“One of the first rules of performing close-up magic is the same as the first rule of improvisation: Never say no.”

This is the olde blogge’s first Quote of the Month, courtesy of the research and/or musings of Lance Pierce over at the Magic Pebble. And it’s a whopper.

There is, in improv comedy, a concept called “Yes, and…” You get a couple of guys up on stage, and one person throws out an ‘offer’, which is basically jargon for a dramatic act or gesture or line or whatever that he’s offering to his partner to take and run with. The point is to accept that offer and build upon it, and it gets sent back to the other performer as another offer, and the concept gets ping-ponged back and forth until hopefully the scene comes to a satisfying conclusion.

An example of a scene starting out with the “Yes, and…” premise:

“Oh my God! There’s a parade going on!”

“Yes, and I think it’s the Pride Parade!”

“Yes, and they’re coming this way!”

“Yes, they are, and boy is it fabulous!”

“Yes, it certainly is, isn’t… What are you doing?”

“Oh, nothing, it’s just a bit hot here, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but do you really need to be tying your shirt into a knot like that…?”

etc. etc.

Technically, there’s a bit of the spirit of “Yes, and…” in just about every bit of improv theater out there, including some of the more complex formats and games like what you’ll see on “Who’s Line Is It Anyway?”, but theoretically, if you can get a couple of people who are talented enough, this base format could be enough for a strong bit.

We’ll set aside the pure “Yes, and…” game for a while, because it’s far too easy for any theater (let alone improv) to fall into celebrations of form at the expense of content. The point is that the theater builds upon the idea of the performers playing off each other and accepting whatever offer is being made your way.

How does this apply to us?

Well, go to the Magic Cafe and read any number of threads that talk about dealing with troublesome spectators, or about problems with audience management, or “How do you respond when they say X?” or whatever. Answering these questions or contributing to these discussions is frequently just addressing the symptom of the… I want to say ‘problem’ here, but part of the problem is people thinking that it is a problem in the first place, which it usually isn’t.

Pretty much all magic performance that isn’t a manipulation act announces its fourth-wall-breaking nature proudly, and part of what makes magic so alluring to some people is the possibility of exploring that. If you’ve ever watched a compelling movie or read a good book, you’ve probably had your imagination kick into overdrive as to how you want things to turn out. Since this never gets talked about, I can only guess about how common this might be, but I’m willing to bet that more than a few have shared in my experience in coming across a character in there that I really like, and the imagination starts up, and I project myself into scenes with them, interacting with them, helping them along with the plot or whatever. I suspect that it’s never talked about because it comes across as hilariously juvenile, but it is, in a weird way, the benevolent counterpart to the heckler. It’s also a moot point if you’re watching a movie or reading a book, since no matter how much projection (good or bad) is going on, the way the story was going to end was pretty much preordained before you started watching it.

In a weird way, you see a lot of the same stuff going on with serialized forms, such as television or comic books, particularly those where a story arc is underway where the conclusion hasn’t yet been settled by the writing and production staff. Believe it or not, sometimes the writers of TV shows pay attention to what’s being said in the fan forums or reviews online, and sometimes it even happens that they read something somebody says and realize that there’s some value to be mined from it. This sort of fan service can foster a great deal of loyalty. If you want to learn more about this sort of thing, look here, but for the love of God be careful, because TVTropes.org is where productive afternoons go to die.

Too many magicians, including prominent ones, fail to recognize what’s going on with hecklers. The point is that people want to be a part of the action. And why shouldn’t they? The whole point of a magic show is to use the brains of your spectators as a playground to monkey around in, so why not be responsive to the things coming your way? This is why I hesitate to think of people who yell stuff out, theories or spoilers or attention-whoring jokes or otherwise, as hecklers. To me, this is brought on by fear more than anything. Stop thinking of people heckling you as the enemy, and start thinking of them as people who are just sending you offers, like a scene in improv, and all those worries start to go away.

Capturing that attitude can even help you out in seemingly-disastrous situations such as when a trick goes wrong. Remember that you can always use card-to-pocket or the Invisible Deck (or whatever) as an out, and suddenly risks aren’t just less scary, they become almost tempting. Richard Osterlind talks about this all the time. Take a chance on a few cold reads when you know that you can always divine what was written on the billet as your backup plan. That’s where the effect is going to end up anyway, so even if you miss you still have that. Start hitting on cold-reads, though, and now you’re doing miracles that essentially have no perceptible method.

Improv comedians have already figured this out, but many stand-ups understand it as well. Russell Peters had this great set where he just started asking people random questions, and he turned the answers into jokes. While I’m more than willing to indulge the skeptics out there in apparently-audience-driven bits like this (or others), the point is that if the audience is convinced that it’s a legitimate bit, there’s an energy to the show that’s different from something preordained. One way to do this is to have stooges act as hecklers and set you up for your great lines. Another way is to just start practicing interacting with people mid-routine and seeing if you can play off what they’re giving you. If you’ve never done this before, then barring some innate genius in your DNA, of course you won’t be an instant master at this. Never start trying it out, though, and that mastery will remain seemingly nothing more than a pipe-dream.

And make no mistake about how audiences feel about that energy brought on by heckling. If the performer handles it well, they love it. Definite Not-Safe-For-Work example to follow, but here’s a video of Joe Rogan saying awful, awful things to a woman who was heckling him. Notice the 2.5 million views? Notice the likes/dislikes ratio? Notice the cheers at a particularly bold question asked to the crowd? And that’s in a potentially hostile situation, something so much more extreme than what we have to go through. All you need to do is stop thinking about spectators as being sources of potential fear and worry, and start thinking of them as sources of things you can use.

Which brings us back to the concept of offers talked about earlier. The easiest way to do this is through “Yes, and…”, but this requires somebody who is on your side. If there’s a hint of an adversarial relationship (such as with heckling), now if you’ve got the urge to accept it as an offer, you’ve got to handle it a different way. Having a bank of heckle-stopper lines can be useful, as can having a few themes you can draw upon in a truly improvisational way. Most heckling (beyond the “You suck!” comments) usually falls into the realm of bad jokes, comments on magic in general, “What if…?” type questions, and theories on what’s happening in the routine itself. The first two can usually be dealt with generically, but I’ve found that the third and fourth are usually most successfully conquered through doing the same few core routines over and over again until you’ve been given just about every reaction possible to them — even if you’re of the opinion that you never stop learning, you usually reach a point where you’ve learned enough that you can usually at the very least conjure up a suitable response, anywhere from a single comment or joke, to a variation in the way the routine unfolds, to the choice of an appropriate follow-up routine that deals with their concern.

Another alternative is pre-emptive: bait the hell out of them, either through feints to counteract their attempts to bust you, or else to foster a suspicion that you’re going to be able to trump in a follow-up routine. This is one way where the almost annoying proliferation of card magic out there actually works to the magician’s advantage, since there are so many ways to jazz in such a scenario — all that’s needed is a holistic approach to training and the willingness to take a few chances. Mentalism is also pretty good for having various methods that can be played off each other (such as what can be achieved with a swami in one routine and a switch in another). Here’s hoping that the specialists of other props figure out ways to add to the discussion in the future.

Yes, Tommy Wonder would start a script and try to stick to it like a fascist, and yes, his magic was magnificent and satisfying, but there’s also something to be said for those magicians who can really harness what’s being given to them and turn it into part of the show. Do it competently, and the audience will be satisfied that they just saw something unique. Do it expertly, and you’re a GOD.

This one is essentially a combining of ideas between myself and Tyler Erickson… although, to be fair, I provided the “Oogah-Boogah” part and Tyler provided pretty much everything else that’s of value to it.

Now, out of all the ‘theory’ you’ll read here on the olde blogge, this probably comes closest to the “Here’s a hypothesis to test” sense of the word. As such, maybe it’s better to call it an axiom or a hypothesis or whatnot. However, this is my damn blog and if you don’t damn like it you can go set up your own damn blog and call it whatever you like. Here, it’s the Oogah-Boogah Theory, alright there tough guy?

Sorry, still fighting the flu.

Anyways… Oogah Boogah Theory! Here’s the idea. You want to know if you have a good trick? Here’s how you know you’ve got a good trick. No presentation. You show the prop, you do something, you say “Oogah Boogah!”, and then show the result. If the spectator likes it, you’ve got a good trick.

That’s essentially it. Take all this nonsense about performing archetypes and cancelling methods and theatrical motivations and what-have-you and throw it out the window. If your trick fails the Oogah-Boogah Theory test, toss it.

The reason why I’m typing this one up is really because I realize that, with all the emphasis on presentation and theory and “making magic seem less like tricks and more like real magic” (barf), it’s easy to get caught up in things that are essentially wrong. I remember on my second trip to Minnesota, I was describing a trick to Tyler, and it was essentially taking John Bannon’s “Play It Straight” Triumph dramatic premise and applying it to a sandwich plot, and his face curdled like month-old cheese. Deliberation ensued, and later on, when I was talking about how I wanted to make sure each trick I did had a strong theatrical development in it (I think, at that point, we’d moved on to Daley’s Last Trick), he basically said that sometimes the best thing to do with the trick was essentially show them one black Ace, show them the other black Ace, and then say “Purple Monkey Dishwasher”, and show that the black Aces had changed to red Aces. Fin. My memory is slightly hazy (still got flu!) and he might have said something other than “Purple Monkey Dishwasher”, but I know that he almost certainly did not say “Oogah-Boogah”, which is why I get to claim some credit.

But the key message here is an important one. Read too much presentational theory, watch too many of the wrong performers — actually, heck, watch too many of the right performers — and you get the feeling that presentation can justify, motivate, and even rescue any trick. The reality is ultimately less kind. If you want to be a good magician, or if you want to make sure that what they’re seeing is good magic, then ultimately, you want to put less effort into throwing presentational strategies at the 21 Card Trick, and put more effort into developing tricks that pass the Oogah-Boogah Theory test.

Of course, it is reasonable to assume that the Bannon Triumph approach could still work with the Sandwich plot, but the point is that what would make it strong wouldn’t be the fact that they forgot to put their card back in the deck (ie: what separates Bannon’s approach to the traditional Triumph approach). That helps the theater of it, of course, but as Tommy Wonder pointed out when discussing his Coins Across routine, before you can do a parody of a routine, the audience — most of whom will have never seen a close-up magician before — must know and understand the effect that is being parodied. As such, clarity is required. So, for instance, two spectators each take a card. The first spectator puts their card back into the deck, and then the Jacks are placed at the top and the bottom. Magic moment, and the Jacks are gone, and after spreading the selection is between them. That’s something that has a chance to survive the Oogah-Boogah Theory test. The magician turns to the next spectator, and says “Now I’ll find yours! Watch, and I’ll put the Jacks and the top and the bottom, and they’re gone, in search of your card! Erm, which apparently you’re still holding. Well, don’t worry, the Jacks have got my back!” at which point you spread the deck and show the Jacks have the second selection’s three matching cards sandwiched between them.

That’s a bit better. Still a long way to go for an overrated card magic plot, but whatever. Now at least there’s clarity. Also, in the quest for clarity, it shows how certain things that have little to do with traditional notions of presentation better — specifically, if you could have the deck shuffled, you take it back, flourish-produce the two Jacks, and then go into the two selections, now the trick gets escalated to the next level, and all you’ve added are things that would help make the “Oogah-Boogah” version of the trick play better.

To put it another way, imagine something inane like a card speller. Now reimagine it as the following. Card is selected and put back into the deck, and the spectator shuffles. The magician takes the cards back, and asks, “What’s the card?” The spectator names it, and the magician says “Oogah-Boogah!”, before dealing off and spelling each letter, before arriving at the card.

The trap here is obvious. Say “Oogah-Boogah!” too many times in a paid performance and you’re going to look loco. Even broader than that, though, is the idea that any cursory magic moment (even something like Oogah-Boogah-like such as snapping the fingers) can both trivialize the effect and fail to capitalize on the theatrical and misdirectional benefits of a more compelling magical moment. Still, if there’s any merit to Whit Haydn’s idea that the better the trick is, the less it needs to rely on “presentation”, then the Oogah-Boogah Theory essentially takes this to its logical (if slightly absurd-seeming) conclusion. In some ways, this is really just an extension of Dai Vernon’s point about a good effect being something that sound compelling when it’s summarized in a single sentence. The “Oogah-Boogah!” part just means you’re committing to it.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to throw that out there before getting to the last archetype, where this theory is somewhat relevant. One more to go!

Sorry about getting behind. Thanks to an unforseen double-header on Friday, another surprise gig on Saturday night and a flu that hit me up Saturday afternoon, knocked me out Sunday, and which has turned my face into a running faucet of phlegm, the schedule for the olde blogge got derailed a bit. Since the last three archetypes require a bit more thought than I’m capable of at the moment… Card tricks! Here’s some card tricks.

Day 350: Ricky Jay’s Gambling Demonstration

Part of the purpose of these Card Tricks videos is to provide some added content to the Ubiquity of Card Tricks entry I had a while back. I mention that because this may not be the first gambling demo for that page. Whatever. Did I mention I’m dealing with a lot of phlegm?

Anyways, here are the relevant videos. I recommend fast forwarding to the 4:30 mark of the first video to get the relevant stuff explored today, but obviously I recommend watching the entire thing if you’ve got time.

…and that’s certainly one way to go about doing a gambling demo.

One of the things that’s interesting about this is just how much of a presentation piece Ricky Jay has made out of what would otherwise be a straightforward demonstration of skill. Even if we assume Jay’s starting with massive prestige and that most people who forked over the money on the ticket were happy to be there and would have gone along with whatever he wanted to do anyway, here’s almost certainly plenty in there to appeal to just about everybody. After watching this, we’re in a good position to understand the differences between the three forms of false dealing, and why those differences matter. We’ve seen a variety of games including poker, blackjack, and gin. We’ve seen a very direct proposition bet in terms of cutting to the high card, and then there’s a straightforward ace-cutting sequence. We’ve seen an interesting take on the Triumph plot, which is used as an apparent demonstration of the different types of shuffling in a gambling context. The storytelling is vivid, the jokes are humourous, the exposition is clear and well-written, and just for those intellectual hipsters who were just looking to get some culture in them by going out to tha theatah, he opens by reciting a freaking poem.

There’s a lot there, and in its own weird way it goes to show just how much this specific subgenre of card “magic” (for lack of a better term) can still be useful as a means to display character. What do we learn about Jay himself in this? We’ve also talked elsewhere on the blog about the usefulness of conflict to help reveal character, and there is a bit of that in here with Jay taking on the spectators in both the high-card-cutting and a game of blackjack. The really neat moment in this for me, though, is when they’re playing blackjack, and the two guys onstage were openly calling for Jay to bust, at which point he says “Oh, grow up. 21!” and the audience loves it.

This is yet another reason why I believe that the quote by Darwin Ortiz in Strong Magic, about how challenge has no place in magic, is really quite incorrect, because what is this if not a direct moment of challenge between the magician and his spectators? And even if the tone of challenge is muted somewhat, what else do we have at the end there except for a performer clearly pleased with himself for winning? There’s two reasons why I think this works. First is that old adage espoused by Leipzig (or somebody else, could look it up, not gonna, did I mention I was sick yet?) about how people want to feel like they’ve been fooled by a gentleman, and Jay certainly goes overboard to ingratiate himself to the audience, and effectively demonstrating himself as a cultured and worldly man, before that specific moment comes about. Second, though, is an idea offered by Whit Haydn which could be summed up as the “Golfing with Tiger Woods” theory, where if you get the chance to go golfing with Tiger Woods, you don’t really expect to win, but you also don’t really care if you get your ass whipped, it’s still a pleasurable experience. (In terms of audience management, Tyler Erickson’s got a great analogy of the Gym Coach vs. the Martial Arts Master which is well worth listening to if you go to him and sign up for skype lessons (the first of which is free, remember?)). Again, this is where all that preamble is useful, because it’s in there that Ricky Jay basically establishes himself in the audience’s mind at that point as the Tiger Woods of card tricks.

Also, it doesn’t hurt that the guys there were calling for him to bust, which had an immediate way of casting him as the hero for that moment.

Moving on… the major point of focusing on that video is that just because we’re talking about a demonstration of skill, it doesn’t follow that it’s got to be dry. Jay’s show here is well worth studying in terms of the way he manages to apply texture to an act almost entirely filled with card tricks, but this specific piece might be worth extra study just to see how many different dynamics can be successfully invoked in a single, prolonged routine.

Day 351: Ricky Jay doing some Card Throwing

In his unrelenting quest to establish himself as a Renaissance Man, here’s something complete with professional actors watching as spectators (if you don’t recognize the guy who was in Sex and the City, you certainly ought to recognize John C. Reilly), where Jay is showing a fun stunt.

At the risk of invoking him once too often, one other thing Whit Haydn said was that the better the trick, the less need for “presentation” it would have. Now, there is still a bit of presentation here, but it’s mostly all about establishing the stunt, and even altering the parameters of the stunt in order to make the conditions seem as fair as possible (going from 5 tosses to 1 toss, putting the narrow edge of the base card towards himself, etc.). Plus, the idea of getting a precariously-balanced egg to fall into a glass has been done with other bar bets before, but again, the neat thing here is that it’s been replicated (in an authentic way) with cards.

Day 351: Chad Long’s Shuffling Lesson

Best I could do in terms of finding a video demo, sorry about that. I guess that it’s testament enough to the strength of the effect that it manages to survive the ponderous style of overpresentation that you get from guys like Wayne Houchin or Oz Pearlman.

But anyways, getting to the trick itself, the reactions here do point out a key feature that’s present in most Do As I Do tricks, which is that the magician’s advantage is essentially nullified because the spectator’s involvement is equal to his own, a strong enough aspect to the Do As I Do dynamic (for me, anyways) to highlight it as a key dynamic. However, it also actually has a feature that most Do As I Do tricks lack which is that there’s no exchange of items at any point. That’s really quite special, and Chad Long deserves a whole lot of credit for thinking his way through to an effect which accomplishes this.

It’s also a roundabout lesson in another aspect of magic, though, that of the difference between the premise and the dynamic (or dynamics). The subject was talked about earlier on the olde blogge, but this video does serve as a very telling example of the difference between the two, especially when compared with Ricky Jay’s gambling demo earlier.

Consider that the trick is introduced as a lesson in how to win at card games, and Houchin’s tone in presenting it is both authoritative and slick. You know people are going to eat that up. The problem is that there isn’t really anything sincere to back that promise up in the trick (just as there wouldn’t be anything legitimate in an Invisible Palm routine to show people how to cheat… ugh).

Now, that might not be a trick-killer. Chad Long’s performing style is somewhat silly and goofy (as demonstrated in this video), and if you present things in a tongue-in-cheek manner or with some sort of humourous, ironic, or even humourously ironic tone, then violating the premise isn’t too big a sin. People, even smart people, will be willing to play along and realize that the premise is just an arbitrary framework being thrown at the presentation, and that the good stuff is coming. Obviously, it helps that with Long’s trick, good stuff really is coming.

The problem with Houchin’s style here, though, is that the previously mentioned slickness and authoritativeness, without much in the way of irony, essentially creates a barricade between himself and the audience. The inherent features of the trick do allow him to play up the fairness of the proceedings, but one can do that without promising that it’s a legitimate way to win at cards, or else to talk about how he who cuts controls the game, or else to even talk about the number of players, since the more you think about that, the less sense the final result makes.

And before you say “It’s magic, it doesn’t have to make sense!”, consider instead the following imaginary Perfect Poker Trick Scenario (hereafter “PPTS”)… You have a deck of cards. You give it to a spectator. They shuffle the cards. They deal the cards out into five hands. When they look at their own hand, they see they’ve got the four aces. If you’re going to hold to the premise promised by Houchin, then that’s what you want to do if you’re going to be sincere about it. To do otherwise is to be disingenuous, and I really believe people, especially those who like the performer and want to connect with him, pick up on that. Again, yeah, a humourous and/or ironic tone can trump that, so if that’s your bag, ignore that criticism and carry on as you would.

Now, one could argue that in laying down the presentational framework as Houchin does, their final memory might actually be altered so as to reflect the imagined scenario in the PPTS discussed in the last paragraph. Case in point: When I do Copper/Silver, I make a big deal out of the fact that I’m going to steal the coin from their hand three times — the first two times are gags, and the last one’s the copper/silver effect involving an extra item. Nothing new there, that’s been done plenty of times and my bits of business owe a great deal to Scotty York and others. When I mentioned this to Tyler, he acknowledged the merits in that sort of approach, but suggested that doing that sort of thing sometimes only serves to reinforce the fact that you’re handling the item so many times. He’s got an altered handling (not mine to tip here, but oh, if only he did online Skype lessons and the first one was free… sigh…) that essentially allows him to plant the memory in the spectator’s head that the item was fairly stolen from the spectator, including (intriguingly) an absence in their memory of the secondary item that arrives in their hands. Now, Copper/Silver is a good effect framed as it is, but there’s a difference in the way a spectator recounts the experience to others of “I held my quarter, he held the English penny, and they magically switched places” and “I held my own quarter in my fist tightly and he magically grabbed it out of there.” It’s a subtle difference, granted, but you could argue that the English Penny serves as a bit of an open compromise (in Derren Brown’s parlance), whereas the lack of it, in their memory, points towards a truer and purer display of power, of something of theirs simply disappearing from their fist. We don’t really have scientific studies to test this one way or the other, but Tyler’s generally speaking from his experiences doing the trick that way, and in listening to the way some people spectators about it. Again, if you’ve performed for people, you know that their desire to hold onto a fantastic cherished memory is such that they’ll invent an account of the events that’s sometimes so much better than what we’re actually capable of doing (let alone what we actually did).

Anyway, I said all that to say this. He’s still talking about Copper/Silver, but he’s also saying that depending upon how you use the presentation, you can alter their memory of the effect pretty radically. If that is possible, then it follows that it ought to be similarly possible for people to remember Chad Long’s Shuffling Lesson in a way identical to the PPTS described earlier. Even if we accept that as true, though, there’s still a bit of a difference, since recasting the Copper/Silver effect as Tyler described offers plausible deniability — their coin really does apparently vanish from their hands. It’s replaced with another coin, sure, but that’s a function of transpositions by definition. With the Shuffling Lesson, though, the process leading up to the reveal isn’t really something you can gloss over in that way. There’s too much going on, and very little of it retains any similarity to proper card-table procedure.

To put it another way… say you do Copper/Silver so as to heighten the “My coin disappeared from my fist!” memory. If they tell that story to a skeptic, and that skeptic comes around to you and says “I wanna see you make my coin disappear from my hand” then there are presentational dodges you can do while still keeping the basic Copper/Silver effect intact, and even afterwards justify the use of the secondary item because “their skepticism was making it difficult for me to do it normally” or whatever. Still a mind-blowing trick.

Let’s say, on the other hand, somebody goes and tells their skeptical friend about their experience with Chad Long’s Shuffling Lesson and they recount it as “I dealt myself four Aces in a poker game and he never touched the cards after I shuffled them.” If said skeptical friend goes to the magician looking to have the same experience, now the magician has to do some serious tap-dancing, because the discrepancies between the story of what happened earlier and what actually happens stick out pretty blatantly. You could still turn around and do something like a Marlo/Gardner Poker Deal (or similar) to make up for it, but then the question is raised that, if that’s what you’re hoping to plant in their memory, why not just do the Marlo/Gardner deal (or similar) from the get-go?

Jerry Andrus was well-known apparently for espousing the virtue of never telling a lie in the course of a trick. I’m not quite sure why so many magicians who point this out seem to value it so highly, given that what magicians do by definition is a lie anyway. But whatever, if that famous “actor playing the part of a magician” quote has shown us anything, it’s that magicians love to hold onto their silly mantras. That said, I suspect that if you took that sort of non-lying approach to doing the Shuffling Lesson that didn’t invoke too much (or any) of the poker-playing procedures, and just let an awesome trick be an awesome trick, then if a spectator formulates associations to poker on their own, then it’s pretty much impossible for that to come back to bite the performer, as per the skeptical friend scenario talked about earlier. “Hey, my friend said that she dealt herself four aces in a poker game in a deck that she shuffled. I want to see that trick!” could be answered with “Oh, I was just pointing out something interesting with shuffling and cutting cards. Here, let me show it to you.” and all is right with the world, and you can still bust their gasket with the original trick.

(As an aside, obviously it stands to reason that you could do the same Andrusian non-lying thing with Copper/Silver, as I’m sure Tyler would recommend to anybody not ready to deal with the implications of claiming that sort of thing. The key difference, though, is that Copper/Silver by its nature has a better chance to survive that lie.)

This is where Ricky Jay comes back into the picture, because his routine allows him to explicitly and unambiguously claim amazing and legitimate poker-related events. Yeah, he’s not going so far as to let other people deal themselves the Four Aces, but regardless, the honesty with which he does the routines, the lack of disingenuous framing with the presentation, and the fact that he’s sticking true to the imagined effects, means that he doesn’t have to worry about presenting himself falsely, and in much the same way that I feel people sense the disingenuous nature of Houchin’s framing of the Shuffling Lesson, people will similarly sense the honesty in Jay’s routine. Perhaps that’s a case of symptoms of larger performing-style choices, dunno.

(Of course, it’s hilarious to point that out given that Jay’s using a pseudo-center deal, but whatever, by that stage of the routine he’s earned the right.)

Bleah, anyways, that’s enough pontificating for now. Obviously, it’s still an awesome trick, and I’ve got no doubt that if Houchin read this himself he’d think I was making a big deal out of nothing, and if anybody Houchin’s performer the trick for read this they wouldn’t have the foggiest clue what I was talking about. That said, we’re in an age now where things are getting recorded all the time, and such discrepancies are now way out in the open if people are willing to look for them.

Believe me, this wasn’t the first choice for this archetype, but it was the best I could do on deadline. It’ll be a bit annoying because I’ve already written a whole lot about “Superhero”-theory in terms of how it can apply to a magician’s persona, so much of this may be repetitive for long-time readers of the olde blogge (all seven of you), as well as potentially confusing since yesterday’s archetype was The Superman.

To summarize, while The Superman can do anything, the Mutant is a creature with a specific power. Hailing to the X-Men comics and similar, he has a special ability of some sort, and he explores it through his performances.

It’s a bit troublesome to look at successful current examples of this archetype, as there aren’t all that many, and of the ones who really succeed at exploring their material in terms of power, most of them are mentalists. That said, even though this is an experimental archetype being offered, I truly believe in its potential.

Some defining characteristics…

* The power displayed needs to be sustainable. It needs to be duplicable in a variety of circumstances with a variety of relevant objects, offer the necessary range of proofs and able to survive scrutiny. It also can’t be so outlandish that it would have an impact outside the show. In other words, you don’t want to change $1 into $100, and then have to deal with the uncomfortable situation of having to answer why, with a power like that, you’re not collapsing world economies and such. This doesn’t mean that you have to abandon that effect, but rather incorporate it in a way that’s more sustainable, either by offering it as an example of a temporary hallucination, or perhaps hypnosis, or perhaps as a signal of the magic moment for something else (such as having a $1 switch places with a $100 bill).

* The range of power needs to be clear. The Mutant’s performance is essentially a showcase for his power, and that power pretty much becomes a perceivable entity, if not a character all of its own. Obviously, offering to show what it can do is easy enough… but what about explaining what it can’t do? That can be compelling as well. Mentalists have known this for a while thanks to people taking Chan Canasta’s ideas of failures paradoxically giving credibility to the performer, and running with it. Say you’ve got two people, and they’re each thinking of a card. The person who’s more skeptical might only be able to communicate the colour and suit of the card, whereas the person who’s more of a believer might be able to transmit everything about the card. Consider that the differences here are purely theatrical — the method for both situations can be exactly the same. As for how this could apply to the Mutant… imagine you’ve got this strange ability to make things penetrate through other things, so long as they’re small. You do it with a penny through a table, it works. You do it with a nickel through a table, it works. People get curious, so you do it with a signed quarter, it works. But when somebody pulls out a dollar bill, it doesn’t work. In fact, it actually gets stuck in the table.

* The power displayed needs to have enough potential to offer a variety of effects and routines. This is essentially to escape the trappings of offering a set or routine that hits the same note too many times. Consider somebody like Nightcrawler, who is capable of teleporting from one place to another. That’s already pretty cool, but in the comics, he’s explored it even further, including as a combat tactic — not just in the obvious way of teleporting behind somebody and knocking the from behind, but actually grabbing them and teleporting them with him around the room, which disorients them to the point of getting dizzy or even fainting, which means that he can win a fight, with his power, without throwing a single punch. Of course, since necessity is the mother of invention, Nightcrawler’s need to be able to survive combat makes adapting his power to the situation easy. What to do for just plain performance magic? This is a bit tougher. The best way to handle this is probably found in the following guideline, which is that…

* The power probably doesn’t shouldn’t be too specific. If the cause of the magic is too specific, that can have a detrimental impact on the range of effects open to you. It might be better to say something like “I’ve been messing around with metal.” or “I’ve got this weird relationship with fire.” What’s more, following up on an idea offered in Henning Nelms’ Magic and Showmanship, it’s not always that the higher the claim, the higher the proof needed to support the claim. Sometimes, it’s that the more specific the claim is, the more specific the proof needs to be. In general, unless you’re able to field a variety of questions adeptly, the less said, the better. Obviously it helps to have a crystal clear idea in your head about the nature and range of your powers, but if you can avoid saying it specifically, people ought to be able to pick up on your internal logic and fill in the blanks themselves.

* Irony of tone needs to be handled very delicately. We’re not engaging in pure charlatanry here, but you don’t want to undermine what you’re doing in the same way a Jester or Clown might. The Mutant essentially believes that the power has entertainment value if taken seriously, and uses that as the starting point from which to explore things. On a general level, this is one reason why it’s somewhat hazardous to mix magic and mentalism, since magic (usually) has a tone of trickery and shenanigans, whereas mentalism (usually) has a tone of a display of power that’s serious (if not somber, to quote a Derren Brown distinction). The same thing ought to apply here. Too much hinting that it’s all tricks basically means that your power is shtick, and to be taken just as seriously (or not, as the case may be) as any other magician’s tricks. This brings up a funny thing that David Blaine once said, when somebody asked how he can do what he does — he looks nervous, glances about, and says “Uh, it’s just a trick.” That’s intensely clever.

* Do not rely solely on the nature of the power to be entertaining. Yeah, it’s compelling, but a good rule of thumb that’ll be covered in the Round-up for this series is that “Just because you’re staying true to an archetype, it doesn’t follow that you’re entertaining anybody.” Remember, you’re a character, and that means all sorts of things, some of which have nothing to do with magic. You’ve got to be a person, and again, usually, the less explicitly said about your power, the better.

There are quite a few possibilities for sustainable powers in the magic realm. Things like the following have potential for both range and sustainability. “I’ve been messing about with metal/wood/paper.” “I’ve been testing my pain threshold with fire.” “Sometimes I can heal things if they’re not destroyed too badly.” “None of this is real, it’s just an image I’m planting in your head.” “I can hide some things within other things.” “If I touch something enough, something weird sometimes happens.” Michael Ammar offered some other interesting ideas on the recent Paul Harris DVD set. Now, it’s been a while since I watched them in Minnesota, so some of this will be paraphrased, but the idea was essentially to say something like “Sometimes I get these voices. Usually I drink in order to quell them, but for tonight I’m remaining perfectly sober, and we’re just going to see what happens.” I don’t know about you, but to me that’s some great fodder for a show (particularly if you like to drink). He mentioned in that interview that he thought that a performer who could do this successfully, even if it was a really specific power, if he could do that power under any circumstance, he’d be world-famous.

He also mentioned that it was tough. There’s a commitment here that’d be very difficult to follow, and perhaps that’s why we’ve only really seen it amongst the mentalists, who are playing in a realm that a lot of people believe in already. That said, I’m convinced there’s something here…

The notion here is pretty simple. Think of performance venues as being on a scale, from intimiate close-up on one end to massive huge spectacles on the other end. Why produce a coin when you can produce a Buick? Why vanish a ball when you can vanish an elephant? Why float an inch of the ground when you can soar through the air?

The dominant characteristic of the Superman is that if we think of a magic trick as an event, we might as well make that event as massive and extreme as possible.

The benefits to this are pretty obvious. Assuming that a major part of the power of magic is the memory of the experience, then adding near-hyperbolic details to that memory is a great way to help ensure longetivity, and the more people are there to share it, the more validated that memory becomes. Make things in your illusion bigger, brighter, louder, more dangerous, etc. than the other guy’s, then all other things being equal you’ll be remembered and he’ll be forgotten. Obviously, you’ll want the trick to be good, and for any exaggeration of qualities to not enter the realm of the unintentionally ridiculous, but assuming you can be disciplined in your artistic choices, then bigger really is sometimes better.

And don’t underestimate the power of spectacle. It has a way of uniting and prioritizing tricks that might seem strange in a close-up set. There’s no magic in a straitjacket escape, for instance, but there’s a way that can close a show that Twisting the Aces never will be able to, even though TTA has a proper illusion of impossibility. Sometimes the strength of a routine has little (or nothing) to do with the strenght of the magic in the routine. The Superman understands this, and reprioritizes appropriately.

That said, there are certain defining characteristics of a prototypical Superman trick. You’ll want the trick to be clear, either in terms of effect or else in terms of objective. You’ll pretty much be forced to call your shot, since a big part of a spectacle is organizing to have a big crowd there to witness it, and for that you need a draw, something to hook their interest. That means losing much of the surprise factor, which can be an ally in most magic tricks.

It also stands to reason that a huge part of enjoying the routine is that you’ve got to enjoy the way the routine unfolds. That’s generally a given in most tricks, but it’s particularly important for the Superman. It’s not enough for there to be chuckles, but there must also be thrills, chills, surprises, tension, etc.

It’ll also need to either be incomparable, or else it must trump what’s been done before. This last one is difficult, because it’s too easy to throw so many added features into a traditional routine that it ends up being a parody of the entire process. Sometimes it gets to the point that the only way to trump what’s been done before is to take a completely different approach to it. There was no way, for instance, that David Blaine was going to be able to beat Copperfield’s Flying Illusion in terms of scale (and perhaps not even artistry), and so he took the wise approach of instead doing the wandering Shaman approach, which allowed him to use media in an unconventional way to bolster the power of close-up tricks. Criss Angel, in turn, was able to find a happier marriage between the two, by incorporating stage-style tricks with reality television techniques. One doesn’t have to be a fan of Angel (and believe me, I’m anything but a fan of his) in order to appreciate and respect what he’s accomplished through that medium, and how he’s been pretty imaginative in terms of how he’s attacked the same things this archetype goes for.

Some other potential dangers… distance and medium can have a diluting impact on the way tricks are viewed. The Superman is all about maximizing Yin in an effect, and every now and then this means sacrifices in Yang (conviction). Sometimes vanishing a penny right under their nose has a way of having more power than vanishing an elephant up onstage. And if distance is problematic, then media is doubly-so, because now there are things like editing and special effects that can be seen as rational and reasonable explanations for what’s being seen. Hollywood movies may be lame, narratively, but the things that can be accomplished through special effects are spectacular, and getting more so by the year. That said, if the Superman takes his tricks live and pulls them off deceptively and entertainingly, he’s in a position to compete with them in a compelling way that few others can.

One other potential hazard is the expectation to hit home runs every time a new trick starts. Whit Haydn likes to echo [[GUY'S POINT]] that you can only whack them over the head so many times, and from time to time, if only to break up the tone of constant climax, it helps to be able to switch things up in terms of the dynamics, either by adding humour or sentimentality or pretty much any dynamic that’s both entertaining and yet in stark contrast to the rest of the show. Copperfield and Angel are both very good with this. Copperfield has his Grandpa Aces which offers many positive contributions to his show (good trick, change of tone, increases prestige, etc.), and Angel, in many of his episodes of Mindfreak, will have a feature illusion at the end, but will also have the odd trick to break things up and add texture to what would otherwise be an experience that would otherwise be made up entirely of either that feature trick, or else build-up to that feature trick.

If you think of the great tricks in history, many of them are tricks that play enormous. Things like Penn and Teller performing the Bullet Catch, Houdini escaping his straitjacket while upside-down, and Copperfield’s Flying illusion are milestones for the art. I have no delusions that any trick I do, no matter how well I perform it, will ever come close to imprinting itself upon the world collective consciousness in a way that those tricks will. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to take advantage of the features of my performing style, but I’m also not kidding myself.

Part of the difficulty in trying to come to any conclusive definition about the definition of “magic” performance is that, on the one hand, you want to point towards magic as being the demonstration of impossibilities and mysteries and such, but on the other, we’ve got to take into account the fact that something like Ricky Jay or John Scarne doing a gambling demonstration has the feel of a magic show, even though there’s no “magic” really being claimed (let alone shown). Maybe this is all Erdnase’s fault, I dunno. This is one reason why back when I was more indulgent in the semantics of this whole thing I wanted to call what we do The Theater of Mysteries, since it opened the door up for pretty much any feat being done in real-time that caused people to wonder either about the nature of the feat itself, or the machinations that made the feat possible.

That meant including gambling demonstrations of pretty much any sort, even those that expose different techniques. John Scarne was able to help build his legend because he was called in to do gambling demonstrations for GIs who were regular targets for cheats. To hear the way it’s talked about in Scarne on Dice, if you’re a soldier, then you’re in training, you’re bored and don’t have a lot of entertainment options, and gambling at cards is a fun way to pass the time. That makes you easy pickings. At the time, it was a big enough problem that somebody in the brass saw what it was that Scarne could do, and they wanted to bring him in simply to educate the soldiers about the hazards of playing with strangers. I don’t know if the genre itself was born at that point, but whatever, the point is that it’s a viable situation.

This is one reason why magicians need to get beyond this idea that exposure of any sort is bad and detrimental and gives cancer to puppies, etc. I understand the feeling, as I used to feel the same way, but if you think about it, the situation that led to Scarne exposing gambling cheating techniques makes a ton of sense. If people are out there defrauding other people, it is not only reasonable for people to want to protect themselves, it’s reasonable to assume that there are those who’ll happily teach them those tools for protection. Whether it’s offered as entertainment, or if he lucked into it because he was actually a magician who was halfway conversant with cheating techniques, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Magicians have used, and currently use, techniques that shoplifters and pickpockets have used. Does it make sense for them to complain if a store teaches their clerks how to spot these techniques so as to make sure people don’t walk off with merchandice? Of course not. The same applies here. Anybody complaining about exposure in a gambling demonstration is missing the point. It’s got nothing to do with magicians.

Of course, even if it’s acceptable for somebody to use exposure as a presentational premise in a gambling demonstration, you’re not ironclad-bound to the idea. Plenty of people have come up with dodges so that they can do gambling-themed material that doesn’t read like “magic”, without actually giving away techniques. Others still have managed to use a gambling demonstration as a part of their set, which includes other tricks that have a more magical feel to them. It’s an interesting situation we find ourselves in as magicians, since we might end up in any number of performance venues, some which demand a full act, some which only have space for a single routine, some which are totally impromptu and where we can set our own rules as we go along.

One interesting thing about this particular archetype is that, out of all of them, this is the only one that’s bound to a prop. This makes for a really interesting dynamic. If you don’t like the baggage that’s normally associated with magicians, you don’t have to deal with it — in other words, even though you’re doing impressive and mysterious feats with great surprises in real-time under close scrutiny and with aspects of deception involve, elements that are essentially prevalent in any traditional magic show, you don’t need to take on that mantle if you don’t want to.

If there is a downside — or perhaps, more accurately, a real challenge — it’s that there’s no way to fake talent. I mean, you could do a pseudo-center deal if you want, but now you’re back in magician territory, offering the illusion of something rather than the real deal. Rather than making that silly joke about how nobody wants to play cards with you, you’ve actually got to be somebody that nobody would really want to play cards with. Regular audiences might not know the difference off-hand, but people in the know definitely know a credible cardsharp who can sit with fast company, versus somebody who’d get laughed out of a weekly poker game, and that credibility is a big part of what sells you as a person worth watching.

This means research in a way that many magicians are allergic to. Steve Forte is pretty much considered the pinnacle of this sort of expert handling of cards. In actuality, if you’re going to dive into this Archetype full throttle, then emulating Forte is just the beginning. It takes specific cahones to move in a game, and that includes not just technical competence but the ability to properly shade something. Sleight of hand is perhaps the most obvious way to demonstrate ability in this regard, but how are you with shiners, readers, sending signals, etc.? Keep in mind that the legitimate card cheat wants two things. First, to win, and that means that anything that reliably gets the money is fair game. Second, to not get caught, and that means that the sorts of feats that you’d show in a magic show are probably completely different from what you’re going to do in a card game, because not only do you not want credit for winning in a game, you don’t even want to think that anything deserves credit other than the random chance of the cards being dealt, or perhaps the basic (and commonly-understood) skill at playing the game, such as what you’d see in a Poker Stars tournament.

If there is a pitfall to the whole gambling-demonstration thing, it’s that it’s not too difficult to fall into a rut. “Watch me blow your mind with my chops” can get old pretty fast, and if you’re trying to have a well-rounded and entertaining show, that might mean making sure that there’s a variety not just of “effects” (for lack of a better term) but also dynamics. Are you interacting with people? Are you accepting a challenge? Are you educating them in an entertaining manner? Are you allowing for the possibility of tension and suspense? Are you hitting 100% of the time or are you allowing misses? Are you opening, building and closing the way a competent showman would? Are you being funny, serious, tricky, etc.? Keep in mind that if you’re really embracing this archetype, you’re already taking a bit of a hit by sticking to the same prop, the same theme, and a relatively narrow range of powers. Good showmen can overcome these challenges, of course, but these challenges are real and must be overcome.

It’s also worth considering study of this archetype even if you’ve got no interest in playing it. The cardsharp needs to function under really specific situations, and all the cover and misdirection and strategies need to fit it perfectly — one movement out of place and you’re uninvited from the card table. Of course, it’s also easy to glorify this approach to card handling too much, to the extent that Hugard bemoaned some of the negative effects brought on by Erdnase. If you think about it, it makes sense. The card guy sits at his spot with little to no suspicion, can bide his time, not really interacting with anybody, wait for his moment, and happily claim no credit once he rakes the chips in, whereupon if anybody is suspicious of him, it’s too late.

That sort of situation favours certain strategies. Adopting those same strategies within something geared more towards magic (even if it’s just card tricks) is troublesome. Erdnase brought some great ideas with regards to sleight-of-hand, but sleight-of-hand can’t solve everything.

It also helps to highlight just how many opportunities there are that exist for regular magicians. The interactive factor alone allows for new choreographies and strategies that wouldn’t be there for a person who just sits still and remains as a static point of focus. Of course, it’s not a given that a Cardsharp type must eschew all the presentational strategies open to magicians — on the contrary, a bit of dabbling about in traditional magic would probably benefit most Cardsharps just so that they can explore the different dynamics available if they switch things up. That said, if you’re advertising yourself as an apple, and you give people a delicious orange, people who are just happy to have fruit will be satisfied, but those there to get an apple won’t be. This is one reason why I detest the line “People never want to play cards with me!” stated all-too-often by guys who can do a few good card tricks. Yeah, people who don’t know the difference, don’t… well, know the difference. People who do will resent having their time wasted.

So yeah, again, some challenges to overcome. If you succeed, though? Well, you’ve got an act that packs flat and plays flexible, involving a very commercial topic, and that won’t insult anybody’s intelligence by involving any pretenses of magic if you don’t want it to. You’ve also got a demonstrable power that’s totally sustainable, which means that any reputation you get off it is completely legitimate without any pretense of trickery. That’s pretty good stuff.

It’s probably a stretch to be including this as an archetype in the first place, but I’m going to do it anyway. Very quickly, I want to make a distinction between something that Whit Haydn has termed “The Theater of Charlatanry”, and a bona fide Charlatan. Haydn, when talking about ToC, is basically talking about a show where the performer takes on a role where the aim is to inspire and/or prove belief in his powers, but the performer is no more a real charlatan than Anthony Hopkins really is a mass murderer who eats people. It may be convincing, but in the end it’s still entertainment.

That’s the ToC. For this, though, I’m talking about a pure Charlatan. The kind that pisses off James Randi and his fan club. The type that wants nothing more than to part you with your cash by pretending to talk to your dead parents. The type that ranges from Uri Gellar on the tame end to that lady who gives false hope to parents of a missing child by trying to pick up psychic resonances from the kid’s teddy bear.

Why would I include such an archetype? Because, in the end, this whole thing about the archetypes isn’t so much to offer strict roles for people to follow, but rather as models of study, to pick the odd thing from. After all, shell game hustlers have probably screwed nice people out of their rent money, but that doesn’t mean performers need to stop doing the shell game. I think a similar dynamic is in play for people who would be in what Haydn terms the Theater of Charlatanry, in terms of being able to study these guys in order to create a more compelling theatrical experience.

Insofar as ethics are concerned, the olde blogge’s official position is this — no harm, no foul. If you’re not taking advantage of anybody and if it’s all in the name of entertainment, nothing’s off-limits. That might seem innocuous enough, but I really mean it when I say nothing is off-limits. That means the Andy Kaufman-like territory where everybody is trying to figure out if you’re serious or not with whatever outlandish statements or claims you’re making. Truth be told, not only is that sort of thing permitted, it’s actually desireable, particularly for people who’ve grown numb with the mundane. I think that a lot of people feel Kaufman is overrated simply because rebelling against convention has an easily-gained novelty to it, but I personally think that this sort of thing is extremely intellectually satisfying, because it brings out into the open a question that we frequently consider, that of how much of what we do for each other is a lie. Once that becomes the premise for the interaction, it can be really fun territory to explore.

This is also where pro wrestling can actually be an interesting study. Hear me out. If you don’t know kayfabe, it’s a pro wrestling term that’s used to describe what happens when a pro wrestler stays in character even outside of the ring (or the weekly televised show, whatever). It’s what keeps wrestling interesting even when people know it’s fake. It’s a difficult thing keeping people engaged when you’ve got two grown men who feel that the best way to air their differences is to wriggle their way into some tights and miss each other with punches. What holds it all together isn’t just acting, but this sort of contract of make-belief that everybody engages in, and while one way to break that contract is to put on a poor showing in the ring, the other way is to let the public see you, outside the ring, not actually hating on the guy who made you froth at the mouth when you were inside the ring.

So sum up, if you hate Hulk Hogan inside the ring, and then you have an interview outside the ring, and somebody asks you how you feel about Hogan, if you keep character and talk about how much you hate him, you’re maintaining kayfabe. On the other hand, talk about how much you like working with him and how professional he is in the ring — in other words, being honest — and you break kayfabe.

Wrestling’s a fascinating study in that sense, because they’ve found that not only are people capable of appreciating what they see on those two levels, but they like the notion. This has led to things like shoots (wrestlers who seem to break kayfabe in the middle of a show against the wishes of the organization) and even worked shoots (wrestlers who break kayfabe with the organization’s permission).

I’m going to stop going down that rabbit hole though, because the point here is to see its potential for the Charlatan, as it offers a way to essentially play the character in an interesting (yet still socially acceptable) way.

Now, there’s a question of how all of this stuff applies to the Charlatan, as opposed to magicians in general. After all, isn’t all magic a lie at some point?

The key to answering this is to shift the perception of what the real illusion is in a magic show. If you’re presenting what you do as an illusion, then you’re a magician. If you’re presenting yourself as the illusion, now you’re entering into Charlatan territory, because now not only must you avoid having the stuff you do be seen as tricks, or accomplished via trickery, now you can’t even use the term “trick”, or even let yourself be called “a magician”. That sort of thing is an insult. You don’t hired to use a dove pan at a Barmitzvah, you’re walking a long and mysterious road. You see things that others can’t see. You do things that others can’t do.

It also has built into it the notion of suspension of disbelief. Darwin Ortiz talked about how magic never really incorporates the willing suspension of disbelief, and while I can see his point, in that magic needs to really engender almost near-belief in order to be powerful, but going down that road can still be an acknowledgement that deception is in play — it’s just that the deception is sublime. Here, though, the Charlatan wants to maintain the illusion of being the real deal, and frankly, that’s a lot easier when you’ve got people who already believe in the phenomena that you’re demonstrating. This is one reason why Charlatans tend to be successful when sticking around the psychic territory, since modern culture (things like the X-files, Astrology, etc.) has been pretty good at fostering the notion that this is a plausible area of the supernatural.

Of course, that means you’ve got to be careful. If you’re going down this path, it means that you don’t want to be compared to other magicians, so you’ve got to pay attention to what they do and say. Tropes and terms invoked by them are not only to be avoided, they need to be scorned. Obviously, if you’re claiming psychic powers you wouldn’t want to do something like the Chicago Opener, which is a fairly blatant magic trick, but if you’ve got an experiment that you’re doing and some magician sees you do it and then incorporates it into their act, and it becomes popular and even perhaps ubiquitous in a way that the Chicago Opener currently is, then now you’ve got problems. Magicians are known for their tricks, and even when a good trick is done, people believe there’s a method for it. If you’re a Charlatan, there is no method — or rather, you are the method. Having your stuff duplicated by a magician — or worse, a skeptic-magician who’s targetting and exposing charlatans — means you’re compromised. Richard Osterlind echoes Corinda’s point about the acceptable nature of card tricks in a mentalism act, but to think of mentalism as one all-encompassing body is an oversimplification. If I were trying to be a Uri Gellar-type, I wouldn’t touch cards unless I could test-conditions the bastard into the ground. To do otherwise, to let even the faintest whiff of trickery into the exquisite aroma of your act is tantamount to performance suicide.

Obviously, this is incredibly hazardous territory. When you look at any self-respecting person and assert something to their face that they know is impossible, it’s doubly duplicitous, because not only is your claim insulting to their intelligence, but your ballsy continued insistence upon it is equally insulting as well, and can arouse a backlash that most magicians will never have to deal with it. Of course, the great thing about that is that anybody sympathetic to your cause will see these attacks and can either offer sympathy, or even come to your defence. After all, their belief in you has given them pleasure, and now some know-it-all wants to take that meaningful experience and say it’s all false?

And that goodwill can go a long way. If people are already suspending disbelief that can open up some methodologies that might not be available if they’re judging your every move with intense scrutiny. Derren Brown seeks in his shows strategies that don’t involve open compromises, and that makes sense for him, because he’s got a broad audience that includes all levels of schemata (believers, skeptics, people who are there for a good time, etc.). However, if they’re already halfway to believing your powers, they’ll accept the odd compromise. Tyler Erickson even thinks that a Charlatan might get away with flashing a technique or hidden item and get away with it, so long as he’s got one seemingly legitimate bit in there, and that bit captures their imagination enough. If you’re a magician, it’s tough making an excuse for not being able to do something under certain conditions (eg: “What card am I thinking of, smart guy?”). If you’re an effective Charlatan, you won’t have to make any excuses — your audience will be more than happy enough to do it for you.

Hopefully it’s more clear now why I’ve included this as a legitimate archetype for performers to consider. If we can set aside ethical considerations, or even let them be rendered moot by virtue of the fact that you don’t actually hurt somebody aversely through your performances, there’s some fascinating stuff here.

As explained yesterday, the set of Archetypes I’m offering makes a distinction between Bizarrism and story-telling magic, if only because one usually involves a series of motifs or themes, whereas the other involves a format of presentation. For various reasons these two tend to go together quite well — story-telling, as Darwin Ortiz rightly pointed out in Strong Magic, has a capacity to create a very strong atmosphere and invoke a variety of emotions, and these are the sorts of things that Bizarrists are usually very happy to take advantage of.

That said, they can be seen as separate entities as well. Triumph, various Magician-vs-Gambler tricks, “3 Card Monkey Business”/”Colour Monte”, Hamman’s “Two Twins”, “Sam the Bellhop” etc. can all involve story-telling in its most innocent form, the relating of a past experience. In fact, there are a lot of advantages that can be drawn from story-telling by all kinds of magicians aside from Bizarrists, as well as some potential drawbacks.

First, though, the advantages…

* People like well-told stories. This is not just an accepted art form, it’s an accepted High Art form, up there with painting and sculpture. It offers by its nature the potential to increase the audience’s estimation of the routine, from a trifle to something really substantive.

* A story can be a great shift of tone in a magic set. Most tricks force the audience to experience interaction-driven events. Every now and then, though, switching up the tone can add texture to the set, giving people are more complete and well-rounded experience. Stories are a great way to do that.

* Stories can serve as an audience management tool. A well-told story can make your audience passive and attentive to what will happen next… and if by some chance somebody else doesn’t care for it, they’ll still be under social pressure to see how the story plays out.

* Stories can invoke other artistic features. Drama, tension, humour, atmosphere, surprise, excitement, suspense, tragedy, nostalgia, poignancy, etc. are all things that can be created simply through the competent retelling of a good story. Magic frequently suffers the problem of hitting the same note once too often, and the potential to switch things up and add texture to a set is vast if the appropriate story trick is brought into play.

* Stories can diffuse challenge. This is a big one for those who want to use tricks such as 3 Card Monte, or any number of “Guess what the real state of affairs is” type of tricks (eg: 2-in-the-hand/1-in-the-pocket) but don’t want to have to incorporate the challenge effect aspect of it. I’ve done this, it works, and depending upon venue and expectations this is a good way to ensure that theatricality doesn’t suffer via audience-driven disruptions.

* Stories can offer justification for difficult-to-motivate tricks. Part of what makes fiction work is the idea of suspension of disbelief, and this is a feature that can brought into a magic trick where things might otherwise be considered difficult to motivate. Consider Triumph. Who on earth would shuffle face-up into face-down? Even if this is a stretch of the imagination, people will play along so long as there’s a promise that the pay-off will be worth it. (How you get them to accept that promise, of course, is another story…)

* Stories can add meaning to an effect. There are some that argue that magic is inherently meaningful. I’m willing to buy into that to a certain extent, in a “the medium is the message” kind of way. However, sometimes people get dulled to the novelty of surprises and real-time mysteries, and are receptive to (if not in active search of) something a bit more. Plus, let’s face it, as society advances, a lot of what we do risks becoming trivialized simply by virtue of our imagination getting surpassed by what science and technology are capable of. A little meaning in that context doesn’t hurt too much. Additionally, the promise of meaning can be used to heighten interest in something that might otherwise be considered a minor feat — eg: the Hindu Thread Mystery.

* Conflict is a fantastic theatrical tool. Pit two people against each other on understood terms, throw a little contrast between the two, add some jeopardy, and you’ve got the building blocks for narrative art. It’s worth mentioning that Whit Haydn considers that these same dynamics are what make any pick-a-card trick capable of being elevated to art, simply because you’ve got a protagonist, an antagonist, and a conflict. How the magician goes about resolving that conflict is where the art kicks in. The very power of this simple principle is probably what’s lead to the magician-in-trouble plot being so pervasive. I could talk at length about this here, but really, get thee to Tommy Wonder. I’d actually recommend studying his ideas (and the routines that use those ideas) since they can be useful to anybody, Allegorist or no.

Drawbacks?

* People hate poorly-told stories (or poetry, or fables, or…). People don’t like their time wasted, and a poorly-told story wastes people’s time in a particularly insufferable way. And, truth be told, most magicians have a hard enough time pulling off a good trick that trying to indulge in story-telling is a bad idea, and even further, so many people (let alone magicians) don’t really understand how to put a good story together. It’s not enough to use flowery language or have an eloquent style, and magicians frequently add the tone of gravitas to a passage that only exacerbates things and would get them laughed out of a first year Creative Writing course. Just as Aesthetes benefit from understanding the visual and dynamic arts and setting aside magic to study the masters of those disciplines, and just as Clowns benefit from aspiring beyond what’s considered “comedy magic” to look at what makes for good comedy in any venue, Allegorists need to broaden their exposure to good story-telling beyond what’s commonly done by other magicians. If you’re going to take proper advantage of incorporating the features of an art form, you’d best be conversant in what makes the art form work. And here’s a clue — when I’m saying an “art form”, I’m not necessarily saying that you’ve got to aim for Faulkner or Hemingway. On the contrary, it’s that attempt to aim for “high art” that makes the exercise laughable. Find somebody you like and also happens to be good at their craft, study them to see what they do, and incorporate that.

* People want to interact. Magic offers something that most other artforms, including live performance art forms, do not, and that’s the element of interaction. Throw too much story at people and you’ll risk alienating them or turning them off outright, because you’re denying them something that’s usually expected in magic, particularly close-up magic, and that’s the opportunity to be a part of the experience, and even share in the shaping of it.

* Stories require certain venues. Noise, language barriers, levels of drunkenness, etc. can drastically impact your ability to engage people with a story. Assuming you want to be a working magician incorporating aspects of the Allegorist, understand that at times it won’t be feasible. Stay flexible.

* Metaphors are hard to do well. By definition, a metaphor is something that represents something else — a doll might represent a child’s innocence, a wand might represent something else that’s both elongated and gets regularly manipulated by the magician, etc. The problem is that in order to do a metaphor well, you’ve got to take the chance that the audience can make the connection that you’re hoping for. If you find yourself literally saying “This card represents the depths of your soul” then you’re incorporating metaphors poorly. A huge part of the power of a metaphor is the spectator’s ability to draw the connection themselves, and making the connection for them risks both diluting the power of the interpretation in their own mind, as well as insulting their intelligence by indirectly conveying that you don’t think they’re smart enough to interpret the metaphor correctly.

Additionally, though, poor artists, in an attempt to invoke symbols and metaphors and presumably announce to the world that what they’re doing is profound, not only execute metaphors poorly, they choose them poorly as well — meaning, they have the lofty abstraction in mind that they want to talk about, and then force it onto a prop that doesn’t mesh well with it. Never mind oil and water, I’ve seen tricks where people try to use playing cards to represent hopes and dreams, and they’re usually painful because they’re trying to force meaning upon an item (or proceedings that are done with that item) that’s artistically inappropriate.

As an example, take the Torn and Restored plot. This is not an uncommon device in narrative-driven tricks, for good reason — you’ve got something, something bad happens to it, but then it’s restored. There’s a pleasing symmetry and circularity to it. We’re not talking High Literature, of course, but it’s an acceptable way of having events unfold. That said, when Eugene Burger chooses thread as his object to tear and restore, and he’s having that thread represent the universe, that’s an excellent choice not just because it’s a phsyical item that’s getting torn and restored, it’s also an item defined by the quality of length, which can mimic the linear way many humans perceive existence (a start point, an end point, a path, etc.). Going with a playing card or a newspaper in this instance would be a bad idea, if only because of the additional traits that those items bring to the equation.

* Sometimes a good story is a distraction. A good story transports people into imagination, which is a good thing. A good magic trick forces people to question the literal truth in front of their eyes, which is also a good thing. Unfortunately, most people don’t really want to be troubled with these two warring mental processes competing for their attention. It’s already difficult enough making sure the metaphors work, the props fit, the pacing is good, the scheduling of events works, and you’re not umming and ahing. Forcing people to choose between enjoying a great story and trying to appreciate the physical mystery can be a very difficult balance. Another potential problem related to this is that you usually don’t want the story ending and the trick’s climax to be at staggered moments, since that sometimes only serves the highlight the lack of organic relationship between the two, which suggests one is subservient to the other, which means that either the story or the trick was optional add-on content, which can water down the impression of the trick as a whole.

* Sometimes the trick can’t make good on what makes stories so compelling. In order for stories to work, time and care and attention needs to be taken in setting up characters and agents and conflicts and whatnot, just to get the story moving properly. Where things get troublesome is that most tricks are around three or four minutes in length maximum. That’s not really enough time to get a great narrative going. This means that simplifications and one-dimensional and/or stereotypical characters are needed, just so that the trick doesn’t get bogged down with too much, but that means you’re risking telling a bad story, which suggests that skipping the story might be the smartest thing, assuming you can’t handle delivery of those elements in a satisfying way. Plus, there’s the element of conflict resolution. Most satisfying stories involve the character resolving the conflict according to their own means, but most magic tricks involve the magician snapping his fingers to make something miraculous happen, a la Deus Ex Machina. Deus Ex Machina is usually a hallmark of bad storytelling.

This is one reason why narrative forms other than full-blown stories ought to be considered, such as anecdotes, parables or even jokes, since it doesn’t put too much weight on the narrative to carry the entire proceedings. Even poetry might be a better written form to study than narrative, since poetry has no requirement to involve characters or an acceptable plot.

* Sometimes stories are forgotten anyway. Whit Haydn made the point that the key story in any trick isn’t the one the magician might be telling, but rather the spectator’s own story that he’ll tell afterwards about having witnessed the trick. These things don’t really have to be mutually exclusive, though, and that alone might not be reason enough to drop a story, as that might be the best way for the trick to unfold — something like Sam The Bellhop, for instance, might cause them to remember the recount the experience something like this: “It was amazing, he told this entire story with the whole deck of cards! He kept shuffling them and cutting them and it didn’t matter, he had every card he needed when he needed it, and he used every last one.” Would they remember the specific aspects of the poker hands at the end? Unlikely. Also, irrelevant.

However, where things get problematic is if the story imposes itself as an interference in that Ghost Story aspect. If that happens, you’ve got a problem. Even though I’m constantly making mention of the need to really dive into any art form you’re hoping to incorporate into your routine, in the end you’re a magician, and they’re there to see magic. You want to have a good understanding of literature or humour or aesthetics because your audience is probably filled with people who’ve read a ton of books or watched a lot of comedies or seen dancing before. But when they come to you, they’re looking for magic, so don’t overindulge on these other elements to the point that you lose balance.

Similar to the problem with the Bizarrist Archetype is that we don’t really have enough models of truly remarkable performers who follow this approach. Eugene Burger is a great one, of course, and the fact that he’s been so good in both story-telling and Bizarrism is (I suspect) a huge part of why so many people think the two are synonymous with each other. That’s too bad, though, because it limits a potentially rich subgenre of magic in Bizarrism by forcing it into a specific presentational framework, as well as ruining what ought to be a great format in storytelling by forcing a certain set of motifs into it.

However, even if we lack performers we can point to as models, we do have many instances of great tricks that involve story-telling. Sam the Bellhop is instructive because narratively, it’s rather weak, but the trick is fantastic. Colour Monte is another one, and R. Paul Wilson’s Gypsy Monte approach is quite nice. Tommy Wonder’s Ring, Wallet and Watch is a great example of how a simple story with a readily-understandable conflict is all that’s necessary to get into the trick. Ricky Jay’s History Lesson involves a lot of anecdotes that are presented mostly as humour, and that’s another option. Hamman’s Two Twins is a good example of a trick where the story and trick mesh together well and appropriately, and even if the miracle is minor and the story won’t remind anybody of Moby Dick, it’s a good example of light entertainment that fits the archetype.

I’ve got a background in writing, so I’m probably going to revisit this one way later, but for now, 2500 words (and 15 revisions) ought to be enough.

Out of all the titles given to the different archetypes, this one probably comes off as the most insulting, so I’m going to state for the record that I chose “The Clown” rather than “The Comedy Magician” simply because it makes for a better Archetype name and it saves some typing. That’s it. If there’s a hint of me being dismissive in naming this Archetype in this manner, then let me be clear — one of my personal favourite things to watch is a comedy magic show that is both funny and deceptive.

To sum up the Clown’s approach, it’s essentially a perfect merging of comedy and magic. Laughter is a natural reaction in the face of surprise and astonishment, and as such a marriage with comedy at some point was inevitable. There is, however, a difference between a comedy magic show and a magic show that just happens to have some funny bits in there. Derren Brown and Penn and Teller, for instance, will have some genuinely good laughs in their act, but you don’t get the impression that comedy is the driving force in the way the show unfolds. A comedy magician, however, has decided to take on the challenge of having two masters, to the extent that he would fit in either at a comedy club as one of many sets, or else in some variety show featuring other magicians.

Why is this distinction important? Because out of all the Archetypes out there, this one arguably is driven the most by the pragmatism of the market for live entertainers. If you go to any city’s magic club and meet the guys who frequent it, in all likelihood you’ll run into people who qualify themselves as “Comedy Magicians”, and more often than not they’re banking upon the potential for magic’s inherent ability to induce laughter more than actually being proper stand-up comics whose on-stage personas happen to be deeply intertwined with magic. In other words, they may be funnier than a lot of the other dudes at the club, but these guys aren’t cutting their chops at open mikes and comedy improvs. To paraphrase the way Patton Oswalt put it, a Comedy Magician is either an unfunny standup comic who’s learned a magic trick, or a magician who’s learned a dick joke.

That said, just because there are many unsatisfying comedy magicians out there, it doesn’t follow that the Clown is not a viable archetype. On the contrary, while it may be difficult to come through on the promise that the archetype offers, if you are successfully able to do this you are now arguably more marketable than any other archetype in the list, if only because the number of venues open to you has expanded drastically.

That said, while there’s plenty of literature out there showing you how to become a good magician, there’s very little out there telling you how to become a good comedy magician. For that, you’ve got to go outside the art form and really submerge yourself in what standup comedy is all about. You’ll see that a recurring theme in the exploration of these Archetypes is that many of them borrow from other art forms that have been recognized as legitimate, but it’s not enough to merely borrow.

And you can’t fake being funny. You either are or you aren’t. I won’t go so far as to say that you’re either born funny or you’re not, but I will say that nature-vs-nurture arguments aside, you can’t fake being what you aren’t.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you need to be able to do good standup to be a good comedy magician. Michael Finney, for instance, is a fantastic comedy magician, but his standup (at least what was shown on the L&L tape) is pretty tame. It demonstrates his good timing and delivery and ability to deal with comedic subject matter, sure, but where he really starts to shine is with the magic. On a recent podcast done by Joe Rogan, he talks about how many comics that rely upon a gimmick, such as prop, music or even ventriloquism, get the temptation to want to toss that stuff aside and demonstrate their prowess as straight comedians. This is a mistake. If you can do great standup without the need for magic, such as what Steve Martin was able to accomplish, then good on you, but in the end, we’re not talking about abandoning magic altogether.

Rather, the point is to figure out what it is that standup comics do well, and how to incorporate that into the magic, as well as to figure out what it is that can be leveraged in magic to comedic effect. For the former, you’ll have to essentially dive into the world of standup comedy and watch as many acts as possible to see what’s working and what’s not. That’s a huge body of knowledge to work with, but thankfully it’s out there. The aforementioned Joe Rogan podcast has some great stuff in there that talks about comedy in general, and currently it seems that once or twice a week Rogan is putting out a couple of hours of discussion with different guests. If you’re already a fan of standup comedy it’s a great watch (the last few have included guests such as Doug Stanhope and Dave Attell), but if you’re thinking about developing yourself according to the criteria of this archetype, I’d say it’s probably required viewing, if only to familiarize yourself with what it means to actually pursue this as a career.

Finding out what is funny is almost like chasing unicorns, and a lot of the time, the answers aren’t as profound or complicated as you might think. A recent HBO special that had Louis CK, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, talked about the role of profanity in comedy. Seinfeld talked about how he found himself in a weird situation where he did a joke that included a swear word, and it played great, but without the swear word, it was weak, and that scared him and made him want to abandon profanity altogether so as to refocus his efforts on what was inherently funny. What was interesting, though, was what the others there pointed out, which was that the joke that included the swear word essentially was a display of him being angry, and the swear word helped to punctuate that anger, and it’s that anger that made it funny. If you can hunt down that conversation, I totally recommend it, but the key takeaway here is that something as mundane as the performer showing himself to be angry can be funny — not some clever arrangement of words or judicious use of pauses and statements to set up the timing, but rather a simple dramatization of an emotion. That alone might be a good litmus test to see if you’re Clown-ready — if you can display an emotion honestly and it can read as funny in the right context, you’re on the right track. Watch the beginning of Broadcast News and you’ll see Holly Hunter’s character by the dock sitting there bawling, and it’s both sincerely sorrowful and freaking hilarious at the same time.

If you get David Kaye’s Seriously Silly, his treatise on the theory of performing magic for children, you’ll also get some great ideas in there as well. Of course, they’re also simple. He talks about things like repetition, contrast, surprise, etc. and even though performance for children usually involves the use of obvious strategies to get the laughs, you’ll see a lot of ideas in there that can be useful for a performer for adults as well.

So yeah, finding stuff that’s funny is difficult. On the other hand, it’s not all that difficult to look at something that’s not funny and pointing out why. One thing that comedy magicians tend to indulge in is the idea of putting on a whacky or zany over-the-top costume or appearance, and then head into the regular trick complete with the usual “No, the clean hand.” empty humour. The use of a whacky costume is not necessarily a bad one — Michael Finney uses this to great effect — but it’s not enough to carry it. Notice that things with Finney become really funny when the interaction starts up. Now you’ve got an overweight guy with a lousy suit and a bad mullet and a funny, almost Droopy-Dog way of speaking, and he’s got a hot girl up there, and he’s essentially groping her in the middle of the rope trick. That’s a bold approach, but if there’s a Darwinistic art form out there, it’s standup comedy, and you’ll find that there’s little tolerance for tame or even timid comics. People deal with other people in a tame or timid way all the time — they’re paying money to get something different.

As an aside, one other thing that a whacky and zany outfit, or perhaps any obvious detour from the norm, can do for the performer is to make sure that the audience realizes straight away that they’re allowed to laugh. People in general aren’t all that comfortable with extreme displays of emotion in public, which is why things like the laugh track in a sitcom can be effective, no matter how insipid the concept might be on the surface. You might not need it as much if you’re doing a set at a comedy club, and you really might want to tone it down if you’re doing walkaround somewhere, but if there’s even a hint of stiffness in the audience, making sure that people know within seconds of seeing you that it’s ok to laugh can be a real boon.

Getting back to the bold side of things, if there’s a real sin in what so many comedy magicians are doing, it’s that the jokes are tame. You don’t want to follow up a good opening moment that lets them know it’s ok to laugh with garbage. “Do you want to change your mind? No? You’re happy with the mind you’ve got?” “Look, it’s a floor show! It’s picking up, though.” Ugh. We can do so much better than that base level of wordplay. Look at what Wayne Dobson is doing with the spongeball trick.

He’s a tiny little white guy, and he’s got a big black guy on-stage, and he’s venting a shrill little voice and making him say that he’s going to go to the bathroom if the trick doesn’t end soon. That’s bold stuff. Are you willing to go there with your audience, if that’s what it takes?

Of course, we’ve got to analyze what it is that lets Wayne Dobson get away with that, whereas other people could not. There’s the usual cliche that it doesn’t matter what you say, but how you say it, but we can do better than that. A valuable idea offered by Keith Johnstone in improv theater is that of the concept of “status” up on-stage. Essentially it’s about how you can use various theatrical techniques to establish who on stage has high status and who has low-status, and by understanding these things, you can use status conflicts as a way of driving theater in compelling ways. If you look into Johnstone’s work you’ll find many great ideas about how to establish high or low status, but the key thing here is the idea of status contrast itself as being good fodder for comedy. Again, it’s arguably good fodder for anything, and perhaps the real litmus test is to just set up your interaction with the spectators, cast yourself and them in various high- and low-status roles, and figure out if there’s inherent comedy potential there. Again, look at the Wayne Dobson routine or Michael Finney’s routine through the lens of status. Who’s got high status? Who’s got low status? Are things playing out as one would expect given their default dynamic?

Another idea that could have gotten talked about more in David Kaye’s book is that of callbacks, recognition and discovery. These are essentially three different branches of the same phenomenon, where the audience essentially puts the pieces together in order to create the humour themselves. You might think on the surface that pretty much every joke contains that — after all, explaining jokes is rarely in itself funny — but what we’re talking about is the leveraging of this to a stronger level.

Callbacks are the most obvious ones because it’s an easily-discernible pattern. Even when they’re used to relatively poor comedic effect, as exemplified on Gervais’s Extras with the “Are you having a laugh?” catchphrase humour that he detests so much, it does work. There’s a portion of the population out there that is happy to hear Steve Erkel go “Did I do that?” after some goof-up. That said, people are usually happy to see a pattern establish itself, and callbacks allow for that, since it’s essentially you making good on an offering earlier on in the show, or from another performance. As with all things, it helps if what you’re calling back to is funny, but if it is, then deliberate use of the technique is something you can take advantage of. In some ways this is really just another way to spin Kaye’s stressing of the importance of repetition, but the key thing here is this process of the audience discovering the pattern.

And they can discover other things as well. Bob Newhart’s one-sided telephone conversation sketches have been praised specifically because of what doesn’t get said. Newhart’s genius is in figuring out a way that through his script and what he says, the audience gets to essentially insert their own idea of what the joke is. They essentially get to invent the punchline, and they almost get to pat themselves on the back for coming up with something that’s funny. Yet another is the idea of recognition, where the audience is essentially given a current situational context, and then some new data is introduced and they immediately laugh because they see the comedic potential. While this is useful in a number of ways, it’s particularly useful when using taboo material. Lance Pierce has stated that he refuses to work blue simply because of potential problems that can occur through even the most minor of misunderstandings. That said, he has a great story about how somebody made their own dirty joke at a gig that (if memory serves) was basically an announcement about their impressive girth. For somebody who refuses to work blue, having a spectator drop a bomb like that on the proceedings is really troublesome, because now you’ve got to coral everybody who’s laughing at the dick joke and return focus on the performer and his trick. How do you top a dick joke? Pierce’s approach was to wait until laughter had died down, and he looked at the guy and said, “Hey buddy…” and when the audience turned to him, Pierce made a fist and stuck out his thumb and pinky, set it by his face miming a phone receiver, and mouthed the words “Call me!” That’s a great lesson in how to work dirty without working dirty, but it essentially grows out of people’s inherent ability to recognize something funny despite not having all that much to work with. Doc Eason basiclly uses this gambit in another way for his Two-in-the-Hand/One-in-the-Pocket routine, which I’ll leave for you to hunt down as homework if you’re curious.

I could probably lengthen this laundry list of comedic strategies and tactics, but I’ve talked long enough about that, and honestly, there are better places to research this stuff besides this blog, particularly since I’m not a standup myself. I will say, however, that a study of all this stuff can have a beneficial effect even if you’re not really fitting into that archetype, and if you’re just a regular magician looking to try to get more laughs into your show without going full-blown stand-up. And, frankly, there are things like basic stagecraft and presentation that can be learned from polished stand-up comics that aren’t really jokes in and of themselves. Referencing a Joe Rogan podcast again, one thing that he praised Richard Jeni for was his ability to take a premise and really milk it for every bit of comedic power it might have. If you look at that gag where somebody’s about to pick a card from a fan and the magician has one wiggling out there that he’s trying to induce the spectator to take… what’s going on there that makes it such a ubiquitous joke? Obviously, it’s funny on its own, but a huge part of its value lies in the fact that the magician has taken a part of the trick that is usually not all that funny, and has made it entertaining. Obviously, it sucks that it’s getting used all over the place, but the point is that there’s are opportunities throughout a routine to leverage something that’s potentially funny and make good on it. Chris Capehart has a routine that involves a spectator choosing one of four queens. Plenty of tricks do this, but the approach used by Capehart includes an impromptu character-reading based on their choice, and there’s plenty of comedic potential there. You could throw that sort of thing into all sorts of packet tricks.

For yet another example, watch Pablo Francisco’s “Bits and Pieces” performance, and look at how he closes that show. That’s a fantastic study on its own, since you can bet that a magician who closes his set with the same power will be remembered as a good showman.

Obviously it’s easy to take all this theory too far. Sometimes things are just funny, and no amount of figuring out why it’s funny will be able to overshadow it’s inherent comedic value. If you don’t have a natural god-given genius about this sort of thing, then sometimes the best thing to do is just start throwing as much stuff as possible at the proverbial wall and see what sticks. A lot of the time, the slickness of delivery in a polished stand-up act fools us into thinking that the comedian has a natural grace and they just seem to spontaneously ejaculate funny at people. In truth, a lot of that stuff takes time, patience and repeated exposure to fresh audiences. Again, to reference the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the guests talked about being a featured comic one night, doing his bit, and then sitting down and watching Louis CK go up there with some experimental stuff. To hear him describe it, Louis didn’t kill that night, but he went up there and was experimenting and working through this material with some real discipline, and that material that didn’t kill that time eventually became some of the signature stuff that did kill. There’s a lesson in there that’s applicable not just to comedy magic, but magic in general.

I guess, to conclude this rambling thing, it’s best to reiterate that this is a fantastically commercial route for a magician to go, but to really make good on it, you’ve got to see beyond the obvious tropes and tactics. Stand-up comedy crowds don’t suffer fools lightly, but if you can win them over, you’ve got a chance to be a frequently-booked act that’ll be the envy of every other magician in your area.

This approach to evaluating magic has essentially become ingrained in my thinking — I must admit I rarely use the “yin” and “yang” terms anymore except in the rarest of situations, especially when talking with others because I usually have to follow up with explanations about what they mean. Instead, I tend to talk in broad terms about the presentaton and the methodological strategy, so if it helps to think about this duality in that way, go for it.

The key thing is the understanding that in just about every strong performance of a trick out there, you’ll see balance. David Copperfield’s Flying Illusion is a great example. Look at what’s going for it in terms of Yin: the concept of flight is inherently meaningful, he looks like he’s really flying (instead of just floating or being hovered around as if by wires), there’s nice escalation (first he goes up, then he moves laterally, then he’s flying under test conditions, then he’s actually taking somebody with him), the effect is simple, the music is nice, there’s symbolism, there’s strong imagery, etc. Yang-wise the trick isn’t quite as strong (as he’s employing the same method throughout), but it’s still very good: he floats within spinning hoops and then inside a box, and then he’s even carrying somebody.

Notice how that last detail has a Yin and Yang aspect. He’s sharing the experience (Yin) but he’s also carrying a greater weight, and if you had trouble imagining how wires so thin could do the initial effects, that last bit really rubs it in your face — ie: there’s no way really thin wires could handle that extra weight.

Tyler once talked about the experience of performing Miser’s Dream for his father. He opened with mid-air productions of the coins, which is a bit tough because for as strong as the Yin is (you’re making money appear from thin air, after all), inherent to that particular strategy is the notion that the magician is simply hiding the coins in his hand. That said, Tyler’s approach was to produce three (or so) coins, then produce a fourth, which he tossed up into the air and caught with an open palm, and then, after chucking it into the bucket, cleanly producing a fifth. His father’s reaction at that point was to exclaim “How many more damn coins do you have in your hand?”

At first glance that sounds good. On further reflection, it sounds not so good, since he seems to be hip to the method. On even further reflection, though, it sounds good again, because he’s now in a position to deny that he’s hiding coins in his hand, and he’s in a great position to start using cancelling strategies to prove that.

One other thing to take away from that anecdote involving Tyler’s father was that some people look at magic that way. They’re hard-wired to want to try to figure it out, and that’s ok. Lazy magicians tell themselves that those spectators don’t count and that everything’s fine if 95% of everybody else was entertained. Every now and then it’s a point that can be conceded, as arguably truly establishing strong Yang means making it overt and turning everything into a test conditions experiment, which is a difficult tone to make entertaining, especially if you do it more than once in a set. In other words, embracing Yang as strong as possible can have a negative impact on Yin, if there’s a spot where they’re competing for the audience’s attention. This is one reason why I’m starting favour effects that are simpler in concept, ones that can be summed up easily by a spectator, since it means you can make more efficient use of the time necessary to perform, giving them the necessary Yin while allowing for some time for Yang-related details to sink in. It’s also another reason why I favour a smaller repertoire, since more time spent on an effect means more time spent trying to find the balance, and invariably letting the Yin and Yang components grow stronger as you refine the routine over time.

The other reason why I stick to this model is because of the fact that despite each part of the synergy being analyzed on its own terms, it’s the interrelationship that’s important. A trick without Yin is a trick without meaning. A trick without Yang is a trick without credibility. Favouring one mode too much is a problem, regardless of which one mode it is. However, it’s also a neat way to consider the dynamics of a set. Just as the Yin Yang is a conceptual model and there’s the possibility of one being a bit more influential than the other, so to is the possibility that one’s set has a bit too much time spent on establishing conviction rather than making sure people like the effects, or else too much time going for great effects that aren’t convincing enough. Even for a performer that has good presentational chops and good methodologies, it may well be that one might want to intentionally shift between routines that seem to favour one mode over the other so that the show has the necessary texture.

For example, you open with a quick trick, and that gets the right response, because the effect is clear, unambiguous, and direct. People are still evaluating you from a distance so it’s difficult to get them involved in a strong mystery, the sort of thing where (for example) they need to sign the card for the effect to have proper conviction. That said, once you have established basic competence, along with adjunct qualities such as being fun, or else displaying the type of entertainment that you’ll be offering (eg: establishing that you’ll be doing bizarrism, or sleight-of-hand with cards, or visual manipulative effects, etc.) then as they get drawn in, it only makes sense that they’ll want to know if your effects are credible, in which case their interests may shift. How the performer adjusts to this is, and the competence that they’re able to do so, is in my mind a key measure of their ability as a magician.

I don’t know about the experience of others, but for myself, I’ve found that the more people I do close-up magic for, the more the range is obvious to me. Some people won’t care about conviction (Yin thinkers) whereas others will only think about that sort of thing (Yang thinkers) whereas some might want healthy doses of entertainment and conviction (balanced thinkers), some might switch from one mode to the other in the middle of a set, or in repeat viewings of a trick over the evening (such as if you’re doing walkaround at a party). There are even others will see the balance as being a necessary dynamic (usually magicians or sophisticated magic fans) and will appreciate it on that level (or won’t, if it’s lacking).

Anyways, I can probably go on and on about that sort of thing, but that’s enough for now. Hopefully the case has been made adequately so you can figure out for yourself if this is a good model to follow, or not.