A Thought Experiment
/Here’s Dai Vernon performing the cups and balls on Magic Circus…
Over the course of the routine there are about 23 magical moments (moments where something appears, disappears, penetrates, etc.). It’s a classic. For the most part the audience seems to enjoy it. Of course, as a magician who has see too many cups and balls—especially a lot of versions of this particular routine—it’s a little hard to appreciate it as I would if I was coming to it as a blank slate. ‘
This video made me think a little about magic and mentalism.
In the past couple decades, a lot of people have moved away from traditional magic and gotten into mentalism because it seems to have a greater effect on people.
I think it’s true that, on average, mentalism seems to hit harder than straight magic. But let’s do a little thought experiment.
Imagine these two performances:
Performance #1
You’ve gathered a group of people around a small circular table. On the table is one ball and one cup. The cup is handed around the table from person to person so they can get a look at it. The ball goes around the table next so everyone can see that up close too.
Everyone is now very familiar with the feel of the cool, heavy silver cup, and the little crocheted ball.
“Knock on the table,” you say. “Take a look under it. There’s nothing special about the table, is there?”
You very slowly and cleanly take the red ball and place it under the cup in the center of the table. Your hands are empty as you step away.
You have everyone join hands and imagine a beam of energy traveling from their “third eye” to the cup on the table.
After a few moments you reach over to the cup and slowly lift it up. The ball is gone.
Performance #2
You’ve gathered a group of people around a large circular table.. Over the course of the next four minutes you:
Tell three people their ATM code
Tell two people a word they’re thinking of which they saw in a book
Tell one person the name of the first person they kissed.
Tell four people the name of their childhood pet.
Tell one person what number they will roll on a die.
Tell one person what Wikipedia entry they looked up.
Tell two people what color crayon they handed you behind your back.
Predict the cards two people would would pick.
Tell three people which hand holds a coin.
Reveal someone’s star sign.
Bend a spoon with your mind.
Mentalism frequently does receive better reactions than magic. But what if we presented mentalism like we do many standard magic tricks? What if there were 23 moments of mentalism crammed into four minutes?
Is magic actually weaker than mentalism or is it just the fact that we tend to present mentalism as if it’s something interesting? As if it’s something that is meaningful. We usually take our time with it. There’s no desperate attempt to keep their attention by doing as much mentalism as possible in the time we have.
Performance #1 is simply a magic trick presented with the pacing of a piece of mentalism. Performance #2 is mentalism performed as the cups and balls (or many other multi-phase effects).
From my experience, you get much stronger reactions by taking a few minutes to build up to one moment of magic, rather than trying to do as much magic as possible in a few minutes. So my ideal us usually a one-phase routine. That being said, often the context of the effect I’m performing requires multiple phases, in which case I’ll do as many phases as I need to serve the story.
But these mega-phase routines (cups and balls, egg bag, linking rings, long card routines, long coin routines) with many magical moments but no interesting context holding them together, have really no place in the type of amateur performing I like.
What makes them so attractive to magicians, I think, is that they can be a lot of fun to practice. You get to feel like you’re accomplishing something as you string together all these moves into one long routine. But that doesn’t make them great routines to watch. I would say the strongest routines I perform consist of minutes of story, conversation and interaction with a magical twist at the end. But the truth is, these effects are really not that interesting to practice. There’s not much satisfaction in just practicing a single coin switch. The satisfaction comes in performance, when that switch helps tell a story of traveling in time or whatever.
Perform whatever tricks you like, of course. Just be wary that “lots of magic moments” doesn’t correlate with powerful magic. In my experience, often the more magic moments, the weaker the impact of the effect. Or, at least, the more diluted the reaction is. And the more general the audience’s memory of the effect becomes.
Do I think Dai Vernon should have just vanished one ball and then been done with it? No.
But I also don’t think you should perform socially as if you were on a 1970s magic variety show.