Mailbag #101
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I began practicing magic only at the age of 20 when I met a magician in a bar. In that moment, I realized how incredibly powerful close-up magic is, and this started my journey to becoming a magician. Now, I have been supporting myself and my family as a mentalist for over 15 years. In retrospect, the tricks the magician performed weren't very remarkable, but they left a deep impression (invisible deck, thumbtip, ambitious card). However, I remember one trick stood out for its mediocrity. It was the "Haunted key". I wondered why the magician first told some ghost story and then showed how the key moved in his hand by just turning it. Since then, I've always been puzzled by how some magicians can deceive themselves so thoroughly. —JA
Last week’s mailbag brought out a few Haunted Key defenders and detractors to my email.
“No one ever questions the Haunted Key” was the defender’s position.
I’ve already broken down this “defense” in this post, so I won’t go deep into it again. But I’ll post this brief clip from a podcast I listened to last week.
You have to understand, this is the position of most people who watch magic. They “look and smile” and watch the performance. I have had to plead with people to tell me when they see through something I thought was deceptive. If you haven’t done that, don’t assume you have an accurate feel for how fooling a technique is. Those people who shout out, “I know how you’re doing it!” are like cockroaches. For every one you see, there are 100 you don’t. 100 people nodding along politely.
Sure, if you are profoundly unlikable, you might get a lot of people stopping your tricks to call you out. But most people above the age of 12 won’t do that. They’ll have some idea how it’s done, but they’re not going to stop the show to say it. Just like they don’t stand up in the middle of a production of Peter Pan and say, “He’s on wires! And he’s a she!”
You can’t take the absence of being called out as the absence of them having those thoughts and suspicions. Magicians think, “That woman didn’t call me unattractive… therefore… she must think I’m beautiful!” That’s not how it works.
The Haunted Keep is at best a spooky visual. But it’s not something that fools most people (as traditionally performed).
Loved the IPMT technique.
To me, the biggest benefit of this is that it makes the story of the performance much more interesting and memorable. Not the magic-trick part of the story, the spectator’s-experience part of it. I would bet that if you did the non-ipmt method (using the DFB to force the right name, for example), a week later the spectator might remember the trick, but they are much less likely to remember the names of the celebs, for example. I think it produces much better engagement on the spectator’s part.
But I don’t think you can throw the baseball into the lake because it will float, and still be visible from shore. Throw it in a river and watch until it is gone downstream. —PM
Yes, there is a “richness” to the IPMT that makes the whole thing more memorable. And that’s true regardless of how the spectator ends up perceiving the final effect. For example, whether they see the effect as the bill really reappearing in their wallet, or whether they see that as a sort of “faux-trick” presentation for a mind-reading effect (in other words they know it’s two bills… but how did you predict the celebrity they’d select?) it doesn’t really matter. Either way, there’s more substance to the effect.
As for your second point about my hypothetical baseball trick mentioned in that post, I sometimes forget the athletic ability of the audience I’m writing for
When you’re a physical stud like myself, capable of anything athletically, the concept of throwing a baseball far enough out into a body of water that it won’t be seen by anyone except almighty Poseidon isn’t difficult to fathom. But you make a good point that it might not be possible for the typical magician.
In all seriousness, though, a baseball will float for about 30-60 minutes before it gets water-logged enough to sink. All the better. Kick back, have a few drinks, tell a couple of stories and watch the ball slowly “vanish” before you make it reappear.