Mailbag #108 - Slow Climaxes and more
/So, I want to do Directed Verdict, Creepy Child version for somebody, but we always hang out at her place. It would be suspicious if I asked her to come over to my place just to do a magic trick, but I was wondering if I could still make it work and maybe increase the impact with a Slow Climax. Or am I wrong, and this is a garbage idea?
Here's what I'm envisioning. I see the cards she cut to, remember the drawing, and tell her I have to show her something at my place. We live a ten minute walk or two minute drive from each other, so this isn't a tall order. I have her take a picture of the cards she cut to while saying I wish I had taken a picture of what I'm talking about, and we head off. When we get to my place, I have her go in first and go to the refrigerator to find the drawing of the cards. Tada!
Does the Slow Climax fit here at all? You said it must be used carefully.—CF
Slow Climaxes are something I wrote about in my last book. Traditionally, there is a moment in a trick where the effect becomes apparent. The coin disappears. The card rises to the top of the deck. Your prediction is revealed.
My idea with Slow Climaxes is to break up the climax so it plays out slowly, in a more disconnected way.
This is not good theater. And it’s not the most entertaining way to perform a trick.
So why would you ever want to do it?
Well, because a climax moment has an inherent feeling of “ta-dah” to it. So regardless of your presentation, it will, on some level, feel like a trick. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if you fuck around a little with the pacing of the climax of the trick, you can make it feel less like a trick and more like something weirder.
It’s not something you’d want to do a lot. Most often you want the punch of climax. But you can do it every now and then to give people a different type of experience with magic.
For example, let’s say I asked you to pull eight random words from my French vocabulary flash-cards to decide which words I was going to focus on learning that day. You pull out: apple, rabbit, bicycle, dinosaur and a few others. Then I say, “Hmm… that’s an odd coincidence.” And I open the door and show you a billboard in the distance for a kid’s movie with an animated apple, rabbit, bicycle, dinosaur etc, on it. That’s going to have the feeling of a trick, because it has this single moment of a climax.
But what if you pulled those cards for me, and then later we’re walking down the street and there’s a sign with a rabbit on it. “Ah… wait… oh right, rabbit is lapin.” Then we walk a little further and there are some apples at a fruit stand. “Oh… pommes!” I say, excited to get this chance to test today’s vocab words. And at first it seems kind of normal because these aren’t crazy uncommon objects. But it just feels weirder and weirder—as we come upon another thing and another thing—that everything on those cards is on our walk. A gumball-machine rubber dinosaur toy abandoned in the street!? Come on now, this is just getting too weird.
So now we have this extended slow climax to the trick. It doesn’t build to a grand finale. It’s just one climax that’s been stretched out. .
And I might say to you, “This isn’t the first time that’s happened. I see my vocab words all over. The universe really wants me to learn French, I guess.”
And while you may be fairly certain that I had orchestrated the whole thing for your benefit, you still probably wouldn’t think of it as a “trick” per se. Because messing with the climax makes it not feel like a trick. It just feels like a strange…episode.
As I said, this isn’t the best way to do magic. But it’s sort of like how the Blair Witch Project wasn’t the best filmmaking. That wasn’t the goal of it. The goal was to approach something in a different manner. And mixing up your approach to magic is something we should be doing. Not just sitting at a table and showing people card tricks over and over. After a while, that becomes something we’re doing for our benefit, not theirs.
But that brings us all the way back to the original question. In actuality, the question is talking about something that isn’t a slow climax at all. Because the actual climax to the trick would still play out in a moment. It would just take a while to get there. So this isn’t a Slow Climax. It’s more of a Delayed Climax.
So this is a different thing. But it’s also a valuable thing. It’s another way for us to play around with the expectations of a trick.
If I pull my prediction out of my pocket. That feels like a trick. If I say, “Wait a second…that reminds me of this drawing my niece did,” and we go into my kitchen to see the drawing on the refrigerator, that feels less like a standard trick. And if we’re next door or down the street from where I live and we have to walk back to my house to check it out, that feels even more like, “Wait… what’s going on here?” Because it seems like I was unprepared for this to happen. (And how could a trick happen that I was unprepared for?)
Another less impactful, but perhaps more universally useful way to do something similar, is to have the drawing in the background of a photo on your camera roll or on an Instagram post. Not the focus of the picture, but just somewhere in the environment. That’s another way to “journey” to this drawing when you’re nowhere near home, e.g. “I swear these are the cards my niece drew for me. I wish I had that picture with me because this isn’t the first time she’s done something weird like that. Hmm… did I take a picture of that drawing? I sometimes do. [Looking through your camera roll.] I guess not. I’ll look when I get home and let you know. She’s a little freak. Oh wait… here look… you can barely see it, let me zoom in. Look, those are the exact cards you cut! And hold on… is that stick figure supposed to be you? I just thought that was some random person. But that’s sort of your haircut, isn’t it?”
There was a time when I first came to your site that I always misread the Jerx as the Jinx. Now anytime I read about the Jinx somewhere, I misread it as the Jerx. So mission accomplished?? —SC
Yesssss… finally! My plan is complete.
Here is Annemann with my great-grandmother at a show where she was an audience member in 1938.
He is reported to have said, “Those hands look good, but what that mouth do?”
Then Annemann went to my great-grandfather and asked him if he could take my great-grandmother in the back and show her a “special one-on-one magical experience” for forty minutes or so. My great-grandfather, an eminent pussy of his day, said, “Sure, I guess. Do you have a book or jigsaw puzzle I could occupy myself with while you’re gone?” Annemann then took my great-grandmother into the other room and balled her brains out within earshot of my great-grandfather, who was left without even a book or puzzle to distract him.
This, obviously, became a huge deal for my family and my family’s legacy. And revenge has been passed along in the bloodline for decades. Even after killing Annemann and staging the scene to look like Even after Annemann's suicide, it was still an open wound to my ancestors. And only now that I have become the go-to person for magic material released under a J _ _ X name, as well as a champion of “special one-on-one magical experiences,” can my family finally rest.