Sleight of Hand

Okay, I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I had, what may be, my most controversial opinion yet.

Sleight of Hand is a Method of Last Resort

And I don’t mean this to say that most people do sleight of hand poorly (which, they do). I mean this to say that sleight of hand, in and of itself, is quite often a very bad method, if your goal is to create a feeling of impossibility and magic.

This isn’t an easy thing to say, especially since there was a time when sleight of hand was almost synonymous with magic for me.

Here are some disjointed thoughts on the matter….

— Sleight of hand frequently requires fast or unnatural movements. While these can fool people, they’re not going to charm people or fill them with wonder.

—I know some people reject the romantic notion of using magic to truly capture people’s imaginations, or enchant them, or make them question reality. But if that’s not the goal, I don’t know what it is. Is it just to get people to say, “I’m not 100% sure what exactly happened there”?

Here’s Derek Dingle doing sleight of hand. I genuinely do not know what the experience of this is supposed to be for the spectator. I don’t know what emotion it’s supposed to be tapping into.

— We all agree that when a trick obviously uses technology, it’s not a very good trick. Yet magic is full of tricks that are obviously done with sleight of hand, and yet we don’t see them as bad tricks. I think we probably should.

— Sleight of hand is usually the most direct-line method. It’s the equivalent of stealing the Mona Lisa by blowing a hole in the wall of the museum, breaking open the security case, yanking it off the wall, and running off with it. At some point, the authorities find you with the Mona Lisa and your response is, “Ah, but you didn’t catch me while I was doing it.” Like… that doesn’t matter. They know you did it and generally how you did it. There’s no mystery here.

Now, if the Mona Lisa was gone and there was no hole in the wall, and the security case was intact, and nothing seemed out of place, then we would have a mystery or an impossibility.

Sleight of hand magic too often feels like, “I did it without you catching me.”

— Magicians are spectacularly bad at understanding what good sleight of hand looks like. They think if the thing they’re trying to hide is hidden, then that’s good sleight of hand. It’s often not.

Here’s someone who is teaching the pass on youtube.

I admit that I don’t see the two halves switch places. But I do see a completely unnatural gripping and rocking of the deck accompanied by flailing fingers. So maybe I don’t know exactly what was done, but I know you did something weird and exactly when you did it. This is equally not good.

—Yes, I use sleight of hand all the time, but I try not to do tricks that rely just on sleight of hand. I really want a mix of deceptions going on: sleight of hand, gimmicks, psychology, mathematics, misdirection, subtleties, linguistic manipulation etc.

— In recent years, I’ve become more discerning with my sleights. If it requires unnatural speed, tension, or abnormal movements to do, can it ever really be deceptive? I don’t think so. The moves may be fine for people who want to make it known that they’re doing sleight of hand. But as a casual performer—performing in the Carefree style—I now consider sleight of hand to be something of a last resort.