Becoming A Generalist

One of the least productive things I think you can do in amateur magic is specialize.

What I mean is, if you’re a professional magician, and you just do gambling routines, or mind-reading, or some shtick where you use “deductive reasoning to mimic having supernatural powers,” that’s fine. People are going to see you for one night and probably never again.

But as an amateur, you’re going to be in these people’s lives for (hopefully) years to come. Magic is already a niche enough way to entertain your friends and family. Limiting it down further seems insane to me. “I just do coin tricks.” Really? I promise you, anybody who has seen more than a few tricks from you probably has almost no distinct memory of any trick you’ve ever shown them.

In the early days of testing, we brought a couple small groups of six people (I believe) in to watch the performances from one of Michael Ammar’s money magic videos. Afterward, we had them describe the tricks they saw. For the most part, they were able to differentiate the tricks with coins from the tricks with bills. But beyond that, there was very little nuance to what they described. We didn’t do extensive testing of this. Just a dozen people or so. It took too long, and it wasn’t that fun for us. And the responses were pretty clear. But even though we didn’t look at a lot of people, I’m pretty confident in my takeaways from this.  If you think people understand the distinctions between Coins Across and Hanging Coins five minutes after they see them (much less five days or five months), you’re deluding yourself.

Douching tricks out of your repertoire with similar premises is essential. You just don’t need a ton of different tricks where cards switch places with other cards. Or where you “influence” your spectator. Or where you read their mind. 

“I can read your mind of what playing card you’re thinking of.”

“I can read your mind of what word you’re thinking of.”

“I can read your mind of what film from the AFI’s top 100 films you’re thinking of.”

We get it. It’s still impossible. But by definition, the more you see the same impossible thing, the less impressive and interesting it will become. 

It’s the same with mind reading as it would be with regular reading. If a kid tells you he can read, and he picks up a book and starts reading, you might say, “Wow. You’re a good reader.”

“I can also read the newspaper,” he says, flipping through the Wall Street Journal and then telling you about the inflation rate.

“Yup. There you go,” you say.

“I can also read a cookbook. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Lightly grease the pan.”

“Okay, I get it. That’s how reading works.”

The only way that watching someone demonstrate mind-reading over and over is interesting is if the nature of the interaction is one where you’re like, “Try to catch what I’m doing as I pretend to read minds.” 

(Perhaps counterintuitively, if your presentation is bad, you can use the same premise over and over without wearing it out. Because people aren’t paying much attention to the premise in the first place.)

I’m currently in the process of blowing up my repertoire and rebuilding it with the Carefree magic philosophy more in mind, and limiting the number of tricks with the same premise.

As I’m rebuilding the repertoire, I’m creating a database and tracking the premise of each trick in one of the columns. It helps me notice when I’m accumulating too many tricks that might seem different to me, but will possibly feel very similar to the people I perform for regularly.

Try to remember that most laypeople’s understanding of the nuances of magic tricks is like your understanding of something that doesn’t naturally fascinate you. (Go to youtube and look up the top Mariachi songs of all time and see how good you are at telling them apart.) This is helpful in some ways, because it means you can use the same methodology for different premises, and they will rarely catch on. But if you’re using different methodologies for similar premises, you will burn out an audience much quicker.