A Critical Examination of the Films of Rob Stiff and Magic Makers: Part One

In 2013, with Breaking Bad ending production, there was a hole in the landscape for prestige dramas.

Enter Rob Stiff, the man behind the much maligned Magic Makers corporation. What Rob realized was that what magic ads were desperately missing was a goofy, ill-conceived, storyline into which the tricks could been shoe-horned. And with that, Rob went to work putting together ads—sorry, short-films—to showcase some of the effects offered by his company.

Rumor has it that HBO wanted to buy a season order of 24 episodes of the Magic Makers Theater Playhouse to run in 2015, but they were turned down by Rob who wanted to do half the number of episodes in order to maintain the quality.

Today we will take a look at some of the original masterpieces released by Rob Stiff and Magic Makers in 2014.

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Out of this World

Plot: A virgin on his first date with a non-cousin suggests showing her a card trick after playing poker. She shoots his ass down when she realizes he’s planning on showing her the 21-Card Trick. She instead proposes that she show him a trick of her own that involves him separating the cards into reds and blacks without looking at the faces. Fortuitously, he happens to stop exactly half-way through the dealing allowing her to do the necessary switch of the leader cards required by the method.

After the dealing is done, the woman switches the necessary packets in what I genuinely believe is a pretty good casual way of handling the switch. She then goes on to reveal he has separated the cards into reds and blacks.

At the end, he’s convinced she can read his mind, but the truth is that she just knows all simps think the same.

What’s weird about this film is that it begins with our male lead making the incredible claim that he “never loses a poker hand.” Not a single hand!

“Until today,” the woman replies.

“We’ve got to play best of five,” he shoots back.

Is the implication here that they sat down to play one single poker hand? That’s hardly worth pulling the cards out of the card case to do that. And then he suggests playing “best of five.” But still, that’s like two minute of playing time.

Between playing one hand of poker and then offering to stumble his way through the 21 card trick for her, it’s clear he was attempting to set her up to be used to things that are quick and underwhelming.

Trick Rating: 5/5 Out of this World is a Classic.

Film Rating: 3/5

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Wild Card

Plot: Rob Stiff—living up to his last name in both his acting and card-handling abilities—plays the role of “the magician,” in this heartfelt drama about how to compassionately handle the mentally ill who enter public businesses. Taking a seat at a coffee shop/diner, Rob does what I fear people who only casually read this site assume I do: He dumps a bunch of decks of cards on the table desperately hoping someone makes a comment about it. When the waiter engages him, we get an overdubbed performance of Wild Card that will have you wondering why you ever thought that was a good card trick, and begging for the dumpy pedophile who accosted Tommy Wonder in the video clip in Monday’s post to come and liven up this performance.

Trick Rating: 2.5/5 I find Wild Card more fun to perform than to watch.

Film Rating: 2/5 Rob Stiff is a Rob Schneider type. He shouldn’t be the lead.

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The Vanishing Coin Trick

Plot: In this erotic thriller, a love triangle threatens a young couple’s relationship—and the bakery they co-own—when Rob Stiff rocks their lives and vanishes a coin.

This film features the same actress as Out of This World, who also reappears in a lot of Rob Stiff’s other work as well. That’s understandable. You can’t expect a magician to know more than one female to put into these sorts of things. And it’s fine that she’s used a lot because she always steals the show. As the character of Jen, you really feel her heart being torn between this mysterious stranger who knows one coin trick, and her long-term boyfriend who seems to really get off on unnecessarily getting his hands all over the baked goods.

You may find it odd that the phrase “clumpy frosting” is tossed around so frequently as if it’s a common saying. It’s not, of course. What it is is a nod to the famous “gay bakeries” of the early 20th century, where asking for “clumpy frosting” was a secret signal to the proprietors that you were part of the gay lifestyle. And, “eating the clumpy frosting from another man’s cinnamon roll” (as happens at the end of this film) was gay code for what would eventually be known as felching.

Trick Rating: 3/5 - It’s alright. The half dollar isn’t really justified. It’s just there because you need it for the mechanics of the trick.

Film Rating: 5/5 - Stiff’s masterpiece.

That’s all for today. We will look at the rest of Rob Stiff’s oeuvre in a future post.

Monday Mailbag #49

I’m new to the site and have been reading a few posts per day for a couple months now. The amount of information on the site is really overhwelming.

[…]

What do you feel is the most easily implementable advice that will have the greatest impact on the performance of magic for an amateur? —EB

I will give you two related pieces of advice that you can implement instantly and have an immediate impact on your performances.

Those pieces of advice are:

1. Slow down

2. Don’t make jokes.

Slow Down - Your instinct is likely to rush to the climax. It’s understandable because that’s the “interesting part.” As magicians we decry the part of the trick where cards are being dealt in piles or counted or whatever the process of the trick might entail. And thus we try to barrel through that part to the point where the magic can finally happen. This gets you in a bad habit of not putting effort into the process of the trick, because that’s the part you’re trying to get through as quickly as possible anyway.

Don’t make jokes - Have fun, be funny, and make funny comments that come to you in the moment—if that’s part of your personality. But don’t have canned jokes you insert into your patter. You want the interaction to feel genuine, not scripted. Whatever you may gain by a laugh on a scripted joke you will lose more by making everything feel more premeditated.

You’re the one showing the trick so it’s up to you to frame the interaction. Speeding through it or forcing in jokes makes it seem like you feel apologetic for wasting their time with this thing.

Watch this lady give airplane safety instructions. She goes through as quickly as possible with a bunch of added jokes.

You might think, “That’s great! She made the whole thing entertaining.” I agree with you, but what she didn’t do was make you give a shit about the actual safety instructions. Even if you had never heard safety instructions before, you would know not to care too much about them. You would know they were a formality. Her speed and humor was her apology for making you sit through this mandated safety speech.

Instead, imagine you’d never been on a plane before. And this flight attendant sits you down one-on-one, leaned in close, and took great pains to focus your attention on the safety instructions. She walked you through how to use the belt buckle step-by-step. “I need you to focus. This is going to be super important,” she tells you, as she guides you through the way to use the life vest. For the rest of the flight you’re going to be on edge, head on a swivel, looking around ready to pounce into action because the instructions were delivered to you as if they were something important.

I’m not suggesting you be somber or move at a glacial pace when presenting magic. I’m just saying a good way to get people fascinated with the trick is to present it in the way you would something fascinating. If you had something really worthwhile to show them, you wouldn’t rush through it, and you wouldn’t add a bunch of dull jokes.

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What post of yours generated the most negative response? —RC

Hmmm, that would probably be the post where I disagreed with Tommy Wonder’s thoughts on misdirection. I thought his ideas were a little too caught up in semantics. And beyond that I think his notion of directing their attention away from a move with something “thoroughly intriguing” is the wrong way to go (particularly in informal performances). If I want to misdirect someone attention, I’d much rather do it with something forgettable (adjusting my glasses) rather than something “interesting.” In my opinion, if you’re trying to misdirect what someone is looking at, you want something that is as unmemorable as possible, while still working consistently. Striking that balance is the hard part.

Now, the truth is Tommy and I were just coming from very different performing perspectives. And I think the kind of heavily choreographed misdirection he talks about does work well with long routines and in formal shows. But I don’t perform formally. And the fact he thought a multi-phase routine where the same thing happens 7 times in a row was a good choice for a talk show appearance, suggests maybe performing in more informal/interactive situations wasn’t his strength. (And yes, obviously the tubby host in the too-small glasses was no help with him getting through the routine. But the host wasn’t nearly as “hard” on Tommy as he was with this boy, and that kid never stopped singing.)

Now, because I’m me, and Tommy Wonder was Tommy Wonder, just the fact that I was disagreeing with him was considered blasphemous by some. So that garnered quite a bit of negative feedback. It didn’t bother me. I don’t mind when people disagree with me. I’m happy to learn more about things and change my mind. In this case though, the feedback was just more or less, “Who do you think you are!?” Which is actually a really ineffective way of arguing. Because you’re not saying, “Here are the reasons why you’re wrong.” It’s simply, “You must be wrong because you disagree with someone I like.”

Now, while that post got the most negative feedback, the follow-up post, Practical Misdirection for the Amateur Magician is easily in the top 2% for positive feedback on this site. With one magician calling it “some of the best actionable advice on misdirection ever written.” And the person who provided that quote was another Tommy Wonder-level magical genius, so Who do you think you are!? if you disagree with him.

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Let’s say in your 100 Trick Repertoire you have the Invisible Deck but you have multiple presentations for it.

Do you class the Invisible Deck or the presentations as the factor taking up space in your repertoire.—CE

I would keep this as one listing in my 100 Trick Repertoire. The reason for that is I have 21 different presentations for the Invisible Deck that I’ve used in the past three years. And I wouldn’t want to list them all separately because it would take up too much space or just list a couple and forget about the other ones. So I have a main Invisible Deck entry and then a list of the presentations below it. When I’m “rehearsing” my repertoire, it’s just a matter of reminding myself of the ideas behind each presentation with the ID. I don’t actually bother performing them in rehearsal.

This is possible because—despite the wide variety of presentations with the Invisible Deck—the handling is almost always the exact same (spread the deck, separate at the card). This makes it a “Blank Slate Effect” in my terminology. And those types of effects generally only take up one “position” in my repertoire.

Now, conversely, let’s say I had two tricks with a Svengali deck. Those two tricks would require two separate listings because it would be quite likely that the tricks themselves would have different handling and choreography of action and all of that. So I would want to practice each one separately.

Dustings #44

Do you have a manipulation act? Do you want to go on America’s Got Talent or some show like that? I have an idea for you.

One time, years ago, I was watching a guy on youtube doing a manipulation act. I have no idea what he was making appear. Probably cards or some shit. Anyway, whenever he would produce a new fan of cards he would make this expression of surprise, like, “Where did that come from?”

My reaction was, “Why are you surprised? What did you think you were going on stage to do if not to produce these cards?”

But that gave me a good idea for an AGT audition piece.

You walk on stage. “I’m here to sing ‘On My Own’ from Les Miserables. [Clears throat] On…my ow-BLECHHH!!!” And you do that thing where it looks like you vomit cards out of your mouth. You’re legitimately concerned. Both because you just spit up a bunch of cards and because your big singing debut is ruined. You toss away the cards. “Sorry, I don’t know—I’ll just start over.” But as you go to reach for the microphone, a fan of cards appears in your hand. You immediately drop it, scared of what you’re seeing. Then you notice one in your other hand. You start tossing these fans of cards aside but they keep reappearing. “I’m sorry! I don’t know what’s happening. I just want to sing my pretty song!” you wail, as you keep pulling cards from the air and from every orifice.

Well, it’s the beginning of an idea, at least. The basic concept is that instead of conveying faux surprise when you’re clearly there for a magic performance, you act as if you’re there for some other reason.

If you’re thinking, “Yeah, but they’re going to know it’s not real after the first few seconds,” then you may not have the comic sensibilities to pull this off. Yes, I realize they’ll know it’s not real. This is just the premise you would use as the comedic structure of your first appearance on the show.

It might be good to foreshadow what’s about to occur. Perhaps you could get them to do one of those sappy intro pieces on you. “I lost my job in 2019. It’s been a real struggle. I couldn’t even afford a suit for my appearance today. I had to borrow this one from my brother-in-law, from his days as a magician.” Next thing you know, you’re trying to sing Memory from Cats and at every gesture you make doves are appearing all over the place, changing color, vanishing, etc.

Perhaps this is a notion that just appeals to me. That might be the case. I just think there’s something funny about a manipulation routine where the magician isn’t reacting with cocky pride or theatrical confusion to whatever’s appearing, but with genuine human confusion.

“What the crap? Where did this bird come from?”

“Holy shit. There’s another bird here. That F’n bird was like… made up of two different birds or something! Did you see that?!”

“Another cage? How can this be? I’m sorry… I just wanted to twirl my baton for you. I don’t know what’s happening.”

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For those who have been following along with the evolution of the Alphablocks concept on this site, there is a new variation called Linguablocks that you can check out on Warwick Harvey’s site here. Linguablocks is similar to Alphablocks with the difference being that it gives you words rather than random groupings of letters. So whatever “oracle” you’re using to divine their word (even if that oracle is just your mind) is going to be spitting out words rather than as opposed to letters, which may make more sense depending on the premise you’re using.

Warwick has also added a timeline of the tool and associated ideas on the main page of the site. So if you haven’t been following along here, that might be a good place to start.

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For those of you who aren’t on Ellusionist’s mailing list, you missed an important announcement recently.

They get this request at least ten times a week! So, conservatively, over the past year, they’ve received 500 emails asking them for their artwork so that someone could get an Ellusionist tattoo. Wow! One thing that’s unclear is if this is 500 different people making this request, the same rabid group of ten fans each week, or just one very persistent retard.

What type of Ellusionist tattoos might you want? Well, here are some of the offerings. And no, this isn’t me trying to be funny. These are tattoos they think people might get.

And just so you’re not confused, the ad clearly states the artwork can be scaled up and down. So if you thought you had to gain and lose weight to match your body to the printed artwork, you can actually do it the other way around.

If you’re heading to prison and you don’t want to just go ahead and get a swastika or a Latin Kings tattoo to keep you safe on the inside, then I’d recommend getting an Ellusionist tattoo before you go in. It won’t signify a gang affiliation, but it will send a clear signal to everyone that you’re fucking insane.

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Joshua Jay (@joshuajaymagician)

Impressive? I mean… sure… it’s okay. But I’m not sure what he’s so impressed by. Yes, the mixed media with the sticker and the pencil on the envelope is somewhat advanced, but I’ve done stuff almost as good and I don’t even really try that hard. I will also admit that if one of those figures in the second image is supposed to be Josh, then she does a very good job of capturing the lack of musculature in his legs. But otherwise, I don’t really see what’s so great about this.

Also, Josh, it’s stationEry with an E (you’ll remember because it goes in an Envelope). That, for once, is not a shot at Josh. I mix up my homophones all the time when writing, even though I know which is correct if I bother to think about it. This is just to pass along the “envelope” mnemonic which is one of the few grammar mnemonics that’s always stuck for me.

Luck and Four Levels of Presentation

In last Friday’s post I mentioned the idea of an Imp using a “luck absorbing crystal,” after which I received the following email.

Of course, the converse with the stone is that some people are vulnerable to having their luck drained, so maybe I have my luck drained and then somehow give it to you?

Could I give someone else my bad luck, too? —AB

Definitely. I like any premise that treats “luck” like an actual natural resource that can be collected, manipulated, re-routed etc.

I would definitely routine it in a way that any trick ends with the spectator feeling like they’re leaving with more luck than they came in with. Not because the audience is really believing any of this, but just because… why not?

This is a good opportunity to look at four different levels of presentation, using “luck” as the subject of the presentation.

Level One - No presentation

Maybe the spectator deals out some cards and they mysteriously are able to match up cards of the same value. There is no stated presentation here.

In my experience, people will often enjoy tricks like this as they are happening, but they will remember very little about the tricks the next day. And if they’ve seen a few different card tricks from you, it doesn’t take long at all for this to blend in with all the others.

Level Two - The Bookends

This is what I see a lot of magicians doing, and frankly I think it’s probably worse than no presentation at all.

They’ll pull out a deck of cards and say, “Do you believe in the power of luck? I think you’re probably a lucky person.”

Then at the end when the cards match they’ll say, “See! I told you. You’re lucky!”

I hate this kind of thing. There’s something I find displeasing about “the least possible amount of effort” even more-so than “no effort at all.”

If you’re not going to put any effort into the presentation then just do the trick without a presentation. Adding a couple of lines to the beginning and end of a trick don’t make it any more enjoyable or memorable.

Level Three - Context

Context is a story within which the trick exists. If you do a ctrl+F for “context” you’ll find a bunch of posts with titles that start with “Presentation vs Context,” where this idea is explored more fully.

In this instance the “context” might involve me removing the stone, telling the story of how I acquired it, explaining how it supposedly works, going through the process to “invoke” the power of the stone, and then finally testing it with “a simple game.” The trick now really only makes complete sense in relation to the context. The cards matching up is a demonstration of the luck generated by this stone. (I’m not suggesting this is a brilliant context, just using it as an example.)

A context immediately ups the memorability of the experience of a trick. It’s like taking random notes and putting them into a melody.

Level Four - Immersion

Immersion happens when the context and real life start to overlap and blur a little bit, using the extra-presentational techniques I’ve written about over the course of this site.

Imagine a trick where I transfer some of my luck over to you via some sort of process. At the end of the trick—as a demonstration of this luck—you’re able to match up cards in a game we play. So you’ve absorbed my luck.

Now, the trick is over. But think of what could happen afterwards in terms of Reps. How can we extend the absurd premise as if it’s real? Since I’ve given away a bunch of my good luck I should have an excess of bad luck in my system. I’m unbalanced. So when I go to put the cards away I knock them off the table and all over the floor. As I pick them up, I smack my head against the underside of the table. I get up and stub my toe. I break a glass. Etc.

Perhaps I tell you there’s one way to “burn off” the bad luck and to do that I place a bunch of low-dollar wagers on some baseball games happening that night. At the end of the night we look and see that all my teams lost. (So this would just be some type of headline/sports prediction. But I would be picking all the losers rather than all the winners.) In reality this is an unrelated trick, but it gets wrapped up in the same premise (earlier I transferred some of my luck to my friend) extending that premise beyond the trick.

Immersive presentations aren’t things you can or would necessarily want to do all the time. But if you’re looking to create a lasting memory with a particular trick, this is the best way I’ve found to do so consistently.

Monday Mailbag #48

When I first read the Force Unleashed, I felt that it was a good study and agreed with the findings for strong, direct prediction tricks, but thought it had some limitations on other uses of forcing. Your more recent post on Casualness and Clarity has highlighted what I think is a potential flaw: The Force Unleashed was a study on what forces are best from a clarity perspective only.

[L]et's take a standard cards across plot and let's say that after having done the set up in their hands, you now need to force the number three to have three cards go across (and let's stick to card forces here). In this situation, I think it would completely reverse the Force Unleashed findings, because going for extreme clarity draws undue attention to something that should be trivial and forgettable. Saying "just grab a card - what have you got?" is a much more casual event than "Say stop as I deal these cards down. Do you want to keep going?".

Another example of card forcing where I think casual would be better is if the force is just there to show that you could do something with any card, rather than the importance of a specific card. So for example, Gary Kurtz's ambitious card forces the card, so that later he can have time reverse to before the card was signed. Having a very fair selection procedure would draw extra attention to something that should be completely trivial before the trick has even begun.

So to sum up, I would say that Clarity forces would be best for predictions, but Casual forces would be better for incidental parts of routines or anywhere where the choice of cards doesn't play a major part in the plot (from the audience perspective). —DF

Yeah, I think we’re pretty much on the same page here. The Force Unleashed testing was about which selection procedures felt the most free and the most fair to the participants. So the results there are valuable in the instances where it’s important to emphasize the fairness of the selection.

There are certainly other routines where you want a particular card in play without focusing too much on how it’s selected—primarily because it would slow down the routine. In those cases I might use a dribble force or riffle force or a gimmicked deck.

I still wouldn’t use a classic force though. The eye-opening thing about the force testing for me was that the action of the classic force is something that’s really only associated with deception. It’s associated with magic tricks and forcing. In fact, the act of spreading something between the hands for a selection is so associated with something being a “trick” that people will make that joke whenever that action happens in another context. If they’re offering you your choice of Kool-Aid packets, or something like that, they’ll say, “Pick a Kook-Aid packet, any Kool-Aid packet,” as if it’s a card trick. So whether I’m going for the most fair choice I can or the most casual, I’d avoid the classic force altogether.

On a separate note, the only thing I’d really disagree with here is the contention that choosing a card to select a number for Cards Across should be “trivial and forgettable.” Cards Across is significantly stronger when they feel the number of cards that went across was:

A) Of their choosing
and
B) Determined after their cards had been isolated

So personally I wouldn’t feel the need to rush that moment. I would want them thinking, “Wait… I picked the three myself… if I had changed it for another card—like he offered—then a different number of cards would have had to come into my packet. But that packet was already in my hands!”

Might as well make it seem like a really fair choice. If you’re having them choose a card to choose a number you’ve already given up on casualness at that point.

I’m still using the technique in this post to allow them (most of the time) to determine how many cards go across. It continues to work very well for me.

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Hi Andy, I have some questions for you.

1) What does Pre-Show look like for the Amateur?

2) How do you practices sleight of hand and routines?

3) What is your opinion of doing coin rolls in routines?

—CE

What does Pre-Show look like for the Amateur?

There’s a sort of weird state-of-mind you go into if you ever leave a traditional job and start working for yourself. At first it’s really freeing and exhilarating. You think, “This is great! I never have to go to work!” Then it dawns on you that while you never really go to work, you’re in a sense always at work.

Being an amateur magician is sort of like that. You can look at it as there’s no “pre-show” because there’s no set “show.” Or you can look at it like everything is pre-show, because a magic performance may happen whenever.

I would consider “pre-show” for the amateur to be the act of always keeping a small part of your mind attuned for things that are said or done that you might be able to take advantage of at a later date in a trick. (Even though it didn’t work out as I planned, the section in this post titled “Magically Delicious” is a good example of that.)

How do you practice sleight of hand and routines?

I practice sleight-of-hand very half-assedly. Learning new sleights is not a part of magic that I enjoy. I don’t feel a great sense of accomplishment when I finally nail something. It just doesn’t do it for me. If I can’t practice it with half my brain while watching tv, I’ll never practice it at all. So don’t look to me for tips on that.

As far as practicing routines go, I wrote my current system up in this post. (Which came out after I was sent these questions.)

What is your opinion of doing coin rolls in routines?

Well, I avoid any type of flourish because I want to do my best to get them to forget they’re seeing a “performance.” And flourishes say “this is a performance” and also, “I’m skilled.” I don’t want to emphasize either of those points.

If I had a different viewpoint on flourishes, then coin rolls still might be one of the flourishes I avoided in performance. The reason why I’d avoid them is because they’re extended flourishes and they serve no purpose. A one-handed shuffle shuffles the deck. A fancy cut cuts the deck. A wand spin takes a split-second and can be seen as part of a magical gesture. So these are all little moments of “beauty” that enhance something that needed to happen in the effect. But a coin roll takes multiple seconds to sink in and serves no purpose. Coin rolls have a real dorky, “Look at me!” vibe to them. This is why many (most?) performers feel the need to undercut them with a line like, “And this is why I didn’t get laid until I was 36.”

However!

Coin rolls are one of the most useful flourishes for the amateur magician.

How so?

Don’t use them in a routine. Use them as a Hook. Let’s say you’re at a bar or somewhere where change might be in play. You’re in conversation with someone and you’re absentmindedly tapping a coin on the bar. Tap-tap-tap. Without breaking eye-contact you start to roll the coin along your knuckles. It’s not a “flourish” it’s just a kind of nervous-tic. It’s “flourishing” in the “Distracted Artist” style. If they notice it and comment on it, then you can use it to steer into some kind of trick. “Oh, yeah. It’s something I learned as a kid. There was this guy in my neighborhood who knew magic and he’d teach kids tricks if they could master this move. It was like his barrier to entry. I practiced it for months before getting it down to the point that he would teach me other stuff. Now it just happens automatically when there’s a coin nearby. Anyway….” If the person is interested and likes magic, they’re going to hop on that and pursue it further.

Dustings #43

I was reminded of the layman experience the other day after watching this video.

I’ll be honest—and this may make me sound dumb—but this fooled me when I first watched it, which was right before going to sleep the other night. Then, the next day, I did 15 seconds of research and realized what was going on.

Now, here’s the thing, I wanted to search for an answer, but once I found one, I wished that I hadn’t found one.

One of the notions I’ve fought against since the beginning of this site is the idiotic idea that people only try to figure out your tricks if you’re a bad magician. That’s nonsense. Magic only exists when people watch your tricks with a critical eye. To get the feeling of an “impossibility” people need to test what they’re seeing against what they know is possible. Googling a trick is just an extension of the same thought process you want them to engage in when they’re watching.

The better you are as a magician—the stronger your tricks are—the more you’re going to have to deal with that.

If you become very good at crafting hard to penetrate mysteries, and the people you’re performing for understand you’re not trying to make them look stupid or make yourself look cool with your tricks, then you can—over time—get them to realize that they’re just wasting their time trying to search for answers, and they might as well just enjoy the ride. But that takes time. If you think you’re just going to immediately charm someone into that type of response with your incredible magic, you’re just fooling yourself.

But, to reiterate something I’ve said before, just because they might feel compelled to search for an answer, that doesn’t mean they want to find one. I’ve seen people search for an answer online and immediately find an explanation or a link to where to buy a trick, and I’ve also seen people search and find absolutely nothing to explain this mystery they’ve just seen. And almost universally—even though people may think what they want is an answer—people seem more excited when they can’t seem to find any explanation for what they witnessed.

Do I wish that guy had some secret way to scoot his glutes across the floor to drive away rather than the boring reality of what was really going on? Of course!

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Here’s an Imp I used earlier this week. It was inspired by Monday’s mailbag question about how I handle being asked to repeat a trick, and my response which offhandedly mentioned a “lucky crystal.” While I don’t think the “lucky crystal” idea is all that interesting, for some reason this expansion of the concept seemed to really capture the imagination of the person I was performing for.

I gave my friend a crystal to hold onto and explained to her that supposedly it was a good luck charm. “I don’t necessarily believe in that sort of thing,” I said, “but I thought this was kind of interesting. Usually you think of a lucky charm and it’s just the sort of thing that is apparently lucky because people have deemed it so. There’s not too much rationale behind it. But what’s different about this is that it’s the first time I’ve heard of one of these charms having some sort of ‘mechanism’ behind how it works. I don’t know that I fully understand it. But what they say is that this crystal can absorb excess luck. Like, supposedly, there’s extra luck around us all the time that we’re not taking advantage of, because you don’t need luck for a lot of what you do throughout the day. So it just goes to waste. But this crystal can consume it and store it until you need it. It’s like when you have a glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton. It doesn’t naturally glow. But if it’s exposed to light it can absorb it and then reflect it back later when it’s dark. Apparently this crystal does the same thing with luck.”

From there I went on to demonstrate the “luck” in the crystal.

I hadn’t thought too much of the idea originally, but the person I was performing for was really taken with the idea of this crystal that could “absorb excess luck” for when you needed it later. I left the crystal with her at the end, of course.

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So there’s a new wallet out called the Climax Wallet.

I was going to make the obvious cum-related jokes about and be like, “Hey they stole my idea. I can prove it. Here’s my prototype…”

Blah, blah, blah. Admittedly, not the funniest shit in the world, but sometimes you’ve got to pick the low-hanging fruit.

But anyways, while googling semen wallet I came across a whole page of cum related wallets on Cafe Press.

It’s really strange. They’re selling this garbage for SEVENTY FIVE GODDAMN DOLLARS a piece!

You have your basic stuff like:

And then, for people with a more refined palate…

In general it looks like these were all designed originally to be put on t-shirts with no thought at all given to the proper cropping required to put these images on wallets. Or even if it would make any sense at all…

When your wallet is the only shirt you have with no cum on it, your life has really spun out of control.

However the most bizarre design on the “Cum Wallets” page was probably this one…

Uhm… congratulations?

The Magic of Expectations

Years ago, before this site even existed, we tested a rather simple idea in one of our magic focus groups. We showed people a basic coin vanish using a Raven gimmick. There was nothing more to the trick other than the coin vanish which—due to the nature of the gimmick—is very clean and visual.

We then had them rate the trick on a scale of 1 to 10. I don’t know the exact language we used at that time because we didn’t record much for posterity other than the actual final results. But it’s likely we asked them to rate how impossible the trick seemed on a scale of 1 to 10, where a rating of 5 would be what they considered an “average” trick.

The trick had an average rating of 6.0. So they felt the trick was a little better than your typical magic trick.

We showed another group the same coin vanish and their average rating was a 8.8. So they felt the trick was really great.

The performances of the coin vanish were identical. So what caused the second group to rate it so much higher?

For the second group, we first taught them a bad french drop. That was the only difference. That was the difference that caused their appreciation for the vanishing coin using a Raven to be almost 50% higher than the other group.

Setting expectations in some manner and then exceeding them with an effect allows the audience to appreciate things in a way they can’t if you simply perform the effect on its own. The expectations inform them what to appreciate and what to remember. And the expectations provide contrast that make the effect seem stronger.

When they just saw the coin vanish on its own, there wasn’t much for them to acknowledge other than the fact that it was a trick and it fooled them. They didn’t know what to pay attention to, so it becomes kind of a binary thing. “I saw the coin vanish and it fooled me.”

But when preceded by the lesson in the French Drop, they now had expectations. How does a coin vanish? Well, it vanishes when you mime an action that makes people think it’s in one hand when really it’s in another. So, for the coin to vanish, the hands need to come together. And at the end one of the hands will have to hide the coin.

If that’s your expectation and your understanding and someone says, “Yeah, I’ll show you a slightly more advanced version of that.” And you see a vanish where the hands don’t touch. There is no “miming.” And the coin is truly gone. Then you will find the vanish much stronger.

But you only really knew to make note of those things because of the expectations that were established.

Those of you who are familiar with my work will see that I use this all the time. I’ve written up a number of presentations that involve seeing the same trick multiple times. Or telling people about a trick (in which the expectations are established) and then performing it in a more impressive manner. Once you start using this technique, you’ll try to find ways to use it a lot too, because it’s a very simple, yet powerful way to increase the strength of an effect.