The World Wants To Be Charmed
/Here we are.
As Josh and Andi once told me at Magifest when I asked how they liked their prostates stimulated: We’re into double digits.
Happy 10-Year Anniversary, my dears.
A few weeks ago, I asked if there were any quotes people had saved from the past decade. I got way too many to post here, so here’s as many as I worked my way through before I got bored with the process. Each links back to the post that spawned it. Thanks to everyone who submitted quotes. And thanks to everyone who has supported the site these past ten years.
See you in June.
Art decorates space. Music decorates time. Magic decorates reality.
A side-effect of our relationship with screen-based entertainment is that the value of in-person experience begins to rise.
A 15 minute trick should be 14:55 of interesting concepts, intrigue, mystery, new experiences, anticipation, unsettling questions, excursions, mini-adventures, absorbing rituals... and then an impossible climax which either amplifies everything that came before or puts some kind of twist on it.
Anthropomorphizing things is what we do to explain to children. And it's a big part of the reason why magic often comes off as being for children and magicians come off as being condescending.
Don’t snuff the afterglow.
Everyone knows this is fantasy. But that's the power of it. You create some outlandish, weird, chimerical scenario and then do something so strong - not to fool them - but to briefly put them in a situation where this fantastic scenario is the only explanation they have for what just happened.
For me, magic is not about telling people stories. It's about giving them stories to tell.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you went to a friend's house and sat around a table and one of them said, "Hey, I have a fun idea. Let's engage in an activity that's predicated on all of us playing along with the notion that I'm the most handsomest boy in the whole-wide world!" What would your enthusiasm for that activity be? Well, I hate to break it to you, BUT THAT'S BARELY FUCKING DIFFERENT ENOUGH FROM WHAT MAGICIANS DO TO QUALIFY AS AN ANALOGY!
I believe that anticipation keeps you happy and your mind and heart young. The happiest people I know have things on the horizon they're looking forward to.
I find this to be a very satisfying way to think of amateur magic. This is the hobby of magic as world-building. You're building an alternate reality that seems like ours in most respects but where strange and mysterious things regularly take place.
I frame self-discipline as an expression of free will.
I really like thinking in terms of "thrill" "enthrall" and "excite" as opposed to "fool" when thinking about the experience I want to deliver. It gets me in the right mindset in regards to thinking presentationally rather than methodologically. For the people who write me and ask how to go about coming up with more engaging presentations I think it's helpful to have those words as the target you're shooting for. That's going to have a greater impact on what you present to people than if your goal is just their basic ignorance of your methodology.
I'm not even doing it strictly to "entertain" people. I'm doing it to give people an interesting, novel experience. It's about creating memories. Memories are just new experiences in the past.
If someone watches you do something for 5 minutes do you want them to leave having an experience that made you look incredible or having an experience that made their world seem more incredible?
If you want people to think what you're doing is real, you're a sociopath. Seriously, I think that's a pathetic mental disorder and I feel bad for you and worse for the people you perform for. And it's a poisonous attitude that has held back magic for centuries. If coming off as "real" is a priority for you, then what you're saying is, "I want to dupe dumb people and look ridiculous to smart people."
If you're playing the part of the traditional magician, then feel free to play it cool after the effect. But if you're rejecting that role and instead you're showing them some strange object you found, or trying some experiment you read about, or doing something where they are manifesting the power, then you NEED to react, or the whole experience falls apart. Not reacting is just another way of saying, "That was me. I did that. I'm special.”
Immersive presentations allow you to wring multiple different performances and experiences out of similar effects, which is important when your audience pool is small.
Instead of having a trick that is easily dismissed as being separate from reality, give them an experience that bleeds into reality and doesn't offer any clean lines or easy answers. Create dissonance and make them live in uncertainty for a little bit.
It is always wise to emphasize the interactivity and the mystery because people are craving these things.
It's only when you smear that presentation into their world that you change the nature of the trick into something formless and less definable. The blurred edges prevent them from knowing exactly when the trick started and ended. What they can dismiss as "just a trick" gets muddled. And when a trick gets enmeshed with someone's real life, that's when it becomes their experience as opposed to just your trick.
It’s pretty funny. Like, real person funny, not magician funny (i.e. not funny)
"Magic brings you back to a childhood state of astonishment," is too easily turned into this in a spectator's mind: "Magic will make your feel dumb. You know, like a dumbass baby who doesn't understand shit. Here, let me take you back to the time when you were the dumbest and most vulnerable as my gift to you." And on top of that, is it even true? Are babies constantly in amazement? If so they seem pretty chill about it for the most part. So I would have a hard time saying that to someone.
Magic doesn't exist. So when you learn magic you're not really learning magic. Instead, you are learning dozens of other arts and crafts that allow you to present the illusion of magic. Whenever I talk to friends with kids and we talk about hobbies for the kids, I encourage them to get into magic. Magic is a great gateway to the world around you, and it helps you identify your passions. Outsiders just think of it as sleight-of-hand. But I can't even begin to list all the areas I've had to explore in order to learn and present a particular trick, or magic in general. Writing, acting, comedy, electronics, memory and mnemonics, psychology, gambling, topology, cons, filmmaking, cold reading, juggling, crafting, dance, mime, mathematics, science, history, carpentry, theater, origami, sewing, forgery, animal training, drawing, optics, physical fitness, puzzle solving, and so on and so on. I love that "doing magic" might involve rubber cementing a bunch of shit together, or memorizing the most popular female names of the 20th century, or determining the sight-lines and angles of every seat in a theater so you can build a stage to vanish an elephant on. Other hobbies don't have that range.
Magic is strongest when it feels like a shared moment of fascination, not just a sequence of moves and punchlines
Make the unbelievable feel real and the real feel unbelievable.
Making someone think they saw an unusual moment is fine. But making someone feel like they got a glimpse of a longer string of unusual events is much more interesting and a better story for them to hold onto.
Most often, the professional wants their show to feel polished and structured, but the best amateur performances will feel raw and spontaneous. They will feel like what's about to happen is happening for the first time.
My goal is never to have them believe. My goal is to have them intrigued and enraptured and swept up in the moment, despite knowing it's not real.
People don't use the phrase "that was magical" to mean "I was fooled."
Self-discipline, for me, has been about training myself that not doing what I've set out to do isn't an option.
Social magic is about coming off not as someone performing a bunch of pre-planned routines, but just as someone with a good sense of wonder.
Stop Humanizing the Props and start humanizing yourself
Story makes everything palatable. Most humans don’t like being scared. Pop out screaming at your roommate from behind the curtains enough times and he’ll eventually punch you in the face. Being scared is another thing our ancestors tried to avoid. And yet, we will pay for horror movies, books, and tv shows. Put fear in context and many people are all for it.
Surprise is the seed. Mystery is the flower.
Suspicion is brought on by an unnecessary expenditure of energy on the part of the magician.
That’s literally the defining aspect of magic: its ability to defy the questioning of the spectators.
The duality (and dichotomy) of advanced preparation is that—when performing for strangers—it minimizes their role in what’s going on (i.e. “well, he was set to show this to anyone he happened to meet tonight”). But—when performing for friends and family—it can emphasize their role in the effect and their importance to the experience.
The experience of MAGIC is created by the gap between what the spectator knows to be true and what feels real to them in the moment.
The first thing to understand is this: for something to be emotionally engaging, it does not have to be *about* their emotions. It just has to be relatable.
The Jerx Describe or Die Maxim: If it's not interesting enough to describe, it's not interesting enough to perform.
The mistake we make is imagining a "perfect" life as a life without difficulties. The perfect life is not a life without these things. The perfect life is one where you skillfully navigate through these things.
The most profound magic directs 100% of our attention to moments that are manifestations of compelling ideas that exist outside of that moment.
The tricks that stayed with people were the ones with an interactive, present-tense narrative that engaged them emotionally.
The world wants to be charmed.
There’s no sleight so easy that some magician isn’t out there fucking it up somewhere
Think of a magic trick like a campfire. When building a fire, you clear out a little space; you go and gather tinder, kindling, and some larger pieces of firewood; you pile up the tinder; you build up the kindling; you light the tinder; you blow on it; you add the firewood; and now you have a fire. And that fire can burn for a long time, if you’ve set things up correctly.
This is the locus of audience-centric magic. Bring them an experience that happens *to* them, in real time, and would not be the same without them there. "Magic is the only art form that doesn't exist without an audience," magicians are fond of saying. And then they perform for people the same way they would for a tree stump.
To increase the power of your magic, remove yourself from the magic.
We can’t just ask if the method is structurally sound and does it fly past people in the moment, we have to ask, “Is this a technique that can be undermined with an ‘easy answer’?
When I say "remove confidence" I don't mean you should be an awkward, mumbling, sweaty mess. It's not your personal confidence that I think you should eliminate. It's your confidence in what's about to take place. Eliminate certainty. Certainty doesn't make for compelling experiences. This is why overly-scripted patter tends to be a turn-off to people in a casual performance. "He's so certain of what's going to happen he made up a dumb little story about it!" This doesn't feel organic or personal to them. It feels like you might as well be replaying a video of the trick as you did it for someone else.
What makes a trompe-l'œil painting engaging is that it seems so real, even though we know it's not. I strive to perform trompe-l'œil of the fantastic.
When something is out of place it's not a normal thing even if it's a normal thing.
When you perform tricks that happen in the flow of people's lives, rather than as a separate moment where it is a "performance," you can get away with a lot of things.
When you’re a professional, you bring your props to the show. When you’re an amateur, you bring your show to the props.
You can’t give your magic meaning. Meaning isn’t given, it’s taken.
You only raise the level of effect as you go on. But also, once you reach that very high “potency” (a 9 or 10-level reaction) you’re done for the day. Let them stew in that for the rest of the night.
Your mindset should be, "I'm going to perform this trick the best I can because I'm curious to see how this person will react to it."