Dear Jerxy: Again and Again

Dear Jerxy: How do you deal with spectators asking to see a trick again?

I'd like to hear your perspective for both types of tricks that you talk about performing: 

1) Quick five second tricks - in my experience these are the tricks most likely to solicit a request to see it again, since the effect is over so quickly that people may have felt like they missed something, or they just liked the effect and want to see it again.

2) The big spectacle type tricks that you're known for - I've never done this type of thing, so I don't know if people ask to "meet your evil twin" (or whatever) a second time, but I assume it must happen occasionally.

Obviously if a trick is repeatable, you can just repeat it. But for the other 70% or more, where repetition would at least be slightly dubious, what are your thoughts on dealing with this request?

Sincerely,
One Pump Chump

Dear OPC: The first thing to keep in mind is that someone asking to see it again is not wholly a bad thing. It means they were fooled and it means they're interested in what you've shown them.

At the same time, I think it's also a symptom of two problems. The first problem is that the audience is viewing the interaction too analytically. With the exception of children, when most people ask you to "do it again" it's because they think another go-around will help them get closer to figuring it out. Even if that's not true, even if they say "do it again" out of shear delight, I still think that's something of a problem, and I'll discuss why at the end of this post.

It is my belief that presentational styles are the cure for every issue in magic. They're the cure for dealing with difficult spectators, the cure for magic being seen as a needy power-trip performed by weirdos, and the cure for preventing or dealing with the "do it again" people.

First, with the larger "spectacle" effects, it's not really an issue. The events just feel too consequential to say "do it again." With the "Romantic Adventure" tricks the magic effect is so enmeshed with the patter/presentation that even if the effect is technically just a color change, you don't get "do it again" because they can't directly detach the effect from presentation. So to "do it again" might mean another 5 minute, 45 minute, or 5 day presentation, if they were to think of it that way.

Here is how I deal with the request in the other styles:

The Engagement Ceremony: This is used for process-heavy tricks which aren't generally the type of thing that people ask to see again. If you have a trick that does invite a repeat viewing done in this style, then just add a final line to the instructions that indicates the procedure should only be attempted once a year.

Peek Backstage: You will occasionally get requests to repeat an effect in this style, but because this style is based on the notion of magic as a craft that you are practicing and working on you will get it less than you expect.

If someone does ask you to repeat it, you have a built in excuse: the truth. The Peek Backstage is a very honest style of performance. With no layer of theater between the performer and the spectator (other than the meta-layer that you need their help), you can just be honest.

Spectator: Do it again.
You: No.
Spectator: Why not?
You: Well... you'd probably figure it out. I just wanted your pure, unadulterated opinion. The second time you'll know what to expect. I don't want you to see too much behind the scenes because I want to be able to continue to get your input as an intelligent, thoughtful non-magician. If you learn too much it will turn you from a really great sounding-board/spectator to a really crappy amateur magician.
Spectator: That makes sense.
You: Unless you really want to learn magic, then I'll help you get started. The first step is usually an 8-hour lesson on how to hold a deck of cards.
Spectator: Uh, yeah, no thanks. I've got a life to lead.

The Distracted Artist: See Monday's post for more info on this style. Basically this style is designed to make the moment seem unplanned so asking to "do it again" would be out of place. 

---

As I said, being asked to do it again is symptomatic of two problems as I see it. And the second problem is this: They are not seeing the magic moment as something special. "Do it again," suggests they see the magic as easy, planned, and within your control. Magicians often strive for their effects to come off this way. They think it's a good thing. And for the professional, maybe it is. But for the amateur performer, I've found that having your magic perceived that way often kills any sense of wonder or surprise you're trying to generate. For a spectator, those things aren't the hallmark of a powerful magician, they're the hallmark of something that's "just a trick."

On Friday I'm going to talk about how we can use this fact to create more affecting magic when I talk about positive and negative ways to use dissonance when performing. I know this week's posts have been theory-heavy, but that's the roll I'm on. You'll manage.

Coming in the JAMM #3

JAMM #3 will be the first of a few themed issues I have planned for this year (there will be one on outdoor magic in late spring/early summer and one on scary/horror magic for October).

The April issue of the JAMM will feature restaurant magic. Kind of.

It will feature one effect that was created to be performed in a tablehopping setting. (The first effect in the JAMM that isn't my own.)

It will feature a quick funny/mentalism-esque tricks that I use all the time as it's pretty much impromptu... and it could be used in a tablehopping setting very easily.

And the highlight of the issue will be a new concept called SCUB. I believe this is a totally new idea in magic (but, you know, who knows). It's a crazy, multi-layered presentational idea that completely trips people out. It is a trick, but it's also a framework for other tricks you may do. And, surprisingly (given my style), it's fairly practical to do in a walk-around setting. It's one of my favorite ideas to come out of this site. You'll learn it all on April 6th.

Click here to subscribe to the JAMM or order the full Volume 1 to receive all back issues and issues going forward and get priority access to the Jerx Deck (and more good stuff to come).

Seedless.

The Return of the Distracted Artist

On Wednesday I have a Dear Jerxy post devoted to how to handle people asking to see a trick again. In preparation for that, I wanted to write more about the Distracted Artist style because the reason I developed it was specifically to indulge in the type of short, visual magic that's so fun to watch and perform, but often leaves you hounded to "do it again." This style lets me dodge that request.

This is one of the more misunderstood things I've proposed on this site. The idea is not "magic is happening around me and I'm just a hapless bystander!" It's about performing effects with no presentation to disabuse people of the idea that what happened was planned. The moment you say, "While traveling through Bahrain I was gifted a magical ring," or, "This one time a drunkard shuffled my deck of cards," or even just, "Hey, watch this," you've lost the notion of complete spontaneity. That's fine for most tricks. You can't be like, "My nine-phase Ambitious Card routine just happened." But for quick, visual tricks, I find I get a better reaction when they come off as brief magical glitches in reality. The type of thing that might happen to someone who practices magic a lot (in a universe mostly similar to ours). With the Distracted Artist style, you are not trying to suggest you're not responsible for what happened. Just that it was unintended.

The motivations for these magical glitches can be things like:

Absentmindedness

"What happened? My napkin vanished? Oh... yeah... I guess that's something I've done since I was a kid. Ball it up and make it vanish rather than throw it out. It's just better for the environment. It's all just muscle-memory now. I don't even think about it. In fact, if I tried to do it I'd probably screw it up."

Real-world equivalent: The distracted artist who sits at a table doodling on a placemat. An careless demonstration of artistic skill done without putting any focus on it.

A Manifestation of a Long-Buried Skill or Habit

"This really is a beautiful ring. Where did you... what the hell? My car key? What the... oh my god, you've got to be kidding me. Don't worry, I know where your ring is." [Pulls out key-ring and the spectator's ring is dangling from it.] "I'm sorry. I haven't even thought about that in years. It's an old trick I used to practice like... 15-20 years ago. It's crazy how those things stay with you. Your ring is probably about the same size and weight as the one I used to practice with. And then my brain is just on auto-pilot with that sort of thing. "

Real-world equivalent: Upon hearing a piece of classical music in the elevator, a woman's fingers start moving along with the trumpet part from when she performed it in high-school band 20 years earlier.

The Culmination of Numerous Attempts

A lemon wedge goes flying off the edge of your glass, untouched by you. "Holy shit! It finally worked! I've been trying that with every drink I've ordered for 10 years. What did you say? What is it? Oh... I don't know what you'd call it. It's like this energy projection thing. But it's almost impossible to control. For me, at least. I once saw a video on it and the guy in the video happened to use mind energy to fling a piece of lemon off his drink and that always just stuck in my head. That's crazy. I couldn't do that again in a million years."

Real-world equivalent: The guy who take a full-court hook-shot at the end of every basketball practice eventually sinks one.

Luck

You're sitting at the bar and you pick up your change and, mid-conversation, you balance three coins on top of one another. "Holy crap!" you say.

Real-world equivalent: 

The intention when I perform these things is not that something supernatural is happening. It's not an "I can't control my powers!" situation. These moments are just meant to be the byproduct of the intense study of magic.

There is one negative and three positives to the Distracted Artist approach.

The negative is that sometimes you will perform a trick and no one will notice. I don't really mind that. It's kind of amusing when it happens. I just load up and try again.

The positives are these:

1. As I mentioned, people don't ask you to "do it again" because your attitude is that it was unintentional. If they do ask you to do it again, you can try it and fail and that only reinforces that what happened wasn't a planned "trick."

2. I love presentations that allow you to model reactions for the spectators and in most of these variations it's perfectly reasonable to be a little freaked out, impressed, or amazed yourself. And that allows your spectator to feel comfortable expressing those things freely.

3. You kind of get two magical effects for one. You get the actual trick, but then you also impart this strange/wonderful idea that if you're someone who puts a significant amount of time and effort into the study of magic that amazing things can just sort of happen from time to time without you intending them to.

People don't understand exactly what it means to practice magic. So we take advantage of that and make it seem like there could be echoes of that practice in your day-to-day life. Just in the same way if you practice a song on piano a lot you'll find yourself humming it at the grocery store, or tapping away the notes on your desk. "I've practiced making coins disappear so much that sometimes when I handle them I unintentionally make the disappear." 

Making a napkin vanish is a fairly small, inconsequential magic idea. And one that is easily dismissed. "I can make a napkin disappear." - "No. No you can't." But the notion that once you get really advanced, magic becomes second-nature to the point that it occurs without thinking is kind of a big magic idea that can't necessarily be easily dismissed because we know it's the type of thing that happens to all other sorts of artists. And it suggests a type of magic secret that isn't just the mundane and mechanical sort of thing we know magic methods to consist of. It suggests a more arcane and esoteric type of secret that could worm itself into your subconscious and slip out inadvertently. And that's the type of charming benevolent fiction I like to leave people with.

Mathemagical

I found this trick on Vanishing Inc. the other day called 5,000,000 to 1.

Let's get this straight

They start off by naming any number between 1 and 5,000,000.

Impressive!

Then that number is used to determine 1 of 5 ESP symbols.

Uhhhhh...

And then you show you predicted the correct ESP symbol.

5,000,000 to one odds!

And all for a mere $55.00. A steal at 5,000,000 times the price!

If you like that effect. You'll love this one. It's a trillion to one prediction.

Trillion to One

Step 1: Ask your spectator to think of any number from 1 to a trillion.

Step 2: Say, "If it's an even number, place this coin on the table heads-side up. If it's an odd number, place this on the table tails-side up."

Step 3: "Now count up to your number, turning the coin over once for every number you count."

Step 4: When they're done, pull out a jumbo coin, head-side up and say, "Does this match the one in a trillion outcome of the events that just occurred?" 

• The performer is 100% correct
• Not a gimmicked coin
• It's easy to do

And guess what, my babies... not only is it easy to do, it's completely self working so you can focus 100% on presentation! The coin will always be heads-side up due to a mathematical principle too complicated for you to understand.

What I like to do is have a funny quip or one-liner for every number as the spectator counts their way up.

"One."

"One? What is this... a Three Dog Night concert? Your voice is in fine form tonight, Chuck Negron!"

"Two."

"Be or not to be? We got a regular Hamlet over here!"

"Three."

"Dog Night? What are you going to do... sing their hit song, 'One'?"

"Four."

"Hey, buddy. You golf on your own time! I'm showing a magic trick here! [pause for laughter]" 

All the way up to whatever their number might be. For example:

"2,357,424,081"

"2,357,424,081! What are we talking about here? The number of seconds founding member of Three Dog Night, Cory Wells lived in his lifetime? Hey buddy, get your head in the game! We're doing a magic trick!"

All these fun lines and more can be found in my book THRILLionaire: A Trillion Quips, Gags, Japes & Jests to Thrill ANY Audience with Wit and Wisdom, for the Gentleman Conjuror.

One more great tip: When you hold up the jumbo coin at the end, make sure to bring it up to eye level so everyone will associate the trick with your face when they look back and consider this 1 in a trillion miracle.

You're welcome!

Thank You

You know, like that Dido song. 

I want to thank those of you who are already supporting the site by subscribing to the monthly magazine and those of you who are planning to in the future.

The audience for this site is tiny, and those of you who support it are a small fraction of that audience. See Fig. 1

Fig. 1

So if you think, "Aw, it probably doesn't mean that much to him that I subscribe. That Tarbell Award Winning hotshot with all his fancy new magic friends." No! I have no new magic friends. Just you. The things I like to write about here, the things I like to think about, the things I find funny, appeal to, approximately, 3% of the people who visit this site, based on the numbers that support it. Good! That seems about right in line with the 97% of magic/magicians that I find intolerable. I didn't win that book award because the stuff I was doing here was becoming accepted or mainstream. I have a small, enthusiastic fanbase and other books had a much larger readership that was just less inclined to want to vote or care about voting for something like that. 

So thank you to that 3%. The vast majority of you I have known from the beginning of this site, and a lot of you from way back in the Magic Circle Jerk days. (And there are a good number of new people who only recently found the site too, which is awesome.) I know all of your names. And it does mean something to me that you support the site. I'm looking forward to rolling out some other benefits for subscribers over the next few months. 

For the other 97% of you? If you don't like the site, I wouldn't expect you to pay. But think about this... that Dido song?... it was recorded almost 20 years ago. Life is flying by. Stop wasting your time reading a site you don't like. And if you do like it, and $10 is too much to swing, I get it. I hope you're in a better financial situation soon. If you like it and you can afford it, but your position is, "Well... you should work on this for me for free." Go suffocate on a dog's dick. I mean that with love. The truth is, I'm not writing the site for you. I write it for the three percent.

Tenyo Trio Trial

In the focus group testing I helped conduct last month we took a look at three broad presentational frameworks for presenting a Tenyo trick and I found the results pretty interesting.

And before you write to tell me that you can't make any broad generalizations based on the feedback of a few dozen people, I already know that. There is nothing definitive about the results we got and our process didn't meet rigorous scientific standards, but I think there is still value in what we found.

[If you're interested in how the testing worked, we had three sessions with 12 people each. Each session lasted about 45 minutes. In those 45 minutes the groups watched five magic performances, each one from a different performer. Two were on video and three were in person. Three of the effects related to something specific we wanted to test and varied slightly from group to group. The other two effects were performed the same way for each group and served as something of a control so we could compare one group to another. After each effect the participants were asked to rate their enjoyment of the effect on a scale of 1-10. There was no discussion, they just watched and rated.

Each group consisted of both men and women with as much of a range in age, income, and ethnicity as we could find. They were paid $25 for their time. 

The hardest thing I've found about these groups is getting people to relax and not be on alert the whole time. A lot of people seem to think this is part of some larger psychological test and it's not really about watching some magic tricks. This attitude can, obviously, get in the way of them just taking in the experience. So there is always a little lecture up top where we ask people just to chill out and enjoy the performances, but I still sense some people think that's part of the ruse.]

We presented the Tenyo effect Crystal Cleaver to each group.

For Group A the presentation was just a standard walkthrough of the actions of the trick. "I have a little illusion I'd like to show you. Can I borrow someone's ring? I'm going to place it in this box." Etc.

For Group B the presentation was, "I would like to show you all something very special to me. It's the first magic trick I ever learned. It came in a magic set I was given for my 8th birthday."

For Group C the presenter came in with a small box in his hands. The presentation was, "Hi everybody. This is going to be a little different. I've been asked to show you the item in this box. I actually don't know what it is myself, so this will be something of a surprise for all of us." He would then "perform" the effect by following the instructions written on cards.

The same person performed the effect each time. He is a theater actor in NYC and a very occasional amateur magician. 

The only instructions the participants were given regarding the scoring system is that it's not like the grading system in high school where 70 (7) is average and 50 (5) would be a terrible score. Instead it's like a bell curve where 0 means they hated it, 10 means they loved it, and 5 is about average.

Here were the average scores for each presentation:

Group A (Standard magic presentation) - 5.2
Group B (My first magic trick) - 5.1
Group C (Mystery box/No traditional "magician") - 7.1

This is the type of stuff I find fascinating. The same effect getting a 40% higher "score" from people just based on it not being performed.

What I find interesting is, like many of you, I had originally thought the "this is my first trick" presentation for Tenyo-style effects was pretty good. But it actually received a slightly lower average score than just walking through the effect with a bland, standard presentation. I had come to the conclusion myself that the "first trick" presentation doesn't work as well as we'd hope, but I think I still expected it to do better than just describing the actions of the effect.

We didn't get a chance to break it down with the participants, and even if we did, I'm not sure they would know why this presentation didn't appeal to them. But I have a theory. From watching the performance I could tell people were interested in the idea of seeing his "very first magic trick." Who wouldn't be? People's first anything is usually an interesting or at least a cute concept. And, as magicians we think, "I've justified the prop! It looks like a toy, so I'm saying it's a toy." And that's true, but that's also only the beginning. You have to play out the whole thing. At the end of that presentation I think you have one of two scenarios. Either they believe you, in which case they're likely thinking, "I was just fooled by something an 8-year-old was performing from a magic set?" Or they don't believe you and that's much worse. That's like low-level emotional manipulation. "He pretended to share something emotionally relevant from his youth so he could show us some stupid trick."

That's not a great look.

You might think I'm taking it all too seriously, but imagine you were dating someone and they said, "I want to cook you something tonight. It's a traditional family recipe. And it's the first recipe my grandmother ever taught me when I was a little girl." And then sometime after dinner you find the recipe on the back of a soup can and they're like, "Oh yeah, I was just goofing around so you'd be into it." You'd think they were a psychopath.

On the other hand, I was gratified to see what I've noticed in my own performances echoed in this testing: The less you take responsibility for what is occurring, the more inherently interesting/entertaining a trick is likely to be. No, maybe not for professional magicians, who people are specifically going to in order to see magic. But in the amateur/casual magic scene that's definitely been my experience. 

This goes for things beyond Tenyo tricks. In fact I think it's just the beginning of the development of a style of performance and interaction that may, one day, be quite common. A number of people have expressed an issue with this because it de-emphasizes the role of The Magician. And while I agree that's true I think it does so in favor of an increase in actual feelings of awe, surprise, wonder, etc. 

More on this to come.

Little Professor

If you have the Jerx App, check out the instruction page for a new use for the app called Little Professor. This is a usage that reader Steven Keyl came up with and it replaces a standard magic/mentalism item in a way that I think is much cleaner and more convincing than the traditional prop.