Biggest Takeaway Follow-Up Part 2
/We continue on with some of the emails I received after last Friday’s post…
I’ve been doing David Williamson’s Saline Solution trick [where salt vanishes and reappears in a coffee cup] professionally for over a decade now. David suggests that you shouldn’t ask them if the cup is empty. Instead you should give them a napkin and have them clean out the cup. Then they’ll know it’s empty without you having to say it. That always made good sense to me. But it still occasionally happens that people will say the salt was in the cup the whole time. I’ll remind them that they cleaned out the cup and they’ll remember that and then react to the trick but it’s a less intense reaction than the trick normally gets.
During my performances this past weekend I experimented with your idea of over-emphasizing the conditions and instead of just asking them to clean the cup I asked them to confirm that there was nothing in the cup and to make sure it was absolutely empty, I asked had them clean it out as well. Reactions across the board seemed stronger than ever.—JW
I don’t make it a habit of disagreeing with David Williamson. I will say that having them clean out the cup is a way of cleverly convincing them the cup is empty. As opposed to just making the claim straight out. And I think in a trick like this, if you only cleverly make the case, then it’s incumbent on the spectator(s) to do some “math” at the climax of the trick.
“Ah, salt is coming out of the cup! Was that salt in the cup the whole time? No… wait… I cleaned the cup. So there couldn’t have been salt in there.”
This is a little less straightforward than them confirming the cup is empty and then having salt flow from it.
I cleaned the cup, therefore the cup was empty, therefore there couldn’t be salt in the cup.
Is one more extra thought needed than just
We established the cup was empty therefore there couldn’t be salt in the cup.
It may seem a small difference, but generally the less thinking someone has to do at the climax of a trick, the more intense the reaction will be..
I like the idea of using both techniques, as JW suggests. Have them confirm it’s empty and then go the extra step of having them clean it out.
[Regarding clearly establishing the conditions] I fully agree with you. This point was very apparent in several of my performances of Chameleon Sandwich by Doug Conn, a color changing deck routine cloaked in a sandwich trick. Magicians were consistently fooled, but laymen would often miss the point because they had not taken in the implied color of the deck. —GT
It’s so important to understand that magicians and laymen process tricks differently. It’s important because so many magician perform almost exclusively for other people interested in magic. So you think how that group processes tricks is normal. It’s not. Magician’s pay attention in a different way.
You know this if you perform for non-magicians. One of the most frustrating things they do is look in your eyes or look at another person in the group at a moment when you want them focusing on your actions. You have something that’s so clean that you want them to really notice that you don’t do anything sneaky. But instead they look up at their buddy and are like, “This is cool, right?” Magicians don’t do that. They understand that they’re doing you a disservice if they remove their attention when you don’t want them to. The pay attention differently.
When you flash an empty hand, the magicians thinks, “Oh, his hand is empty.” Normal people might think that, or they might just see it as a gesture, or they might not register it as anything. This sort of thing is true with all subtle convincers when it comes to non-magicians.
What you pointed out today [Tuesday’s post] is exactly what Tamariz often does. And it's showcased in its most basic nature in his trick Neither Blind Nor Silly (aka Blown Away when first published in Apocalypse).—GT
I’m going to say something that might get me excommunicated from the art of magic, or at least it will get me denied entry if I ever try and visit Spain: I don’t 100% “get” the appeal of Juan Tamariz.
I know he’s a genius, and I don’t doubt if I were to read his magic theory I’d find a lot of overlap between our ideas. (Which is part of the reason I don’t read too much magic theory. Because I want the experience of coming to these ideas naturally.)
But his performance style is so antithetical to mine that it always surprises me when someone says—as has happened a few times in the past—“Tamariz says something similar….” But it really shouldn’t surprise me because my “theory” comes out of performing as I’m sure his does as well. So even if we have very different styles it makes sense that we would come to some similar “truths.”
That being said, I think clarifying the conditions of an effect is most powerful when it doesn’t come off as part of the overall presentation. A lot of magicians will perform an effect where “fairness” is the presentation. “I couldn’t be more fair than this, could I? Actually yes. I could have you shuffle the cards.” Etc. Etc. And they’ll go through that sort of structure a few times, emphasizing more and more fairness.
While that may seem in line with what I was writing about in regards to “clarifying conditions,” I don’t think it’s the best idea. When “clarity” becomes the focus of the presentation—when it’s scripted—then it becomes a sort of “meta-clarity” that I think people trust less than if it seems like something you’re mentioning as just a point of fact.
Having performed magic since the age of 6 (I am now 73 years young), I can resoundingly confirm, from my own anecdotal experience, how crucial it is to strong magic (whether amateur or pro) to make things unequivocally crystal clear to the spectators in order to build optimal conviction and frame the effect. As you aptly noted, laymen do not perceive performances like magicians do. This is something I learned in decades of performing for both. As one example, years ago I performed Simon Aronson’s Shuffle-Board for a woman, an absolutely killer routine. She did all the shuffling and I was hands-off throughout the presentation. However, after the denouement, as I was expecting her to exclaim that she would be starting a religion around me and have t-shirts made bearing my image, I was flabbergasted to hear her say, “You must have switched the deck - that’s the only possible way that could have happened.” Lesson learned.—AD
Yup, this stuff happens all the time.
I was performing OOTW once while sitting on the floor next to my bed with a girl I was dating at the time. After the reveal she said I must have switched the cards she dealt for other cards after the dealing procedure. There was, of course, no opportunity for me to switch two different piles of cards invisibly. But that’s what her mind went to. She thought I had maybe shoved the piles under the bed and took out other ones. I had her look under the bed and check. Of course by that point it’s too late. The chance for the big, powerful reaction is lost.
“I must have missed something,” is such an insidious thought for a spectator to have after a trick. It can be very difficult to prevent it completely. But the more you strive to make all the conditions as clear as possible, the less you allow that thought to have a foothold. If I had a done a better job at making it clear that I wouldn’t manipulate the cards she dealt in any way, that would have raised her guard to the possibility that I would manipulate or switch the cards. With that possibility in the forefront of her mind, it would have made it much more difficult to think she “just missed it.”
Alright, but what do you do if you’re clarifying the “reality” of a push-through shuffle and your friend says, “Okay, if it’s a real shuffle, then let me shuffle the deck.”—NS
You have no choice at that point other than to let them shuffle the deck and do a different trick. If you fight it in any way you’re just going to confirm to them that it’s a false shuffle and ruin the use of false shuffles for future performances with them.
That being said, this comes up very rarely. I thought it would happen much more often, especially since I encourage antagonism from my spectators. But surprisingly, when I say, “Notice, this is a genuine shuffle. The cards are being thoroughly mixed.” They don’t stop me and ask to shuffle the deck themselves. They certainly get more focused on the shuffle, sometimes, but the notion that if this is a real shuffle they should be able to shuffle the deck doesn’t come up much at all in my experience.
It seems to me that going out of your way to clarify the conditions would go against your style of generally not taking credit for the miracle they’re about to see. Once you start emphasizing the conditions, don’t you cement yourself in the magician role? —MC
No, it’s actually the opposite, I think.
If I’m showing them a game, or a ritual, or an experiment, or at trick someone else is supposedly performing for both of us, or showing them some strange object I picked at a yard sale, or something—I can clarify the conditions as an outsider.
“Wait, double check. Is that box really empty?”
“Do the instructions say we can’t shuffle the cards? Okay… I’m going to shuffle them then.”
“Hold on. Let’s look real close. Are those cards all different? Sometimes they’ll repeat the same group of cards over and over as if you wouldn’t notice.”
“See, I thought there must have been something tricky about this thing. But as far as I can tell it’s really just a normal ring. Can you see anything weird about it?”
So for that reason I think the Audience-Centric style of magic can help you add clarity to an effect.
The only performance style I wouldn’t do it with is the Distracted Artist style. When performing something in that style, the magic is supposed to come off as unpremeditated, so any overt clarification would seem out of place. (This is what makes Distracted Artist such a good style for those tricks where you can’t clarify the conditions satisfactorily for one reason or another.)
I’ve come to the same conclusions as you have when it comes to NOT being subtle with the conditions of a trick. Whenever I find myself thinking “I don’t need to tell someone that. They’ll surely pick up on it themselves.” I think of the video below. It makes your point but from the opposite direction. —AC
Final thoughts on this for now… What I’ve seen cause effects to fail most often is what the audience fails to notice, as opposed to what they do notice. We spend a lot of energy to get them not to notice a move or a gimmick. This is important, but it’s only one aspect of fooling people. Hiding things is just the defensive part of the game. The offensive part is clarifying the conditions in order to forcefully establish the reality that you’re going to soon violate.