Dustings #133
/An addendum to yesterday’s post…
When reading through it before hitting publish, I deliberately changed this line:
Touch the deck as little as possible.
to this:
Touch the deck as little as necessary.
You may have a trick where you just need to make one small adjustment to the deck mid-trick, but otherwise it’s completely hands-off. In that case, you wouldn’t want to take the deck, do your move, and immediately hand it back—that puts too much heat on that one moment when you’re holding the deck. Instead, you’d want to handle the deck only as much as needed for the trick to be fooling. In this example, that would mean touching it a couple of other times during the routine so the one time you do your move doesn’t stick out.
It’s not an absolute rule to touch the deck as little as possible, but rather as seldom as necessary for the deception to work.
I see magicians who want the deck in their hands almost like a security blanket so they can riffle the edges or spring the cards. Or they have a compulsion to square and straighten every pile a spectator deals. These are the sorts of things I’m suggesting you avoid.
When you’re recording your friends to get them to be fake amazed by your magic trick, make sure you let them know what part they’re supposed to be amazed by.
The girl on the right is astonished that he can poke a pen through a dollar bill. That’s not the magic part, you goofy bitch! She actually seems less impressed by the trick itself.
If you had a bet with Craig Petty about who could make the nerdiest YouTube video, pay up.
