bat an eye at it because it fits into the narrative.
I love that video. It’s genuinely both amazing and funny. I don’t know if he was the first person to hit on this framing for a trick-shot video, but it’s genius.
As a trick-shot artist he’s fairly limited in the number of contexts in which he can present his shots. In magic we have so many potential contexts for a trick but we so often limit it to, “I have this skill/power and now I’m gong to demonstrate it.” It’s funny to see someone shy away from that framing even when he’s legitimately demonstrating a skill.
I think I mentioned in a post or newsletter recently that I’ve been doing a long-form (month’s long) performance piece with a friend of mine where I can’t lose any game I play. This started with variations on the 10-Card Poker Deal but has evolved into all sorts of games where I can control the outcome. Instead of presenting this as, “I have magical powers that allow me to win any game I play,” I present it like I’m so bothered by the fact that I never lose anymore.
It’s like that Twilight Zone episode, “A Nice Place To Visit” where the guy “wins” at everything he tries and therefore can take no pleasure at anything he attempts anymore.
This is a great way to “batch” together a number of similar effects to create one ongoing story-line.
Many years ago I wrote a presentation for Paul Harris’ trick The Perfectionist (#4 in this post), where I talk about being cursed by an old gypsy woman to not be able to shuffle cards. This was some of my earliest writing about presentation.
I remember an email I got afterwards from a guy who wrote me and said he wasn’t a fan of that presentation because it was “too theatrical.”
But it’s not. It’s only as theatrical as you make it. You can tell such a story and play it up, or you can play it very low key. That’s up to you.
The bizarre thing to me is that a couple months later this same guy posted a video of a coin trick where he said, “The leader coin calls the other coins to join it. So whatever hand it’s in, the other coins will follow.”
It blows my mind how comfortable magicians are with bland patter like this. Like, they’re going to make up a story… and then they choose a totally boring one? What is that instinct? I think it might be that a lot of the standard, corny, meaningless magician’s patter doesn’t require the performer to actually invest any bit of themself into the performance. The patter is just dead on arrival. It’s completely perfunctory. It’s like the dialogue in a porno movie. Magicians just want to “get to the good stuff.”
But what real people enjoy most with social magic is the presentation. Don’t waste it. Do what the trick-shot kid does and embrace it. The more fun you have with the presentation, the more fun the people watching will have.