Mailbag #137
/Saw this on Ellusionist's Insta today and thought you would get a kick out of it.
In the clip the performer is presenting the Sonore to a spectator who just is NOT impressed at all. She goes "meh" and then the clip ends. This is being touted for social media presence as a successful thing rather than something that should have stayed in the drafts.
Whats crazy to me is they are using it to promote the product. Even though the reaction is mediocre all of the comments are congratulating the performer for it being an amazing trick or blaming the lackluster response to the classic tropes in magic, the magicians wife they don't understand how COOOL it is etc. etc.
What is the learning lesson and take away from this clip? Could he have performed it better? Is this the wrong context? Does this actually sell products? No idea but it got my mind racing. —JL
The main problem is that it’s presented poorly.
First, there’s no setup. The audience isn’t given a chance to appreciate what’s about to happen. If you were about to show someone a true impossibility, you’d frame it for them: “You’ve seen cartoons where someone screams into a jar, seals it, and later opens it to release the scream? I used to think that was just a cartoon thing—but watch this…”
Now, perhaps that kind of prelude isn’t ideal for Instagram. But in the real life performance, that kind of setup primes people to expect something weird. It puts them in the right mindset and takes away their ability to later shrug it off with, “Well, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be seeing.” If you were actually showing someone something impossible, you wouldn’t just spring it on them without warning.
Magicians often imagine that downplaying an impossible moment makes it cooler. But all it really does is give the audience permission to be just as “cool” in their reaction.
Second, he asks, “Can you see it inside? You can’t see it inside?” Which is just… confusing. Because there’s nothing to see inside. Not in reality, and not even within the imagined premise of the effect. Even if the audience accepts that the sound is trapped inside, they’re not expecting to see it. So that line just muddies the moment. It adds nothing except distraction—right at the exact point where you want them focusing on the impossibility.
Third, the sound that gets “released” doesn’t really match the one that was “captured.” It’s like vanishing an off-white silk and producing a yellow one and insisting it’s the same. Sure, it’s close—but now the audience has to work to meet the effect halfway, instead of being hit with something that feels undeniably real.
So you have a moment with no build-up, where the spectator is confused, and an inexact execution that requires the spectator to play along rather than just believe. Exactly what type of reaction would you expect to get from this?
I got a lot of pushback on the Anti-Carefree post—which I expected. Coming out against magic that demands enormous methodological effort was never going to be popular. Magicians have long lionized those who spend years mastering a single sleight. “He spent 10,000 hours over 12 years perfecting the diagonal palm shift.” Great. He entertained no one, of course. But how satisfying it must’ve been to place his suicide note in the pad he tore it from and deftly palm it out the back.
Most of the emails I got were arguing against points I never actually made. So instead of replying to any one message, I’m going to clarify a few things here.
If you want to do hard sleights for your own personal satisfaction, knock yourself out.
If there’s joy in mastering something few others have, then by all means, keep at it. That’s just not what drives me.
I wasn’t arguing against learning sleight-of-hand. And I wasn’t suggesting only doing self-working card tricks.
I said that difficult sleight-of-hand generally isn’t worth the effort. Certainly not for me and not for the kind of magic I’m trying to do.
Whenever someone pushed back on that post, I’d ask them to name magicians who use difficult sleight-of-hand successfully in performance. They would give me a list of names, and every magician they named was someone who you would watch perform and think, “Huh, he’s really good at sleight-of-hand!”
If your goal is to be seen as a skilled technician, then yes—mastering hard sleights might be necessary.
But that’s almost never my goal.
I want to guide people into experiences that feel inexplicable. If someone walks away impressed by my sleight-of-hand, I’ve failed. That means they were seeing the method instead of the effect (even if they don’t know exactly what the method was).
Audiences are smart. They can tell when your energy is focused into your hands. If you’re trying to come off as an expert card manipulator, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to create something more mysterious, that energy works against you.
That’s why I said difficult sleights often subtract from the experience, rather than enhance it.
If you disagree, fair enough. But give me examples of actual magicians doing truly difficult sleight-of-hand in casual settings, where it doesn’t feel like a showcase of their skill. You will find those very hard to come by.
You can’t use my own terminology against me.
A few people wrote in to explain that difficult magic is often more “Carefree” than simpler methods.
One person put it like this:
”After all, which is the more carefree and open false count? Miscounting five cards as seven by dealing them one at a time into a pile on the table (and snap dealing twice) and then merely flicking that packet towards your friend and asking them to place their hand over it... Or some sort of Elmsly count, where you only show cards one at a time, and they never leave your hands while you do so?”
He’s suggesting using Lennart Green’s Snap Deal in order to count five cards as seven.
I admit, that would look very casual. But the Carefree Philosophy is a holistic approach to learning and presenting magic.
If something takes dozens or hundreds of hours to master—and ongoing maintenance to keep it smooth—it’s probably not Carefree for most people.
And I certainly wouldn’t invest that kind of time into learning the Snap Deal just to miscount cards into a pile. For what payoff? It’s questionable whether a non-magician would even note the difference between a performance where cards are counted to the table and another where they’re counted casually from hand to hand. And the time spent mastering that sleight could be used to learn dozens of other routines— make me far more flexible in my performances, rather than trying to channel every interaction toward a couple of tricks I can do that use a Snap Deal.
I’m not trying to talk anyone out of anything. I’m just discussing the strategies that have benefitted me.
If I do want to learn a tough or knacky move, I’ll practice it while watching TV or chatting on the phone—making use of time that’s otherwise idle. But if you only have a couple hours a week to work on your magic (which is generally the audience I’m writing for) then I think it’s crazy to spend all of it on refining a single technique.