A Long Question with an Unsatisfying Answer
/There's a question I've been meaning to ask you for quite a while, and honestly, I'd almost prefer if you answered it on the blog, because I imagine it's something a lot of magicians have wondered about.
Yesterday, I was hired by a company to perform magic at a tech trade show [...] If I were to rank everything I performed based on audience response, the more immersive experiences you've written about would easily be at the top. Things like "Night-Night Drawings" and "Zoologic Familiars" from Love Letter 18 went over incredibly well.
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Then came the usual reliable stuff that we all know works well, things like "Two Card Monte," "Double Cross," and "iThump."
But here's where things got interesting.
One of the biggest reactions of the entire event came from "Mosaic" by the French Twins [...] But there's a problem.
This is exactly the kind of effect where, if I asked the spectators five minutes later, "How do you think that was done?" I suspect a lot of them would say something like, "It's probably just an app."
Maybe they don't know how the app works, and maybe they couldn't reconstruct the actual method, but they've probably landed pretty close to the right category of explanation.
And that brings me to my question.
At what point is it worth removing an effect from your repertoire if it gets a fantastic reaction in the moment, but you suspect that shortly afterward, a good number of spectators will arrive at an explanation that's reasonably close to the actual method?
I have the same issue with "Inception."
Years ago, it worked incredibly well for me, but nowadays, after performing it, I sometimes overhear spectators whispering things like, "You know those bone-conduction earpieces they sell? Maybe it's something like that. I don't know how he knew the word, but there must be some kind of earpiece involved."
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What should matter more when choosing our repertoire: the immediate reaction, or the memory that remains once someone has had a little time to rationalize what they witnessed?
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Imagine you perform something for a girl, she has an amazing reaction, but later a friend of hers tells you that, a few minutes afterward, she said, "I think I know how he did that."
Even if her explanation wasn't technically correct, but was close enough to make the effect feel less impossible in her mind, would that make you stop performing it?
So, to sum up, I guess my question is:
To what extent is a great reaction in the moment worth it if the spectator is likely to come up with a plausible explanation just a few minutes later?—DM
This is going to be an unsatisfying answer, because ultimately, only you can decide how much you care about fooling people five minutes after you've finished fooling them.
The important first step is recognizing the issue. It’s surprising to me how many magicians seem to only care about the three seconds immediately following the conclusion of the magic trick. That moment of surprise where their eyes get big and their jaws drop. The moment you see on the demo videos.
This feels like success, right? The trick worked.
But we can’t say that yet. All we know at this point is that something surprising happened. We don't know if we've actually fooled them.
They haven’t yet processed the trick. That reaction is just the first step. That’s the face of someone who’s genuinely fooled. It’s also the face of someone who’s about to figure out exactly how you did it. The problem is, at that moment, those two people look identical.
In 2019, I did a five-part series on how to make your magic as strong as possible. In that series, I described the Surprise-Astonishment-Mystery pathway of spectator reactions.
Surprise: A spectator’s immediate reaction to a trick is Surprise.
Astonishment: If they can’t explain or undermine what they witnessed using their own knowledge and reasoning, Surprise becomes Astonishment.
Mystery: If they also can’t explain it through external sources—Googling, watching YouTube videos, asking around—or they simply don’t go looking for an explanation, Astonishment gradually becomes Mystery.
So there are two gauntlets a trick must survive: the spectator’s internal knowledge and logic, and the external resources they might turn to for an explanation.
Survive the first, and you get Astonishment. Survive both, and you have the potential to create a lasting Mystery.
When you’re performing professional walkaround magic, do you care about anything past that initial Surprise reaction?
Maybe not. You’re probably never going to see these people again. By the time they've started working out how you did the trick, you're three tables away.
As an amateur, things are different. You live with your audience. They’re your family, friends, and coworkers.
I go out of my way to avoid tricks that suffer from the Surprise Fizzle. I would much rather do a trick that gets a 7 reaction and stays a 7 in their memory than one that gets a 10 in the moment but drops to a 2 once they decide it was probably just an app or some gimmick.
Of course, it’s uncomfortable when someone you know figures out your trick. But I actually think it feels more awkward for them to have some idea of how a trick was done. They don't want to embarrass you by busting you on it. But they also don't want to play along and pretend they're baffled by something they've more or less figured out. So now you've just created this weird little social situation. This is why I always prioritize the longevity of the reaction over the initial impact of the effect.
But you’re asking about performing professionally. I don’t think there’s a universal rule here or any way I can tell you what you should do.
But I can tell you this...
For years now, I’ve heard some professionals say that they don’t care if people figure out a trick after it’s over. They don’t care if the spectators assume the deck or the coins or whatever are gimmicked. They don’t care if they Google the trick after they leave the table. “I’m just there to entertain,” they will say. “If they were entertained, that’s all that matters.”
Fair enough. But here’s the thing… I’ve never heard someone say, “I was so entertained by the magician whose tricks I more or less figured out.”
And, in fact, in almost every focus group we’ve done that collects information about how fooling a trick is and how enjoyable a trick is, there has been a direct correlation between the two.
With that in mind, I wouldn’t keep tricks in my repertoire (amateur or professional) that I didn’t think had fooling longevity.
Of course, if I found something that had a tremendous initial Surprise reaction but I suspected it faltered soon after, I wouldn’t just immediately toss it. I’d see if there were ways to account for the transparency of the method and salvage that initial surprise with a more layered, less easily dismissed method that kept the mystery alive longer.