Part III: No Easy Answers

So here’s how it works. The climax of the the trick happens. It’s the moment of Surprise. The spectator’s mind goes into attack mode and starts pulling at any loose threads it can find in order to unravel the surprise. You can try to get them not to do this. You can assure them that it’s actually beneficial to just enjoy the moment. But this is primarily happening on a subconscious level. So trying to convince them not to engage in this on a rational level is going to be of limited usefulness.

The truth is, you actually want them to pull those threads. If they pull on the threads and—instead of unraveling—the Surprise turns into tight little knot, then you will be in the realm of Astonishment.

But for that to happen, your effect/method/presentation must offer no easy answers.

This might seem beyond obvious. “Yes. Of course. If the method is easy to figure out, then the trick won’t ever get past the Surprise phase.” But that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not enough just to disguise the specifics of the method you’re using. You need to do your best to prevent them from even having a general idea of a potential solution. Because even just a general idea will act as a sponge, soaking up the Surprise before it can build to Astonishment. And that’s true even if their solution is not the method you actually used.

It’s not possible to keep 100% of the people from jumping to an Easy Answer 100% of the time with 100% of tricks. So don’t think I’m saying that’s an achievable goal. Instead, think of the trick like a boat. The Easy Answers are like holes in the boat. Every answer you can address will make the trick stay afloat a little longer. And for the rare tricks where you can plug up every hole, you will have something that is virtually unsinkable.

This is the goal when looking to create the most devastating tricks. I would say I reach this standard of “pure impossibility” maybe 5% of the time. That may sound low, but I think it’s actually close to the upper limit. With most performances, I find my audience to be some combination of entertained, perplexed, amused, amazed, in awe—whatever you might hope for from a good magic effect. But 5% of the time—about 1 in 20 tricks—i can craft an experience where they are truly unsettled, and at a complete loss to explain what they just saw.

The way I push a performance to that extreme is by first picking a structurally sound effect (see Part II) and then systematically going through the list that follows and plugging as many of the holes as possible.

From the formal and informal testing of magic tricks that I’ve been a part of, here are the 10 most common Easy Answers that I’ve seen people resort to in order to “explain” a trick, even when they don’t have an understanding of the exact method.

Easy Answers

1. “It was sleight-of-hand.”

Normally, if someone said, “That was sleight-of-hand,” you wouldn’t think, Damn, they figured out my trick.

But for the purposes of explaining away the Surprise element of a trick, “sleight-of-hand” is enough. People may still wonder how exactly you accomplished the trick, but that won’t build into a sense of Mystery, because a general cause has been identified: sleight-of-hand.

Plugging This Hole: While “sleight-of-hand” is the easy answer to probably the vast majority of close-up, non-mentalism tricks, there is a way to greatly lessen the likelihood of people resorting to this answer. And that is to only do sleights that you’ve mastered and that look like ordinary actions.

In the upcoming summer issue of the X-Comm newsletter for subscribers, I’m going to write about some recent testing we did that looked into this. But I’ll explain the conclusion here briefly: Non-magicians expect sleight-of-hand to look like something. Yes, sleight-of-hand is almost a default explanation people will apply to tricks, but if you don’t do any movements that draw attention to themselves as awkward or unnecessary, and if you handle the cards as your audience would, the likelihood of people jumping to this conclusion drops dramatically.

“So I can’t do any tricks that suggest sleight-of-hand?” I’m not saying that. I’m saying, if the spectator experience you want to create with a particular trick is one that ends with an unfathomable mystery, then yes, the Easy Answer of “sleight-of-hand,” has to be eliminated from the equation. And you either eliminate it by doing effects that require little to no handling of the props on your part or by having sleight-of-hand that is flawless and draws no attention to itself.

Further Reading: Inexpert Card Technique, Summer 2019 X-Communication Newsletter (coming in July)

2. “He distracted me.”

After “sleight-of-hand,” this is the most common explanation I’ve found that people give for how a trick worked. They may say, “He distracted me,” or, “He switched something when I wasn’t looking,” or, “He moved too fast and I couldn’t focus where I needed to,” or, “I was looking in the wrong place,” or, “He misdirected me.” Regardless of how they put it, what they’re suggesting is that they just weren’t focused where they needed to be. If they hadn’t been “distracted” they would have seen exactly what happened.

If your spectator is interested in Location A, and then you go and do something interesting to draw their attention to Location B, and then at some point you bring them back to Location A, and something has magically changed there, this does not fool people long-term. In fact, it is exactly in line with a modern layperson’s concept of misdirection.

Plugging This Hole: First, in general, it’s good to move much more slowly than you probably do when performing. If you seem relaxed, it seems much less likely that you’re doing stuff furtively.

Second, try not to ping-pong people’s attention around too much. It’s one thing if you’re doing a production act on stage and you need to constantly direct their attention. But in a social situation, this will feel very weird.

In the further reading below, I talk about misdirecting people’s attention (their eyes) vs. misdirecting people’s suspicion (their minds). If you can master when to do both types of misdirection, you’re much less likely to have a situation where they feel they’re being directed or distracted.

Further Reading: Practical Misdirection for the Amateur Magician

3. “It must be a gimmicked [whatever].”

I’ve beaten this subject to death, but if their options are:

1. “Something happened that transcended the laws of physics.”

   or

2. “That’s a trick dollar bill.”

They are going to go with “trick dollar bill.”

Plugging this Hole: You must choreograph your effect so any object that is altered in some magical way can be looked at by the spectator afterwards.

If you can’t reach this standard, you may have some tricks that offer cool visuals and big moments of Surprise, but you will not be able to transition that into Astonishment, because they will have their easy answer.

Further Reading: Final Exam Part 1 and Part II, Examination in Social Magic.

4. “I must have been forced to pick that (card, celebrity name, slip of paper, page in a book, train car on the Orient Express).”

Forces are a foundational element of many magic tricks, and while the specific techniques behind forcing may be unknown to an audience, the idea that something can be forced is not unknown.

Plugging This Hole: This is something I’ve worked on a lot personally and run testing on as well. Most forces consist of something that feels like a random selection. That’s fine. But to make it more impenetrable, there should be a genuinely free choice that happens at some point in the process.

Why is that? Shouldn’t something that seems “random” be enough for it to seem like it’s not a force? My theory is this… If the spectator says, “That thing seemed random,” they are making a statement about something external. So they can never say it with 100% certainty. But if they say, “That was a fair choice,” they are making a statement about something they felt.

And so, if I want to plug the “it was a force” hole, I’m going to construct the trick so there is a genuinely fair choice at some point in the proceedings. (A “choice” means a selection between two or more distinct options. And no, “say ‘stop’ while I riffle” or “touch the back of any card as they go by” does not come across as a choice.) And then I’m going to show them what would have happened if they had made a different choice at that point. So they have a free choice, and they see the consequences of that choice.

How do you add genuinely free choices to a force? It usually means adding other techniques to the force. (switches, multiple outs, miscalls, third-wave equivoque, or whatever).

As an example, an easy card force with a moment of free choice would use a Pop-Eyed Popper deck. They put their finger on any card. Then you give them a clear, free choice to stay there or move one card to the left or right. Whatever choice they make, you cleanly show them the other cards they “almost” ended up with. That structure makes it very difficult for them to walk away thinking, “I think he forced this card on me.”

(An even better version of that force—better because it has all the same moments, but uses an ungimmicked deck—is what I use most of the time now and will be explained in my next book.)

Further Reading: The Force Awakens, The Force Unleashed, The Damsel Technique in Magic for Young Lovers

5. “Everyone must say that.”

When a trick involves a clearly free choice of something, and the “it must have been forced” answer doesn’t provide any relief, spectators will often resort to this Easy Answer. “I named the 4 of Spades, and that was the only card face-up in the deck. I guess everyone names the 4 of Spades.”

This one is frustrating, because it’s particularly illogical. It’s really a last gasp attempt for coming up with some sort of answer for what happened. “I guess everyone says ‘Angela Lansbury.’” Thankfully it’s not as common as some of the other Easy Answers on this list.

Plugging this Hole: Because it is so illogical, it can be hard to fight. There are three techniques I will use to avoid it before it becomes a potential issue.

1. Don’t use psychological forces to carry a lot of weight in your tricks. It’s hard to combat the “Everyone must say that,” answer, if that is, in fact, the correct answer.

2. Call it out early on. “I want you to think of any playing card. You can think of a common one, like the aces, or an obscure one. It’s your choice. You may think everyone thinks of the same common card or the same obscure card. So whatever you settled on, make some changes to it, if you want. Increase or decrease the value, change up the suit until you’re positive I couldn’t know what you’re thinking.”

3. Add some true randomness to their selection. Having a flip of a coin or a roll of a dice or the spin of a roulette wheel (even imaginary versions of all these) affect the final version of some freely named thing is a good way to eliminate the “everyone must say that,” answer. “I asked you to think of a number. Then you rolled a die in your mind and chose to either add or subtract it from the number you’re thinking of. This is kind of a double-blind experiment. Obviously I couldn’t know what number you would think of. But coming in here, you wouldn’t know what number you would end up thinking of either, because you didn’t know there would be an element of chance that would affect that number.” And so on.

6. “He must have done some research on me.”

This Easy Answer affects mentalism primarily. If you name someone’s astrological sign, and you’ve known them for more than 90 seconds, it’s barely an effect these days. If you ask them to think of a favorite relative or a pet they had or the first concert they went to, often people will think, “Hmmm… could he have figured that out by looking at something on facebook or instagram?” I wouldn’t say this is a default solution when telling someone something about themselves, but I think it’s looked at more and more as a possibility as more of people’s lives are shared online.

Plugging this Hole: Don’t predict or mind-read anything that could conceivably be found online. Look into my concept of the Unknown Personal, which is about predicting things the spectators do not yet know about themselves.

Further Reading: The Unknown Personal

7. “It’s just math.”

This isn’t super common, but it’s an explanation that has come up enough when testing tricks to know that people think it more frequently than you’d imagine (even when it’s a trick that isn’t math-based.)

Plugging This Hole: I find this particularly challenging and wouldn’t say I’ve come up with any great techniques to handle it yet. Obviously if the trick does use math, this might be an impossible hole to plug. Even if it doesn’t, it can be difficult to convince people otherwise.

I have found, on a couple of occasions, that just the presence of numbers on playing cards can have people’s minds thinking in a math direction. If you can use a different type of card (alphabet, esp, flashcards, etc.) that might help.

8. “It’s just technology.”

“It’s an app.” “It’s voice recognition.” “You hacked my phone.”

Plugging This Hole: Good question. How do you? You might say, “Don’t perform for people who are well versed in modern technology.” But in my experience, that’s often a better audience for these types of effects. For young people, the phone is an everyday object. In fact it’s essentially an every-moment object. It feels very natural to say, “Hey, let’s look something up online and try something,” or whatever. But with Grandma, the phone is already sort of powerful and mysterious. What are the limits of its capabilities?

I once performed Wikitest for an older woman, and when I named the word she was just looked at (never spoke, typed, or wrote down) she said, “Oh my god!” (Surprise.) Then as she processed what just happened she said, “The phone must tell you what my eyes were looking at.”

Bitch, it’s YOUR phone!

So yeah, I don’t have a good way of handling this Easy Answer. I would just not build a “big” effect around something that could be explained away in this manner.

9. “It really happened.”

I know many people would be ecstatic to get this response, but if your goal is to move from Surprise to Astonishment to Mystery, then it sucks. “Mystery” doesn’t come from people really believing something happened. “Mystery” comes from knowing something couldn’t have happened, but still having the experience of it and having no rational explanation for it.

I had a wildly unsatisfying performance recently where I performed a trick where the spectator would read my mind. This isn’t intended to be the most profound effect, but it almost always gets a really strong reaction.

“Holy crap!” I said, “That’s incredible. All the cards match. That’s never happened to me before.”

Her response?

“Oh, i smoke a lot of weed. It makes you good at stuff like this. Look it up.”

Plugging This Hole: Give them a premise that is too impossible to really believe. (Unless they smoke a truly gargantuan amount of weed.)

Further Reading: The Sealed Room With the Little Door

10. “I guess there’s a way to do that.”

In the list of Easy Answers, this is the easiest of them all. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know how it happened. But it couldn’t have really happened, so it’s a trick.” In the past I referred to this as the “Non-Explanation.”

Plugging This Hole: You can’t really. Eventually people are going to believe you really did it, or come to the conclusion that it must have been a trick. Those are the two options.

But you don’t want people to just jump to the Non-Explanation in the moments immediately following a trick. If they do, it suggests they’re not receptive to the experience of really powerful magic. If that’s the spectator experience you’re shooting for, then you’re trying to make them experience something they have no interest in.

So this is a hole you plug when you choose your audience. You don’t have to choose uncritical audiences. You just have to choose audiences that enjoy the potential of experiencing astonishment. And because in social magic you build up to the big effects over time, you have the chance to weed out people who aren’t open to a more profound sort of experience.

Further Reading: Dissonance

So those are the generic “Easy Answers” that you will need to address to move from Surprise to Astonishment. (In addition to addressing any specific “obvious solutions” for whatever particular trick you’re performing—threads, magnets, duplicate objects, etc.)

Next week I’ll discuss the last requirement for exceedingly powerful magic. And I’ll walk you through the full process with an example trick from the archives. I’ll also give you my rationale for why I bother. You might think it’s obvious, but I think a question worth asking is, “Do people even really want to see a magic trick that truly rattles them? Or is magic better as a more superficial form of amusement?” I’ll discuss my conclusion and how I came to it as this series continues throughout next week.

Part II: Broken Tricks

This is part II of the series: A Unified Theory of Blowing People’s Fucking Brains Out Their Buttholes.

The theory presented in these posts is not necessarily what I would apply to every trick I perform, but it’s the thought process I apply to tricks that I want to have a truly profound effect on people. To be clear, you can do entertaining, fun, enjoyable magic without ever pushing the reactions to this extreme. So this theory isn’t for everyone, and certainly not every trick you do.

In Part One I wrote that with the strongest tricks, the spectator’s experience goes from a feeling of Surprise, then seconds later to Astonishment, and then in the long-run to a feeling of Mystery.

All tricks have the “Surprise” element. That’s just another word for the feeling they should have at the climax of the effect. But to move past that, I have to find tricks that survive the critical thinking that follows the Surprise. And to do that, I have to avoid certain types of tricks.

I feel like there should be a term for these types of tricks already, because it seems like it should be a fundamental concept in magic, but I don’t know that there is a term. For the sake of explanation, I’m going to call them Broken Tricks (or Broken Techniques). Not “broken” in the sense of “doesn’t work” (although sort of that) but more “broken” as in “incomplete.” Like a broken circle.

“Broken” sounds like I’m making a value judgment about these tricks. I’m not. I’m stating a fact about the structure of an effect. The tricks and techniques I’m going to talk about here can still generate a strong Surprise, but they can’t really be used to reach the next stage (Astonishment) because the process to get there is going to expose the “break” in the trick.

Here’s an extreme example of the concept.

I walk out on stage with a closed cardboard box and set it on the table. “Ladies and gentlemen. I have here an empty cardboard box.” I wave my wand over the box. “And now…,” I open the box, “there is a red balloon inside!”

I clap my hands and spread my arms wide in an applause pose and bow deeply.

The audience is like, “Huh?” They never saw the box as empty so the appearance of the balloon in the box isn’t magical.

After the show, you come up to me. “Hey, Andy. So… about that balloon trick… what was that all about?”

I pull you in close and look around to make sure nobody can hear. “The balloon was in the box from the very start!”

You’re thinking, “Yeah, no shit.”

The method to my trick is: Lying about the box being empty.

While “lying” is a valid method for some tricks, for this particular trick, it doesn’t work. The trick is “broken.”

A broken trick is a trick where the method that is used prevents you from establishing the conditions that are needed for the trick to be seen as truly impossible.

I’ll try to clarify that sentence if it isn’t clear…

Every magic trick sets up some conditions that make what is about to happen seem impossible. There must be some apparent evidence/proof of those conditions.

Condition: My card was placed in the middle of the deck.
Evidence/Proof of that condition: I saw the magician clearly place it in the center of the deck.

Now, when the card appears on top of the deck, the magician has defied the conditions they established. So we have a magic trick.

But some tricks have a method that prevents you from establishing the condition you are apparently going to defy. That’s why I call them “broken.”

The trick in my example was extremely broken, but that was just to introduce the idea. Let’s look at some further examples.

Kolossal Killer - In Kolossal Killer, the spectator names any card and you remove that card from your wallet (sometimes). It’s a seductive trick for magicians, because it will get a strong initial response (a strong Surprise reaction).

But to establish the conditions that would make the trick completely impossible, the spectator would have to know there are no other cards in the wallet. But the method actually is “multiple cards in the wallet.” So the method cancels out the condition that is required. Hence, it’s a broken trick.

“But Kolossal Killer gets a good reaction.”

Yes, often it does. But if you perform the trick, and especially if you perform the trick and then ask people about it afterwards, you will find that it’s a classic example of a Surprises-heavy trick that doesn’t transition to Astonishment.

You ask them to name a card and you pull it out of your wallet. Boom! That’s a nice and clean effect. It’s the baseball bat to the head.

But then the effect travels through the brain. Does everyone say the 8 of spades? I doubt it. He couldn’t have a whole deck in that wallet, could he? No… he pulled out the card too quick, and the wallet would be fatter. But maybe the 8 of spades is a popular card, and he has a bunch of popular cards in his wallet, and he knows where each one is.

The contrecoup reaction to the trick is much smaller, because they’ve come up with a solution. It’s not exactly the correct solution, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s their escape hatch.

And I’m not just making up how spectator’s will think about this trick. Kolossal Killer is something we tested early on in the focus groups (because it was a trick that had supporters and detractors amongst us) and that explanation I paraphrased above is similar to the explanation many people gave. If not that exactly, the overwhelming majority said they’d be interested in seeing what else was in the wallet.

You can, of course, add more elements of deception to “un-break” the trick (a gimmicked wallet, for instance). But in its basic form, you are only defying an implied condition (that you only have one card in your wallet). It’s not quite as blatant as telling them you have an empty box and hoping they’ll believe you. But it’s really not that far removed from that either.

The Classic Force - The classic force is a Broken Technique. For a trick based soley on the classic force to go from Surprise to Astonishment, the spectator would have to be convinced their selection was free. But the method behind a classic force doesn’t allow for that. Done well, it can seem pretty free in the moment, but after the climax they will not be left with the feeling, “I definitely could have chosen any card I wanted.”

It’s a Broken Technique because the method (literally forcing them to touch/grab a card) precludes the clear establishment of the condition that it’s a genuinely free choice.

Genuinely free choices are made at the “choosers” pace, between distinct objects. When you’re on the receiving end of the classic force, there is not a moment where you decide on the card you want, and then reach out and take that particular card. Instead you reach out and you end up taking the card that happens to be touching your finger. These two things might feel similar at the time. But that’s not the real issue. It’s a question of how they feel after the moment of Surprise. If the audience can think, “You know, I can’t say for sure that felt like a completely free choice,” then they have their explanation.

“Wouldn’t this be true of all forces?” you might ask. A lot of them, yes. But not all. (I’ll have more to say on that in the future.)

Psychological Forces

The conceit: “I’m going to read your mind” (or “predict your thoughts” or whatever).
The condition you must establish to make that seem impossible: That there is no way I could know what you might think.
The method that makes that condition impossible to establish: Guessing the most common thing people say.

Of course, most mentalists realize the limitations of psychological forces which is why they’re generally used as part of a method, or as a sort of “experiment” early on in a show.

A Comparison

Let’s take a look at the finale of two different packet tricks.

A couple weeks ago I posted this youtube video of a packet trick called The (W)hole Thing. At the time I wrote:

“I think at the end of this trick, when the card says ‘Hole’ on the back, you’re supposed to get that surprise that you get when you see the $14 card in Color Monte. But I have a hard time believing it ever generated that kind of reaction.”

The reason it doesn’t have that same surprise is because it’s a broken trick. For the appearance of the word “hole” to seem impossible, the audience would have to feel that it was established that there wasn’t writing on the back of that card. But the method doesn’t allow you to clearly display the cards in any manner that would establish that.

On the other hand, Color Monte is not broken. For the appearance of the $14 card to seem impossible you have to establish that you only have three cards (which is true) and that the audience has seen the faces of all three cards throughout the routine. That second part isn’t true, but the displays leading up the climax allow you to apparently establish that condition.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Color Monte is a trick that’s going to transition from Surprise to Astonishment. It just means it’s a structurally sound effect.

Identifying and filtering out Broken Tricks is just the first step in determining tricks that have the potential to be legitimately staggering to an audience. Once you have a trick that has passed that filter, the next step is to eliminate the “easy answers.” I’ll cover that in Part 3 on Friday.

[Note: I originally said this series was going to be three parts. There is actually going to be a fourth part on Monday to collect some tangents that didn’t make it in the other posts. I also said these were going to be short posts. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.]

Part I: Contrecoup Astonishment

How do I make my magic as strong as possible?

That was the question I asked myself.

For a few years I have been tracking the response of my audience to every performance of a trick, which is in the range of 1000 tricks a year (not 1000 different tricks, but 1000 total trick performances). Not only have I ranked their response on a scale of 1-10 (or, in some cases, had them rank it themselves), I’ve also kept track of their comments and if they brought the trick up at a later date. So I have their initial reaction as well as their long-term reaction to tricks.

By studying this, I realized I could break down what were the defining qualities of the strongest magic I perform.

That’s what this week’s posts are going to be about. It may seem like “theory,” but it’s going to lead somewhere actionable. And those actionable steps are the ones I use when I want to create a trick that genuinely fucks people’s minds.

In today’s post I want to talk about “astonishment.”

To do so, I’ll have to wrestle the word away from Paul Harris who really defined the word for the modern magician in his Art of Astonishment set of books. In the opening essay he talks about the moment of astonishment that follows a trick as being a pure child-like state of mind that usually lasts “under 10 seconds.”

Paul Harris has always been one of my favorite magicians, but over time I’ve come to disagree with his understanding of “astonishment.” (You can read his essay in this free ebook from Vanishing Inc.)

My first issue is his basic premise, that a child’s natural state of mind is one of astonishment. I’ve spent a good amount of time around children. They don’t seem in the least bit astonished by the world around them. They often seem fascinated by the world around them, but that’s something different. Astonishment involves having your expectations subverted. A young child has hardly any expectations, so there’s not much to subvert. If you reached into your throat and pulled out a python in front of an adult, they would be astonished. An infant would look at you like, “Oh…so this is something that happens? Neat.”

The second issue I have with the essay is that it implies a powerlessness on the part of the magician. It doesn’t suggest any ways to increase or maintain astonishment. Really the only suggestion is that you try to make it clear to the audience that feeling astonished is a good thing. And then you just hope they don’t fight the feeling. You’re putting the onus on them to feel astonishment. A much more productive mindset, in my opinion, is that it’s your job as the magician to create a state of astonishment that they can’t easily dismiss.

My final issue with the essay might seem like it’s just semantics, but I don’t think it just that. Or, if it is, I think the semantics I’m going to use are more useful.

Paul describes the moment of astonishment as being like the ringing of a bell that happens at the climax of a trick and then quickly dissipates. I’m going to suggest another name for this moment, but for now let’s call it “initial astonishment.” What I’ve learned is that there isn’t much correlation between the moment of initial astonishment and the overall strength of a trick.

Instead, a trick’s power is most closely related to the moment of contrecoup astonishment (this is just a temporary term I’m using to differentiate it from “initial astonishment”).

What is contrecoup astonishment? it’s comes from the concept of a contrecoup (pronounced contra-coo) head injury.

Think of the last time you bashed someone in the head with a baseball bat. (If you can’t remember the most recent time, just remember any time that comes to mind.)

When you hit someone in the forehead with a bat, there is an initial impact of the brain against the front of the skull. But then the brain rebounds and hits against the back of the skull, causing an injury on the brain on the opposite side of the point of impact.

Initial astonishment is like the primary head impact.

Contrecoup astonishment is the moment of astonishment that happens after the trick has travelled through the spectator’s brain.

Think of the appearing cane. The cane appears [FWAP!}. There’s a moment of initial astonishment. Then the trick travels through the brain (that is to say, the brain processes the trick) and there is very little “contrecoup astonishment.” In the moments after the trick, they think, “Whoa! Where did that come from? Hmm… it must expand somehow? Or unfold? Either way it’s some sort of trick cane, I’m sure.” The initial astonishment of the surprise of seeing the cane quickly evaporates.

This is in line with the Paul Harris model of astonishment. Something amazing happens, there is a moment of astonishment, but that feeling soon goes away after the spectator starts to process what they just saw.

What I’m suggesting is that real “astonishment” happens after the brain has gone into processing mode.

You’ve probably all had this sort of experience. You perform a trick: “And the folded red card in this clear box is actually… your signed card!”

Your spectator responds…., “What the hell?! No way!” This is the moment of initial astonishment. It’s usually pretty good-natured.

Then they stop, and they furrow their brow, and they look down and think for a few seconds. You can see their mind working. Their head snaps up. “Wait…wait…wait…hold on. You brought that folded red card out before I chose my card. And my card had a blue back. Wait…,” more thinking, “How? That’s not possible.” They’ve gone from the initial, jovial response to the effect, to something that seems much more unsettled.

This, I feel, is the true moment of astonishment. It’s not a brief moment. It’s actually a feeling that builds over time (to a point).

What I noticed, when looking at the effects that garnered the strongest reactions, was that while some had intense moments of initial astonishment, they all had strong moments of contrecoup astonishment. They were strengthened by being processed by the brain.

Here’s the terminology I’m going to use going forward.

What Paul Harris calls “astonishment,” and what I’ve been calling “initial astonishment” is really just, Surprise.

Surprise is typically an involuntary, fleeting feeling. In a matter of seconds, the spectator’s mind will attack that feeling of surprise and subject it to all the brain’s critical faculties. Often, they will be able to come up with a reasonable explanation (even if it’s just a general explanation) for what occurred and the moment will fizzle out. But if the feeling of surprise isn’t undermined by that process, then it develops into a feeling of Astonishment. (In fact, “an enduring surprise,” is a pretty good definition of magic.) This happens in a matter of seconds. The Surprise will either crumble away to nothing when looked at critically, or it will change into Astonishment when the spectator realizes they have no feasible explanation for what happened.

Now, Astonishment is kind of an uncomfortable feeling; I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some adrenaline response to it. Most people can sit with it for some amount of time, maybe up to a half hour. I know some people who will allow themselves to be thrilled by a trick for an entire evening, but that is pretty rare. Eventually the feeling of astonishment needs to be processed in some way.

There are two ways for a spectator to process astonishment.

1. Destruction - “I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to do some in-depth critical thinking. I’m going to do some googling. I’m going to find someone who does magic to explain it to me. I’m going to post on Reddit seeking an answer.”

2. Acceptance - “I don’t know what happened or how it could have happened. I have no explanation for it. And I’m just going to embrace it as something cool and unexplainable that I was lucky enough to experience.”

If the spectator can’t destroy the feeling of astonishment because the effect was too well constructed, or if they choose to accept the feeling, then it will eventually transform into a feeling of Mystery.

In previous posts I’ve talked about Paul Harris’ concept of Astonishment (which in this post I’m calling Surprise) and Mystery as two different things, but now I believe mystery is surprise that has evolved over time. Surprise is the seed, mystery is the flower.

In Paul’s essay he suggests trying to convince people to stay in that initial moment of surprise as long as possible. But it’s very hard to do that. It’s nearly impossible to shut down your critical thinking that way.

What you can do, however, is craft your tricks so they survive the initial critical thinking and make the jump from Surprise to Astonishment. And from that point, you can train people that it’s just more fun to welcome the mystery rather than to see the whole thing as some sort of problem they need to solve. At this point I can identify people who are connoisseurs of astonishment and want to experience mysteries and the unknown and bizarre experiences and strange fictions. I still have to get past their critical thinking, but once I do, they’re on board. These days I rarely run into someone who is going to desperately try and “debunk” a trick. If they’re that type of person, I spot them early on and they’re not someone I’d plan a “big” trick for in the first place.

For me, this model of the spectator experience—going from Surprise to Astonishment to Mystery—has been incredibly useful for creating really powerful, long-lasting effects. It focuses my efforts on reinforcing those few seconds between Surprise and Astonishment and not giving them any “easy outs” to allow the surprise to die out.

In the end, I’m not dismissing Paul Harris’ idea that the first few moments after a trick can present a powerful void of understanding to the spectator. I don’t know if this is actually our “natural” state of mind or whatever, but it’s fine if you believe that. It’s still compatible with what I’m writing here. My point is that by focusing past the surprise element, we can see a trick as not just the cause of a fleeting moment of child-like wonder, but also as an enduring source of mystery.

Dustings of Woofle #8

Next week I have three posts scheduled which are all going to be shorter (I think) theory posts. These three ideas go together and are the things that I’ve been thinking about recently when it comes to creating tricks that really hit people hard. I don’t think the ideas are all that ingenious, in fact they’re almost basic, but I think they’re things we maybe forget to focus on when we’ve been in magic for a while.

When performing magic, I will generally prioritize the overall experience, beyond just “fooling” them. But obviously if you can start with a trick that is inherently astounding and then create a really captivating presentation around it, you’ll have the best of both worlds.

Next week the focus is on the astounding aspect.

So check back then for: A Unified Theory of Blowing People’s Fucking Brains Out Their Buttholes.

Monday: Contrecoup Astonishment
Wednesday: Broken Tricks
Friday: No Easy Answers

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A few months ago, Penguin switched from their live lecture format to a live “act” format. Not everyone loves the change, but I feel it’s not really that different.

With the “act” structure, instead of: trick, explanation, trick, explanation—they show a full act in front of a real audience and then they explain the act separately with just the magician and Dan Harlan. The nice thing about this is you can have a non-magician join you in watching the act and get their opinion on it. I’ve done this with four of the “acts” so far and it’s been very interesting to see what they comment on and what they enjoy and don’t enjoy. I’ll likely share some of these comments in the X-Comm newsletter if I review one of the acts there. But I encourage you to try it on your own. It’s eye opening.

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In the previous post I mentioned the “Full Strawberry Moon,” and I received a couple emails asking where I find information on the symbolism of the full moons. To clarify, I don’t usually find that information out. I usually just make it up.

Here are the Algonquin Indian names for the full moons

January - Wolf Moon
February - Snow Moon
March - Worm Moon
April - Pink Moon 
May - Flower Moon
June - Strawberry Moon 
July - Buck Moon 
August - Sturgeon Moon 
September or October - Harvest Moon 
September - Full Corn Moon (Harvest)
October - Hunter's Moon (Harvest)
November - Beaver Moon 
December - Cold Moon

But this isn’t quite a science, as you can imagine, so each full moon actually has multiple names. March isn’t just the “Worm Moon.” It’s also the Crow Moon, Crust Moon, Sap Moon, Sugar Moon, and Chaste Moon, among others. You can find more info about that at this site, and in a ton of other places online.

There is some symbology to the moon and its names throughout the year, but as I mentioned, I make it up more often than not. “It’s called the Wolf Moon because—like a wolf—they believed your senses became keener and more attuned during the January full moon,” or whatever. I just find some way to connect the supposed symbolism to the effect I want to show them. No one is fact checking this shit. And if they do, you just say, “Hmmm… I can’t remember where I read it. I’ll see if I can find it and I’ll email it to you.” Then just forget about it.

I realize this is not everyone’s thing, but I’ve always received a good response to it. I like taking people out under the night sky as part of a presentation and telling them something about what’s going on celestially and saying/implying “Oh, and on this one night of the year we can try this special thing….”

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Reader, KM, writes:

The Self-Working Hook post reminded me of Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry doing a magic trick on a talk show. I remember when I saw this years ago it opened me up to how much you can get away with by being a) actually charismatic and b) casual and non-professional. The switch and the lemon force are so straightforward and casual, really like a precursor to The Jerx way of doing things. Even the introduction of them learning/practicing magic on set is very Peek Backstag

I like it. It’s not quite the same thing as I talk about. They’re using it more as a presentation than a context (not sure if that’s a completely clear distinction, I may clarify it in another post someday). But it certainly plays well. They would have made an enjoyable magic duo. They could have been the next Helder Guimarães and Derek Delgaudio! (Meaning they could have done one show together then grown to hate each other’s fucking guts.)

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A few weeks ago I mentioned one of the guys who helps out with this site was going on an extended vacation and would be selling some of his magic collection to raise funds. I mentioned specifically that he would be selling some of the book tests that have been released in recent years that are made to look like old books. I also said that I would promote his ebay listings when they were available. Then I never mentioned it again.

That’s because I got to thinking, “Hmmm… maybe I should buy those book tests.” It’s kind of a dumb idea because it’s a huge investment (The books sell for $200-$400 a piece.) And I’m not even sure they fit with my style of performance. But I was just taken with the idea of having a little shelf of seemingly normal, old books that are pretty much completely examinable. Someone could look through them, pick one or two that caught their eye, and I could show them something hopefully amazing with them.

And so… I bought the whole lot of them.

It’s an expenditure I’m having a hard time justifying. But I figure I’ll take some time to learn the workings of these, then run them into the ground for a few months with my friends and family, and then sell them to someone who might have a more long-term use for them. (If you’re interested in buying the lot if/when that time comes, let me know.)

They’re pretty sweet.

I like this one a lot. The backstory is that this book about a haunted house in England (the most haunted one, apparently)—which is a real book you can find used copies of online—belonged to a ghost-hunter who would carry it with him on his travels. And he would keep notes of his investigations in the book. So it’s filled with 100s, if not 1000s of hand-written notes, markings, hand-drawn illustrations, highlights, etc. These aren’t printed as part of the book. They were written/drawn into the book by someone over the course of many hours of work. Making it a genuinely handcrafted book test with an inherently creepy backstory.

I figure I can come up with a few different stories regarding where the books came from. Weird bookstore. Weird garage sale. Weird great-uncle. Weird something-or-other. Perhaps they all came from the same source or maybe I’ve been tracking them down here and there.

Some of the books can be used together. But even if that weren’t the case, I think they benefit from being displayed as a group. I think together there is more credibility to them. Now it looks like I have a small collection of old/interesting books, rather than a bookshelf filled solely with stuff I got from Barnes and Noble in the past 15 years and one random old book. Plus I like the idea of saying, “Grab one or two and bring them over,” and not knowing for sure what will happen next.

Of course, this means I’ll have to have a working knowledge of ten or so book-tests at a time, which may be beyond me. We’ll see.

The funny part will be when I get hit by a bus and die a week from now and my family comes in to clean out my apartment and they donate these to the library and the library says, “These aren’t nice enough for the library, but we’ll sell them in our book sale,” and someone buys them for 50 cents a piece.

By Proxy World

Here is a mildly amusing way I used to get into Out of This World from a borrowed, shuffled deck. (Amusing for the performer, that is.) I guess it’s somewhat bold in that you’re having them set up the deck for you, but it makes complete sense contextually, so it doesn’t raise suspicion.

Here’s what it looks like…

Take the deck and shuffle it.

Cut the deck into two halves and place them in front of the spectator and say, “Can you shuffle?” And do the standard miming for “riffle shuffle” with your hands. It’s the same move as if you were giving a baby a shoulder rub. (You fucking creep.)

It really doesn’t matter how they shuffle. This is just to check out their abilities.

One of three things will happen.

1. They will say, “yes,” and they’ll riffle-shuffle the two halves together. (It may take them a second to orient the halves in their hands because they’re not used to having the deck pre-cut for them.)

2. They will say, “No. Uh, kinda. Well no. Not like the fancy kind.” In which case you say, “No problem. It doesn’t really matter.” And you shuffle the halves together.

3. They will say, “yes,” and they’ll go to shuffle, but they’re so not used to having the deck separated for them that they will put it back together and then riffle off half of it and go into the shuffle. This isn’t a problem. Just something to note for now.

(I’m going to continue this write-up as if your spectator fell into groups 2 or 3 above. If they are in group 1 you can do something slightly different at the end, which I’ll get to in the notes after the description.)

Take the deck from them and spread through and pull a red card and a black card from the middle and set them side-by-side on the table.

Give the deck to the spectator face-up and tell them to deal the red cards onto the red card and the black cards onto the black card.

Kindly thank them in your mind for setting up the deck for OOTW.

When they’re done, look at your watch or a clock and say, “Okay, that took around 40 seconds. I think that’s a reasonable amount of time for that task. But I’m going to show you a way that will have you doing it in less than half the time.” (I don’t tell them I’m going to time them before they deal, because I don’t want them to try and do it quickly.)

Assemble the deck. Give it a red-black shuffle. (A legitimate overhand shuffle where you run the cards singly in the middle, maintaining the separation of the colors.)

“Now, I know you’re not a card expert, so it would be impossible for you to know exactly the order in which the cards are getting mixed, of course.”

After the shuffle, give the cards an in-the-hands false cut. Then cut a quarter of the deck to the table. “You don’t spend your day handling cards. You couldn’t say for sure if that’s 10 or 15 cards, right?”

Then cut 2/3rd of what remains (half the deck) to the right of the first packet, but with some space between. “Is that 20 cards? 25? 30? It would be hard to say.”

Take the cards left in your hand and drop them a few cards at a time into a pile between the two piles on the table. “Is that 2 cards? 3? 5? You mind—your conscious mind, at least—says there’s no way you could know. Because cards aren’t your area of expertise.”

Place the original packet you cut off, on top of the packet in the middle that you just put on the table, then shuffle that half into the other with a genuine riffle shuffle. Don’t push the halves flush. Spread them in their just-woven state.

“If I gave you 10 minutes to study this, you might be able to remember the exact pattern of how many cards of each half were woven with how many cards of the other half.”

Push the sides of the spread flush, and the square up the spread.

“But now it would be seemingly impossible to have kept track of all of it… the shuffling, the cutting, more shuffling. If I asked you if this top card was red or black, would you be comfortable stating that with certainty? How about the 10th card? How about any card. No…. of course not.”

At this point the deck is mostly still separated into reds and blacks, although there are likely a few cards mixed up in the middle. You’re going to clean this up in the process of removing some “leader” cards for the red and black packet. That may be all you need to do. Or you may have to cull or otherwise secretly move a couple more cards in the process of spreading the deck towards yourself to pull out the leader cards.

“You seemingly can’t know anything about the order of this deck. But for what’s about to happen, that somehow must not be true. Here… take the deck. We’re going to do what we did before. You’re going to deal the cards into red and black. But you’re going to do it in half the time. And… you’re not going to look at the faces of the cards.”

This comes across as a nice little twist in the routine. Up until this point, they didn’t really know what was coming. All you told them at the beginning was that they were going to separate the colors again but in half the time. With that in mind, there’s no reason for them to question the shuffles. They’re anticipating getting a mixed deck back from you, and your shuffling is in line with those expectations. Only now does it dawn on them that something different may occur. This is the moment that clarifies all the patter from before about, “You couldn’t know where any particular card is,” etc., because the only way to do what they’re about to do is if they somehow tracked the distribution of red and black cards during your shuffle.

“Go ahead. Trust me. Trust yourself. Deal the cards into two piles. Obviously not just back and forth, but two somewhat even piles. This will be the red pile this is the black one. Go quickly and don’t think about it.”

From there you finish with your preferred Out of this Word handling.

AfterJerx

1. Although this was always very strong for me, I don’t really perform it anymore because I have other ways I prefer to do OOTW. If I was going to do it like this, I would want there to be some reasoning for why they could now achieve this feat. So there would be something that happens after the first deal. Something that would somehow affect their luck, intuition, perception or whatever.

2. Keeping that in mind, the face-down deal doesn’t have to immediately follow the face-up one. They could happen hours apart (or more). “Okay, you did that in about 40 seconds. Later tonight, when the Full Strawberry Moon rises, I’m going to show you something you won’t believe. The Strawberry Moon is said to affect intuition.” Or something like that. (The Full Strawberry Moon was a couple days ago, guys. You missed it. The good news is, any celestial event can have any meaning you want. All that shit is made up anyways.)

3. If, during the beginning phase of the trick, they’ve demonstrated they can shuffle the two halves together cleanly, you can have them do the final shuffle during the actual trick, if you want. I’m not sure how much it adds.

4. You may be tempted to use a Rosetta-style shuffle if they can’t riffle shuffle. Don’t bother, It won’t work. While the Rosetta shuffle mimics a riffle-shuffle in some respects, it doesn’t replicate a tight, well-done rifle shuffle. You’ll have too many cards to clean up.

5. Don’t rush the cutting portion (the part between the two shuffles). I used to try to set up for that final shuffle with some quick cuts without comment, but it’s hard to get your proportions right that way. You want to be cutting off very close to a quarter, followed by very close to half the deck. By acting like you’re making some salient point about how many cards you’re cutting, that allows you to give it the attention it needs without it feeling weird.

6. You may be concerned that at one point in the presentation they are staring at a deck that’s separated into red and black. Don’t be. It really doesn’t give them any clue on how the trick works. After they see the deck separated that way, they see a genuine shuffle, followed by a genuine cut, followed by a second genuine shuffle (that they may do themselves), followed by them dealing through the deck (which feels like another kind of “mix.") If they follow all of that and whatever OOTW handling you’re doing, then there was no way you were ever going to fool them with the trick in the first place.

7. I originally conceived of this as just a lazy way to get the spectator to do the work for setting up OOTW from a shuffled deck. But I think the face-up deal actually adds a nice element and makes complete sense presentationally. You’re establishing a standard for comparison which they are then going to exceed in an impossible fashion.

Mailbag #7

We all constantly hear magicians talk about how they want to be the most memorable part of the performance. Many times I’ve heard a magician tell of how a layman began to describe a trick he once saw and how amazing it was, and when the magician asked him what that magician’s name was, the layman came up empty. And every magician always talks down about this, that the opposite is really what’s important: for the spectator to remember YOU and not necessarily the trick.

I just found it interesting (and correct me if I’m wrong) that with you, the important thing is for the spectator to get the experience, and whether or not he remembers you were involved is almost irrelevant. As you’ve said many times, you are just as happy when a spectator has an experience and you are just another “bystander” that apparently had nothing to do with creating the experience. Especially because with your style you are not even trying to take credit for the effect.

I guess this is understandable for professionals that want to get future bookings, it’s important people remember them and their names. But as you’ve pointed out, a huge percentage of magicians in the world are mostly hobbyists that do magic for family and friends. —YR

Yes, this is one of those things that is completely the opposite for professionals and amateurs. If you’re a professional magician and nobody really remembers you, then you probably won’t be a professional magician for very long. So if you don’t make the performance about you in some way, you’re not really ever going to take-off as a professional.

On the other hand, if you’re an amateur magician and you consistently make the magic about you then you won’t be an amateur magician for very long. It’s just not going to be fun for your friends and family in the long term.

Let me illustrate this by taking it to the extreme. Imagine you were at a barbecue at your friend’s place and you said, “Hey, everyone, want to see a magic trick?” And then you fired up some Peter Gabriel and unbuttoned your shirt and had a fan blowing your hair and you acted like Shin Lim for the next 8 minutes. If you did that, it’s possible you’d get a good response. But if you tried to do it again a week later, people would be like, “Oh, that’s okay. We’re going to play Jarts.” Putting the focus on you is not something that’s going to appeal to people week-after-week, year-after-year.

I’m going to get back to this letter at the end of this post. First I’m going to answer a couple other emails…

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Can you give us your impression of John Kennedy’s Tractor Beam? I like the idea of the light being what causes the animation but I feel like the “laser pointer” also being the actual electronic reel makes it pretty obvious what is going on. Am I just overthinking this or is it just that blatantly obvious what’s going on? —SL

This is the sort of thing where I honestly don't know how a layperson would respond to it without showing it to them myself (and I don't like the trick enough to bother with that). I definitely don’t think it looks “obvious” at all, so that wouldn’t be my concern.

My issue with the laser pointer (besides the fact it doesn't look like a laser pointer) is that I think it's probably less interesting than "amplified mind power" or "sexual energy" or "low level nuclear radiation" or "shadows" or whatever you might say is moving the object if you did something similar without the laser pointer. The laser pointer is almost too believable for me. I mean, it is possible to move things with lasers.

I apply the "green grass test" to this. If people had been doing this trick with a laser pointer for years and then someone came along and said, "I've found a way to do it without the laser pointer," wouldn't we all be excited about that? So isn't this maybe a step backwards? 

That being said... I could be dead wrong. Someone could test this out and find it gets much better reactions for some reason I can't wrap my head around.

If any readers end up getting it, I’d be interested in hearing how it plays for you.

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Have you ever written about methods to overcome / bury / decapitate-and-shove-garlic-in-the-mouth-of my "magician's voice"? 

I try to be conversational with my scripts, but tense up, and endlessly revert to that booming, gesturing "and now I'm going to show you something amazing!" Robert-Houdin persona. Which isn't pleasant for anyone. 

(Or, if you haven't written on it, do you know of any good books / articles on the subject?  Ken Weber's chapter was way too short and pretty much said, "Just don't do it. Be conversational." Which I'm having a damn hard time doing.) —AD

No, I don’t think I’ve written about this specifically and that’s because it’s not an issue I’ve ever really had to deal with, so I don’t have much insight into it. I do think it’s an important issue, though, because hearing someone go into a “performer” voice is a huge buzzkill. In a social situation it’s the kiss of death as far as creating a moment that feels spontaneous. But even in a professional show you’re going to want to feel more conversational at times.

You say you “try to be conversational in your scripts.” If I had to guess, I would think that might be one of your problems: you’re too scripted. You’re too comfortable in what you’re going to say, which allows you to slip into a more presentational tone of voice. I don’t really know how to get around this if you’re talking about a professional show. I guess it’s just a matter of getting better at acting. You need to learn to act as if you’re speaking extemporaneously. I can’t act for shit, so I can’t give advice there.

In a social magic situation, the way to appear less “performance-y” is simple: don’t script so much. It’s hard to appear too presentational when you’re not sure exactly what you’re going to say. And you don’t gain anything by having a polished script when you show some friends a trick after dinner.

My “scripting” consists of this:

1. I will come up with a one-sentence general premise for the effect.

2. I will make note of anything I need to establish for the trick to really seem impossible. Establishing these conditions is key to making the magic as powerful as it can be, so I will “script” the way I’m going to reinforce them (verbally or via my actions).

Beyond that, I sort of wing it. I talk to you and I tell you a story and I may stumble through parts or say something that’s not 100% clear and you’ll have to ask me to clarify. This is how people communicate in real life. The subject of the conversation may be somewhat fantastical, but it will still have the rhythm of a normal interaction.

So my first recommendation is to script less.

My second recommendation is to use presentations that involve less certainty on your part. You say you end up reverting to the, “And now I’m going to show you something amazing,” style. But you can only do that if your premise is, “Hey, here’s something amazing,” in the first place. If your presentation is more along the lines of, “I don’t understand this thing I found,” or, “Can I get your help with this?” or, “Let’s test this out,” or, “This weird thing keeps happening, I want to see if it happens with you too,” then you will find it difficult to get pulled into something that feels too much like a “Ta-Daa!” moment because it would be a very abrupt change from the presentation you’ve established.

But again, that advice is more geared towards social performances. If you’re reading Ken Weber you may be thinking more in terms of a professional show. In which case I agree with his advice: Just knock it off and act like a human.

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So, getting back to the first email, there was this line I wanted to comment on…

“[W]ith you, the important thing is for the spectator to get the experience, and whether or not he remembers you were involved is almost irrelevant.”

Yes and no. I think sometimes people interpret me saying, “take the focus off yourself,” as me implying that I see magic as some selfless act of giving “wonder” to the world. Like I see myself as just a benevolent sprite, spreading joy through my delightful acts of magic!

Not quite. While I do think it’s sad if you’re doing magic just for some validation, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting magic to be a part of your persona that makes you more likable and enjoyable to be around. Magic is not really the kind of art where you’re like, “I’m going to do whatever I want, and damn what anyone else thinks!” Magic, especially social magic, should be an enjoyable, communal thing that draws people to you. But the Catch-22 is this: if the primary goal of your magic is to make yourself look good, you will turn people off. You won’t be able to hide the neediness in your performance.

Imagine you knew someone who was incredibly strong. One day he proved it to you by bending a frying pan. Another time he did so by bending a steel bar. The next time he lifted an anvil. Another time he lifted a car. And so on. The first time he demonstrated his strength, you would have been like, “Damn, that’s impressive.” But each subsequent time it would be a little less so. Eventually you’d just be like, “Okay, I get it.” And you’d wonder what his need was to keep demonstrating this skill. This is what can happen if you just do tricks that come down to a demonstration of your abilities or your cleverness.

When the focus of the trick is on you, you are forced to tell the same story over and over. That story is: “Look at this thing I can do.” That’s not a story that can maintain its power over time.

When I performed in a magician-centric style, I would burn people out on tricks very easily. Unless they had an innately strong interest in magic, I would feel a slip in enthusiasm after a few times performing for them. And I used to think that was just the nature of performing magic.

But by shifting the focus off myself, and putting tricks in other narratives, a whole world of stories beyond “look what I can do” opened up. That change has allowed me to maintain people’s interest and engagement in magic for so much longer.

The other day I was with a friend who has easily seen me perform 100+ times in the last few years. I walked into her apartment, grabbed a drink and said this, like it was the most normal thing in the world…, “I went to a baby’s funeral and stole this rattle out of its coffin. Check this out….” Now, she knew it wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. Her interest was piqued. Her eyes lit up. She adjusted her chair, leaned in a little, and said, “I can’t wait to see how this plays out.” And she was into it and engaged up to—and past—the point where the rattle began to shake on its own.

“I can’t wait to see how this plays out.” That’s exactly what I’m shooting for.

Now, if I said, “Here’s a baby rattle. I’m going to shake it with my mind.” That would have been just another trick about me. She wouldn’t think, “I want to see how this plays out,” because she would be completely used to me saying I was going to do something impossible and then doing it. It’s a story she’s already heard over and over. It would be like if the strong man came in and said, “Take a look at this wrench. It’s not possible to bend this thing, right?” You wouldn’t think, “I wonder what’s going to happen.” You’d think, “Oh, I guess he’s going to bend that wrench.”

When I was a kid performing magic, I wanted people to think, “Wow! You’re amazing!” But now I realize that you can only pull that off for a short amount of time before you look like a needy egotist performing fake miracles. Now my goal when I perform is for people to think, “that was fun, that was crazy, that was incredible.” Those positive feelings are ultimately going to flow back to me as the person responsible for creating that experience.

My point is, whether you want to just magnanimously show people a good time, or whether you’re hoping to make people like you, the route to both of these goals is to take the spotlight off of yourself.

Dustings of Woofle #7

Regarding White Monte, I was asked if that trick doesn’t violate something I’ve written about in the past: the idea that the best presentations to accompany a trick are “present tense” ones. On the surface level, I would say that yes, it doesn’t meet that standard. But I think, ultimately, it gets to a similar place. You see, the purpose of “present tense” presentations are to include the spectator and to make the magic about this moment, rather than something that happened in the past. It’s a way to infuse vitality into the presentations because the story is unfolding now. I think White Monte achieves similar goals by constructing the props in the moment and—in my favorite variation—suggesting this story from the past concluded with a picture of the person you’re with right now. That ending makes the timeline a little funky, it’s not strictly a “story about the past,” although that’s a big part of it.

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I don’t usually talk about things people send me. And that’s probably why people don’t send me that much stuff.

But I wanted to make an exception for a book I was sent earlier this year, Gerald Deutsch’s Perverse Magic.

“Perverse Magic” is probably not what you’re initially thinking (unfortunately). The definition in the book for Perverse Magic is, “Magic that happens by itself, against what the magician wants to happen.”

The book collects a series of posts done on the Genii Forum by Gerald Deutsch since 2003.

I’m mentioning the book here for a couple reasons.

The first is because all the proceeds go to Open Heart Magic, a company that “provides therapeutic Bedside Magic to kids in children's hospitals.”

The second reason is because I think the concept of “Perverse Magic” is a worthy one. The idea is to take the ego out of presentations. He does this by giving presentations for a couple hundred tricks, including many classic effects, where the magician’s will is undermined over the course of the trick. The magician often ends up confused or frustrated. This is more of a “theatrical” confusion or frustration—it’s kind of impossible to play genuine confusion/frustration over the course of a 4-phase card routine, for example—but it doesn’t really matter when it comes to eliminating the ego element. Whether I think you’re actually confused or I think you’re pretending to be, you’re clearly not using the magic to boost your ego, which is something that so often is the unappealing element of magical performances.

While our final output isn’t all that similar, we definitely have some overlap in our philosophies and you may be interested in someone else’s approach to shifting the focus off the magician’s “power.”

The book is huge. It’s 470 pages. It’s a collection of message board posts, so there’s no illustrations and no real formatting, but that doesn’t prevent anything from being easily understood. The book is $50 and, as I said, the proceeds go to charity, so consider picking it up. It’s available here from Lulu.com.

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Hey, speaking of giving away things for free, here’s a brief history of the times I’ve given away a book for free.

A Brief History of the Times I’ve Given Away A Book For Free

I’ve frequently had a situation in the past where I’m interacting with a well known magician over email/text and they’ll say, “Oh, so your book is coming out, right? I’d really like to get a copy.” And I’m like, “Ok. Buy one.” And then I realize they thought I should send them one for free because they’re famous or something.

When David Blaine intimated he’d like a copy of my first book, I was like, “Hey, I’m no starfucker. He can buy it just like everyone else.”

My feeling is, the only reason someone would want one of my books is if they like the site, and if they like the site, then they are already the recipient of 100s of hours of work a year on my part for free. And if I was in their situation, I would want a way to reimburse the person responsible for that thing I liked. I wouldn’t be trying to finagle more free content from them. So I just don’t buy it when someone suggests they like me, like the site, like the content, but want a free copy of the book.

That being said, there are three times in the past where I’ve sent someone a free copy. Here they are.

Recipient: Angelo Carbone - Theoretically this one wasn’t for free. Angelo is a brilliant magic creator and wrote me expressing interest in buying my book. I knew he was working on his own book so I said, “Hey, why don’t I send you a copy of my book. Then you can just send me yours when it’s ready.” However “when it’s ready” may be years from now. He originally wrote me in February of 2016 to tell me he was expecting his book to be ready, “Later this year.” Hmmm… not quite. But that’s okay, I don’t doubt he’ll eventually come through.

Recipient: Neil Patrick Harris - A year or so ago, Neil put his PO Box address on Twitter and said, “My birthday is in a week, send me presents!” (or words to that effect). And he listed a bunch of things he liked. I think he soon realized how ridiculous it was for a multi-millionaire to be soliciting gifts from his fans, as a couple days later he tweeted that he was just joking. Now, I’m not sure how, “Send me gifts. Here’s my real mailing address and some things I want,” could be intended as a joke, but I kind of admired the tone-deaf audacity of it all so I sent him one my few remaining copies of The Jerx, Volume One. He’s a magician/fan of magic. It had won the magic book of the year. I thought he’d appreciate it, but his response was… no response. So I guess I thought wrong!

Recipient: Steve Brooks - I sent Steve (founder of the Magic Cafe) a copy of my first book a couple years ago. I noted in my inscription that this site wouldn’t exist without him. Then Steve wrote me asking if I’d send him some free decks too. Hey, sure. I’m an amiable guy and I intended to always let Steve have free copies of everything I released. I thought it was funny that he would be the only person to get things for free. But then I started receiving emails from people who had their posts removed from the Cafe for mentioning my site. And not only were their posts removed, but they were also getting PMs from the Cafe staff which made completely bullshit claims about me. (Exactly how fucking dumb are they? Did they think people posting a link to my site would not then also send me screenshots of their PMs?) Anyway, I figured these orders were coming from the top, so clearly my attempts to befriend Steve Brooks had failed. And while I still print an extra copy of everything for Steve, I don’t actually send them to him. I just keep them piled up like presents for a kidnapped child.

So, I guess the lesson of this write-up is: Don’t give people free stuff.

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I want to make a public apology. A few weeks ago I had a contest where people would take a picture of themselves posing in the same manner as a photograph of Joshua Jay. It was all intended to be good fun, but even our best intentions can leave people hurt by our actions. So I want to say, “I’m sorry.” I’m sorry to everyone for holding that contest before Josh posted this picture of himself on Instagram.