Mailbag #111
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I wonder if you find that your friends seem to struggle with differentiating between a performance and a normal conversation when you interact with them. I imagine if I were to adopt your style, my friends would constantly be on edge about whether I’m about to go into another trick.
Just as a casual hobbyist there have been moments where I’ve prompted a conversation and people have asked me whether I was introducing a trick, as though they were trying to figure out how they should respond. —AT
No, I think this is an unfounded fear people have. There is a safety that comes with presenting magic in a sort of standard tongue-in-cheek, jokey way. This style is copmletely bereft of mystique, but at least you don’t have to worry about someone believing you, or thinking you want them to believe you, or getting confused about when you are or are not serious.
This is, for the most part, a non-issue. People use it as an excuse to stick to the standard “Dad Magic”-style of performing. In the same way some people will say, “I want to get healthier, but I don’t want to lift weights. I don’t want to end up looking like some muscle-bound freak body-builder.” As if that can just happen casually.
If people know you, then they will generally know what’s a trick and what’s not a trick. You would have to try really, really hard to genuinely confuse them about the issue. It won’t just happen casually.
Will there be some times when there’s a little confusion? Perhaps. But I consider that to be a good thing. It’s only going to happen with the most trivial matters.
It’s not like I walk into the room and say, “My dad has cancer.” And people think, “Okay… where is this going… this HAS to be some kind of trick.” People don’t feel the need to constantly be on guard around me. Remember that you’re getting a peek at one slim part of my interactions with these people. 95-99.9% of the time I’m around most of the people in my life, I’m not doing anything related to magic at all. I’m just a normal friend, relative, lover, acquaintance who has a somewhat interesting hobby. When I go into a trick, they’re neither expecting it nor are they completely thrown by it.
They have a little hint when I say, “I want to try something with you,” or “the strangest thing keeps happening,” or whatever, because these are not phrases that come up for me in real life outside of magic that often.
If there is some confusion, it’s only momentary. And I don’t really care about it. It’s only an issue if people are truly believing something ridiculous I’m saying, or if they’re disregarding something serious because they think it’s some sort of trick. And neither has ever really happened to me.
When using [Digital Force Bag] do you bother trying to hide the look of the fake apps on the swiping screens in some way? I don’t know if I’m being overly concerned, but they just don’t look like apps that are on my phone. —JS
You’re not being overly concerned, you’re being unnecessarily concerned. Those screens are on your phone when anyone is paying attention for, literally, about half a second each. The time it takes you to do two swipes with your thumb. It’s not really possible to see those apps when performed correctly.
Don’t hide the phone from them during that part of the trick. But at the same time, you don’t display it to them. From their perspective, they see you open your phone and swipe through a couple of app screens, and tap on your Notes icon. Your goal here shouldn’t be to show them exactly what you’re doing, but for them to see enough of the screen to realize you’re not “doing” anything.
I think some magicians think, Well, since I am doing something sneaky here, I need to make it look as fair as possible. And they have this attitude which is like: “Make sure I don’t do anything funny. I’m just going to swipe over to my notes. Look, one simple, normal swipe. And now another simple, normal swipe. And now I’m just pressing the genuine Notes app icon.”
Just be a normal human. Give your patter. Get their number. Mention the note on your phone. Swipe to the Notes app and hand them the phone. Allow them to go into the note and scroll to their number. In other words, do what you would do in reality.
Some things in magic you need to be explicit about. If you’re going to make a card appear in your pocket, you need it to be explicitly obvious that your hand is empty before it goes in the pocket. Or else people will rewind in their head and think, “Ah, he must have had the card in his hand when he reached in his pocket.”
But if you draw attention to the “cleanliness” of you swiping through the app screens, then you’re drawing attention to something they would otherwise not remember. Swiping over to an app is an everyday action that will be forgotten. Allow it to be forgotten. If they are someone who is liable to think, “I bet when he swiped the screen, he was secretly coding a number into the phone so that a force object would appear by my chosen number in a fake Notes app.” Then it doesn’t matter how clean and how openly you do the swiping—your ass is busted regardless.