Monday Mailbag #64
/I recently performed Any Man Behind Any Curtain [From the JAMM #5] for family. I couldn't convince anyone to be the magician so instead I used an auto text app on my phone to send the texts at different periods throughout the night (with options to adjust the final message). To be honest no-one even looked at the texts it was just enough that I checked my phone occasionally. Everyone was blown away by it, including me! So refreshing to perform without being the centre of attention. The magician in question is now a legend in my family!
There was one interesting ruffle in that the pack of cards I found had the jokers in. I chose to leave them in, adjusting the positioning of the cards accordingly. What I didn't count on was that the person dealing through the deck got to the joker (they went with Clubs so were dealing face up) and went to put them aside as if they didn't "count". I just said "Oh I think we should include the jokers" and put it back on the pile. Funnily enough this increased the mystery as on the reveal they said "we even changed our minds about including the jokers!". My participation did not occur to them in the slightest, wonderful. —TC
Thanks for sharing your experience. Any Man Behind Any Curtain is an ACAAN effect done with a Third Party presentation (meaning, a presentation where someone else besides you is apparently behind the trick, and you are just another spectator).
This is one of my favorite ways to perform a trick. It takes the heat off all kinds of moves or techniques that might otherwise be questionable if I was taking credit for the trick myself. Things that would never fly with a Magician-Centric presentation are often completely unnoticed when your role is also “spectator.”
Third Party presentations allows us to capitalize on the idea that magic tricks are frequently done to serve the magician’s ego. When people believe that, on any level, they are completely disarmed when you are are seemingly someone who is equally confused and amazed. It just doesn’t occur to most people that you would be behind a trick and not take credit for it.
Third Party presentations are particularly useful when you have a person in your life who you feel might be holding back a little with their reactions. You get to model being fooled and find excitement in it, and they will see that succumbing to a magic trick doesn’t have to make them feel dumb. It can be a joyous thing.
Once you try it, you’ll likely want to do Third Party presentations a lot. I would recommend against it. At least don’t do it too often for the same audience. As I was writing last week about breaking up Magician/Audience-Centric presentations, if you do this too much it won’t be special. It will soon be just “the way he shows people magic tricks” by pretending someone else is doing them. Two, maybe three, times a years is a good limit for how often you show the same spectators something in this style.
[What are] your thoughts on [the] new trick, Minted?
I bought this at Blackpool a few weeks ago partially on the basis that I own Industrial Revelation but don’t use it very much because of its weight and (in the hands on determined alpha male types) its secret mechanism is discoverable. Minted solved both of those problems for me by being lighter, more portable and the tube shape makes it even harder to pull apart unless you know exactly what you’re doing).
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the trick and can’t watch the video above at the moment, Minted is a trick where you push an object down the middle of a roll of Lifesavers (or something similar). Then you reveal that what’s inside the roll is actually a solid brass tube.
The predecessors to this trick are things like the traditional Matchbox Penetration and Industrial Revelation. I don’t own Minted, but I have owned those tricks and other similar ones in the past. And I’ve always gotten a smaller reaction with these tricks than I would have expected. These effects excite magicians but there is a weakness for them with laymen. And that weakness is that it’s a trick that completely happens in the spectator’s memory. It doesn’t happen in real time. The trick is only a trick retroactively. In the moment, you’re just pushing something through a matchbox, or a card box, or a roll of lifesavers. All things which are totally possible. It’s only when you say, “Ah, but there is a brass thingy in here!” that they’re supposed to be impressed.
This feels like it should be a strong structure for a trick. And in a way it is. But when you talk to people after they’ve seen a trick like this you will very often hear something like, “I must have missed something. I didn’t know what to look for.” They will give this answer regardless of how clean the effect/handling is.
You need to tell people what to notice. “Don’t say the card box is empty, just flash the empty box.” This type of standard magic advice can only come from people who have never really talked to their audience about what they’re thinking after the effect. You can’t just assume people remember everything. Especially in casual situations. (For more information on this, read this post on establishing the condition of your effect.)
So here are a couple of different ways I’ve performed the Matchbox Penetration to eliminate the Easy Answer of “Oh, I didn’t know what to look for. I must have missed something.”
Version 1: Eliminate the Surprise - I would say during the penetration, “You might think this matchbox has matches in it. Or that it’s empty. But actually there’s a solid brass block that fills the whole thing. Yup. A solid brass block. Impressed much?”
Yes, you lose the surprise element here. But not completely. If you act like you’re not going to show it to them and you just want them to take your word on it, then it can still be a surprise at the end when there really is a thing of brass inside there. And, importantly, by telling them what the effect is, they know to look closely. Your hands are empty. There’s nothing poking out the back of the box. The match is really going through the middle, etc.
Version 2: Filmic Evidence - This is how I’ve performed these types of tricks in recent years. Here’s the thing, this sort of trick tends to be VERY CLEAN. But then we end up performing it in a way that doesn’t take advantage of that fact, because the spectator doesn’t know to notice how clean it is in the moment.
So what I do is I ask them to record a video on their phone of something I’m working on. Then I make sure they have a good close-up on everything. I show them the match penetrating the box. “That’s clear, yes? You can see the match going through the center of the box, yeah?” Then, without the box ever leaving the frame, I will take the phone and drop the box in their hand where they can open it and reveal the brass block.
So they still get the surprise of the brass block, but now they can’t say, “Oh, I must have missed something.” Well, they can still say that, but now they have the recording on their phone to rewatch. I would say at least 75% of the time they immediately go to watch it. Which is absolutely fine because there’s nothing to see, so they just end up more fooled.
I’ll admit, this doesn’t make for the most “enchanting” presentation. For whatever reason, it’s very difficult to pull any emotional resonance out of a penetration effect, so I don’t particularly bother. But in situations where I’m looking for a quick, solid fooler, this is a good option. (Sadly, it’s very googleable.)